The Way of the Wheelgun

Wheelguns are obsolete — or at least that’s what internet commenters and the self-proclaimed experts behind the counter at your local gun store will probably tell you. Granted, modern semi-automatic pistols offer some substantial advantages over wheelguns, including higher capacity, faster reloads, light and precise triggers, and the ability to easily install accessories such as weapon lights.

I’ll admit I prefer shooting my Glocks and other semi-autos, and I consider them much better primary defensive weapons for everyday carry. However, that certainly doesn’t mean there’s no place for the revolver in today’s market. After taking a two-day practical revolver class with instructors Ed Calderon of Ed’s Manifesto and Raul Martinez of Rogue Methods, I’m fully convinced that the revolver is still a valuable and deadly tool under the right circumstances.

This course is called La Chata, the Spanish term for flat, stubby, or — most relevant in this case — snub-nosed. Calderon and Martinez, both of whom have appeared in the pages of previous issues of this magazine to discuss their extensive real-world experiences in hostile environments, teamed up to teach this two-day class at the Pro Gun Vegas shooting range in Boulder City, Nevada.

Calderon spent more than a decade chasing drug runners and violent cartel members as a member of Mexican law enforcement, while Martinez grew up on the mean streets of Chicago, deployed to Iraq with the U.S. Army, and returned home to work on a Chicago Police Department undercover narcotics team. The duo has considerable firsthand experience with street violence, all of which was integrated into the La Chata course curriculum.

Above: Instructors from left to right – Logan Prather of Send Me Training & Consulting, Raul Martinez of Rogue Methods, and Ed Calderon of Ed’s Manifesto and the Manifesto Radio Podcast.

The Wheelgun: A Tool with a Specific Purpose

The class began with a simple question: Why choose a revolver? In simplest terms, it’s a tool for solving problems quickly in extremely close quarters. If you’re trying to hit a small target at extended range or might end up in a drawn-out firefight, it’s not the ideal choice. Even for a skilled shooter, reloads are slow and the long, heavy double-action trigger pull can be challenging. But if you’re in a situation that involves using surprise to your advantage, firing two or three shots at close to contact distance, and then making a quick escape, a revolver excels.

Much of what we know about fighting with revolvers comes from the criminal underworld, or as Calderon puts it, “murdery sh*t.” Revolvers are the preferred tool of many sicarios throughout the third world due to their widespread availability, reliability, ease of concealment, and the fact that they don’t leave behind evidence (spent casings). In America, these so-called Saturday night specials are also cheap enough to be disposed of or destroyed after a crime, eliminating the evidence trail.

Among these users, deep concealment is a way of life and holsters are a foreign concept — they’ll just tuck the gun into their waistband, pocket, or even a bag of food where it can be accessed and fired in a split second. Some will even cut off the trigger guard and shave down the hammer spur to make it easier to fire from inside concealment layers (this is commonly known as a Fitz Special). Unlike semi-automatics, revolvers don’t rely on a reciprocating slide that can get hung up on clothing or pushed out of battery by an opponent in a hands-on fight.

For those of us who carry fine-tuned semi-auto handguns with upgraded triggers, red-dot sights, compensators, and Kydex holsters, the idea of carrying a tiny snub-nose in a pocket might seem as jarring as trading in a Lamborghini for a Toyota Tercel. But unless you’re extremely dedicated to dressing and planning your day around that semi-auto, you’ll probably encounter situations where an ultralight revolver makes a lot of sense.

These might include going for a run in gym shorts, doing yard work, or simply carrying inside your own house. The wheelgun is miles better than going unarmed, and it can buy you time to get to another weapon if the situation deteriorates. Revolvers also make outstanding backup guns for those who carry in the line of duty.

Above: In addition to my primary revolver, the red-dot-equipped Taurus 856 T.O.R.O. I also tested a more compact 856 model with 2-inch barrel and bobbed hammer. The latter is preferable for deep concealment.

Wheelgun Caliber Considerations

So, what caliber should you go with? According to Calderon, that question isn’t as significant as you might think. During his time working in Mexican law enforcement, he frequently found cheap .22 LR revolvers at crime scenes. While some of you may scoff at the idea of using a rimfire weapon for self-defense, those small bullets are extremely effective when applied to the right place in the right quantity.

At one point in Calderon’s career, a killer referred to his small-caliber wheelgun as a “stapler” due to his preferred method of use — press the muzzle into the victim, mash the trigger a few times, and walk away. In this context, the size and power of the round is almost meaningless; shot placement and violence of action will end the fight before it begins.

Calderon’s preferred calibers for revolvers are .22LR and 9mm (i.e., the Ruger LCR), followed closely by .38 Special. This is a byproduct of their availability more than ballistic effectiveness; any one of them will be lethal if it’s fired into vital areas at contact distance.
Reliability and Safety

Revolvers may be reliable, but they’re absolutely not failure-proof. One common issue, especially among shooters who are used to semi-autos, is short stroking the trigger. While attempting to fire several rounds quickly, the shooter may not release the trigger far enough to reset the hammer, causing the second trigger press to go “click” when it’s supposed to go “bang.” If the gun gets hot and/or dirty, spent brass may stick in the cylinder, making reloads difficult.

Even worse, the case rim can slide in front of the ejector, causing the ejector to become ineffective and preventing the cylinder from closing until the case has been removed. Speaking of reloads, they should be treated much like a malfunction — Calderon explained that reloading a revolver during a fight will usually be impossible, so learn to work with the contents of the cylinder and don’t empty the gun without another weapon or an escape plan.

Regarding safety, a modern double-action revolver’s heavy trigger makes it reasonably safe to carry in a pocket but be sure to avoid carrying anything else in that pocket that might press or snag the trigger. Protecting the trigger with something like a Kydex trigger sheath tethered to the lining of the pocket is a wise safety measure.

If your clothing allows, inside-the-waistband Kydex holsters are also a good way to secure the gun — in a situation where a fight seems imminent, the gun can be discreetly removed from the holster and staged in a pocket for faster access. Lastly, at contact distances, especially while grappling, it’s all too easy to sweep yourself with the muzzle of a snub-nose revolver. Be extremely cautious about where you put your non-dominant hand while firing one-handed, or how you position your support hand while firing two-handed.

Above: A student practices ducking an incoming strike and moving around for double underhooks. In this position, it’s much easier to control an attacker.

Put Your Wheelgun to Work

As mentioned earlier, the snub-nose revolver is an up close and personal tool, and that means that many of the ways it can be used will seem gruesome. But if you’re in a fight for your life, you’ll do whatever it takes to survive. Calderon began the discussion about vital targets with a PowerPoint slide about shooting opponents in the face. The “T-box” formed by the nose and ocular cavity can easily be penetrated even by low-velocity rimfire rounds, so he recommended visualizing a bright red clown nose.

on your target and aiming for that (if you have a phobia of clowns or have watched It too many times, that should be easy enough). In confined spaces, sweeping your dominant hand up the target’s chest and pressing the muzzle into the chin is another option. Outside of headshots, shots to center mass (the heart or lungs) and the pelvic girdle (hip bone structure and femoral arteries) are likely to stop a threat quickly. Since the typical engagement distance with a revolver shouldn’t be much beyond arm’s reach, hitting these targets shouldn’t be difficult.

As with many Ed’s Manifesto classes I’ve taken over the years, the classroom portion incorporated analysis of real videos of street killings. Students watched several examples of sicarios in Mexico and South America casually walking up to targeted individuals in public places, looking around for witnesses, and then firing one round into the back of the victim’s head at contact distance. Typically, the assassin bends over to deliver one or two more finishing shots, then simply walks away.

These attacks are over in the blink of an eye and rarely involve more than three shots. In another example, a killer approaches a victim with both hands in his jacket pockets, turns his head to ask a question about something nearby, and uses the momentary distraction to fire a revolver through his jacket pocket into the victim’s groin. The victim crumples to the ground as if a string holding him upright had suddenly been cut.

Obviously, the purpose of studying these vicious criminal acts is not to encourage students to commit similar crimes. It’s to show that the revolver is an extremely potent weapon in deep-concealed, close-range settings, and that the “bad guys” are well aware of this fact — understanding this can help you turn the tables and avoid being victimized.

Above: Each student started with an empty gun and practiced drawing and dry-firing to get used to the feel and trigger weight of a revolver. For hands-on drills, inert green plastic guns were used.

Wheelgun Drills on the Range

Once we left the classroom, the range portion of the class was led by Martinez and a third instructor, Logan Prather of Send Me Training & Consulting in Oklahoma. We began by working on the fundamentals of our draw with empty guns. From a holster, Prather said your draw should be no different from any other semi-auto, but recommended practicing various starting points for the draw process — hands up, arms crossed over the chest, hands together at the waistline, and so on. If you’re not using a belt-mounted holster, Martinez says it’s a good idea to sweep the support hand across the outside of the cover garment, indexing the gun and ensuring it hasn’t moved unexpectedly before the draw.

• To grip a revolver, hook the support hand thumb down over the dominant hand thumb. If you use a thumbs-forward grip like a semi-auto and you have large hands, you may burn your thumb due to gas escaping between the front of the cylinder and the barrel (i.e., cylinder gap). Martinez called this a “self-correcting mistake” since you’ll only do it once.
• For reloads, all of the instructors made one thing clear — there’s no fast way to reload, only slightly less slow ways. Rather than going down the rabbit hole of moon clips and speed loaders that might shave a small amount of time off a long process, we simply learned to work as quickly as possible with loose rounds from a pocket.
•  To start a reload, hold the frame of the gun in the palm of the support hand, open the cylinder, and use the support hand’s middle and ring fingers to grip the cylinder, preventing it from flipping closed.
• Tilt the gun back and press the ejector rod, either with your support hand thumb or the palm of your dominant hand.
  Hold the gun flat in your palm again and feed rounds into the cylinder with your dominant hand. (This hand generally has more dexterity for handling loose rounds.)
• Close the cylinder and transfer the gun back into your dominant hand.

At the beginning of the second day, we started with a cold drill involving five shots, a reload, and five more shots as fast as possible. The instructors’ best time was 12.38 seconds — quite impressive but also a reminder of how much slower these reloads are than a semi-auto magazine change. My best time was just over 20 seconds, which is said to be fairly typical for students who are new to the revolver platform.

Above: A student practices ducking an incoming strike and moving around for double underhooks. In this position, it’s much easier to control an attacker.

Hands-On Gunfighting

Since we’ve established that snub-nose wheelguns are close-range tools, it’s critical to be prepared for the other aspect of that reality: you’re close enough that the opponent can grab you and/or your gun. Martinez has considerable experience in this field, so he passed on some lessons and let us fight each other over control of inert training guns.

If an opponent lunges at you, take a wide and aggressive stance and square your hips to him. One quick redirect strategy is to grab the opponent’s wrist with one hand and grab his shirt collar with the other, pushing up and out to redirect his head away from the fight. In the event that you’re unable to redirect or create distance, move in rapidly and go for control. Martinez recommends the clinch technique known as double underhooks — this means hooking your lower arm under the opponent’s arm, ducking under his armpit, and circling the other arm around the torso.

If the underhook is blocked from one side, go for the other side. Once you’re behind your opponent with double underhooks, you’ve established physical control and can maneuver into a rear choke or pin the opponent to the ground with relative ease.
If you’re going in for a hands-on fight, having a gun in hand already may be a significant disadvantage, since a stronger and faster opponent may be able to take control of it before you can use it.

Only draw the gun when you’re confident you can prevent this. To build that confidence, each student paired up with another and practiced controlling the gun while grappling, then switched and tried to take it away from their partner. Since we had an odd number of students, I was paired up with Martinez himself, and he made quick work of folding me into a pretzel.

Ideally, a fight in the real world shouldn’t come to this — you can palm the gun ahead of time or maneuver your body to draw from an angle your adversary won’t be able to see. One of the fundamentals of fighting with a concealed revolver is that the bad guy never gets to see the gun, they only get to feel it once it’s used against them. Speaking of which …

Above: Unlike a semi-auto, a revolver can be fired reliably from within a cover garment. This method of defense can surprise an attacker who thinks he has the upper hand.

Shooting Wheelguns From Concealment

With most concealed-carry weapons, you’ll clear your cover garment, draw the weapon, and then use it. With wheelguns, you can skip straight to the last step. The final exercises in the La Chata course involved firing our guns from inside cover garments. Each student brought an old sweatshirt or jacket, gripped the gun inside the pocket, and fired into a target to see the effectiveness.

Those with bobbed hammers (i.e., no external hammer spur) fared better, since the hammer couldn’t snag on fabric inside the pocket, but even revolvers with traditional hammers functioned smoothly for the most part. It’s surprisingly easy to walk up to a target and send six rounds of .38 into the waistline without showing any signs of carrying a firearm until it goes bang.

Expanding upon this lesson, we worked on multi-step drills that started with firing from concealment, then drawing and firing again from a retention position near the waist, and finally backing up to fire from full extension. During these drills, red balloons were placed on targets to represent vital areas and provide immediate feedback for hits.

Lessons From The Real World: The Spiciest Snack

Here’s a deep concealment lesson based on real-life experience. While working for Chicago P.D., Martinez rolled up on a group of gang members hanging out on a street corner. As they scattered and ran, one threw a bag of chips he had been eating out of … and the bag made a clank when it hit the pavement. Upon closer inspection, there was a revolver hidden among the chips, ready to be pointed and fired through the bag at any moment.

One of the students in our class tested the technique, and aside from leaving behind a cloud of chili-and-lime-flavored dust in the air, the revolver functioned perfectly. Keep this in mind the next time you see someone sketchy carrying a bag of snacks in public.

Featured Wheelgun: Optics Ready: Taurus 856 T.O.R.O.

Feature-rich semi-auto pistols and simple, compact revolvers may seem like two distinct categories, but what if there was a midpoint between the two? That’s exactly what Taurus set out to create with the introduction of the Taurus Optics Ready Option (T.O.R.O.) series of revolvers. Serving as the industry’s first factory red-dot-ready small-frame wheelgun series, these revolvers include a removable optic plate that’s compatible with Holosun K series optics such as the 407K, 507K, EPS, and EPS Carry.

During this class, I primarily used a Taurus Defender 856 T.O.R.O. equipped with a Holosun EPS Carry red dot. The 856 features a 3-inch barrel, smooth double-action trigger, compact rubberized grip, and it can be loaded with six rounds of .38 Special +P ammo. (A five-shot .357 Magnum version of the same gun, the 605 T.O.R.O., is also offered by Taurus.)

This revolver is available in matte black finish, but I preferred the classic bead-blasted stainless finish seen here. The 856 ran flawlessly during the entire course, with roughly 400 rounds fired in two days and no cleaning in between. The optic held zero nicely, and led to substantial interest from instructors and other students who hadn’t previously tried a small-frame revolver with a red dot. At an MSRP of $455, I’d consider this a very good value, especially for semi-auto shooters who might want to try dabbling in the revolver world for the first time.

When we weren’t doing deep concealment work, I carried the gun in a Monocle Kydex holster from Harry’s Holsters, which is specifically designed for the T.O.R.O. revolver series. This holster offered solid retention and stayed exactly where I put it on my belt thanks to the steel DCC clip. Aesthetically, the rich brown color also suits the wheelgun nicely.

Above: Students brought out a wide array of wheelguns, from polished classics to ultralight rimfire models.

Closing Thoughts

By the end of this two-day course, I felt far more comfortable shooting a revolver and working within its limitations. Much like a defensive fixed blade, I hope I’ll never have to use this tool in a defensive scenario, because doing so will likely involve fighting at “bad breath distance.” I certainly hope that I never have to reload it during a fight for my life. But the venerable revolver shouldn’t be relegated to history books — it can be carried discreetly and fired before an attacker even notices you’re armed, shifting the balance of power in your favor. And as we learned during the hands-on grappling portion of the class, a compact, mechanically simple weapon is exactly what you’ll want if someone is trying to wrench it from your hands.

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Editor’s Note: This article has been modified from its original version for the web.

Written by Patrick McCarthy