Personal Protection: .357 Sig vs .357 Magnum

[Music] [Music] hi right on the range today so please bear with gunfire you hear in the background now a lot of viewers have asked to see a comparison between 357 sig and 357 Magnum so here we are however this subject comes with quite a few caveats and the abbot's let me cover two of them right now one of them is we've already done comparisons between 357 sig and 40 Smith & Wesson's between 357 Magnum and nine-millimeter and the list goes on so in comparing the sig to the Magnum we're going to have some redundancy I'll try to keep it to a minimum but please bear with what redundancy there is another one is the only type of ammunition I'm going to shoot today is this Remington green and white box in going to at least a half dozen stores trying to find ammunition for today's comparison what I found was that there's various brands and configurations available for Sig that aren't available for Magnum and vice versa so the only way I could get the same brand in the same bullet weight and at least a similar bullet configuration jacketed hollow point versus semi jacketed hollow point was the Remington green and white box so that's what we're going to shoot today now before I go any farther let me show you a close-up of these two rounds now on your left is a nine by nineteen than the 357 sig the 357 Magnum and a 38 special now the Magnum might not seem a lot longer than the special but look at the difference in case length that's significant also the Magnum is a lot longer than the 357 sig but remember the sig is an act casing one other caveat I want to cover is that so I don't have to use the word 357 dozens of times I'm just gonna refer to the sig and the Magnum and our test guns for today will be this Ruger security six with a four inch barrel and this Glock model 31 with a four and a quarter inch barrel I may shoot one or two other guns later but these will be the main ones and one of the first questions we want to answer is how do the Magnum and the sig compare for power well let's take our 125 grain semi-jacketed hollow point and 125 grain jacketed hollow point to the chronograph and see if we can answer that and we'll start with a 357 Magnum 14:58 1440 1446 1457 and 1463 now let's see how that compares to the 357 sig 1385 1377 1383 1385 and 1395 now let's go crunch the numbers well recruits the numbers and here's an opportunity to point out one of those caveats I was talking about coronagraphs don't always agree with each other and various environmental factors like elevation barometric pressure and ambient temperature can affect cronograph results now that having been said whether magnum we're gonna mean velocity of 1452 with the sig we got 1385 so that is 67 feet per second more that's definitely more but is it enough more to make a real difference well you may have heard me say in the past that 60 feet per second more was significantly more and it is in my opinion when you're talking about velocities down there around a thousand maybe even 1,200 feet per second but when we get up here to 1,400 feet per second is 67 feet per second more really significant a couple of things on that one recently a viewer was kind enough to point out that I was using the word significant incorrectly because these differences aren't enough to be what he called a statistical significant difference okay I didn't use that word in the classroom mathematical statistical sense I used the word significant in the sense that after decades of shooting handguns at distances of 50 100 200 meters shooting targets like soda jugs at cinder blocks and squirrels and rabbits and deer the list goes on at nauseam I found that quite often 60 feet per second more can make a difference that is measurable and it's enough of the difference to make a difference bigger wound channels shorter incapacitation curbs so on but up here where we're talking about velocities around 1,400 feet per second I think it's questionable as to whether or not 67 feet per second more is significantly more and when you take into consideration that you can get more powerful versions of 357 sig and more powerful versions of 357 Magnum and different configurations of firearms especially if you in about different barrel links there's a lot of 357 magnums that have both longer and shorter Burroughs than this one those kind of factors are probably going to make a lot bigger difference in which one of these is really more powerful or how much difference there is more so than just being Magnum versus Sig so to see if our 67 feet per second more velocity really makes a difference we'll shoot the meet target now forgive the redundancy but for those who haven't seen it before this is pig ears to simulate skin followed by a pork chop pectoral pork ribs our bag of oranges lung tissue more pork ribs on the back four layers of t-shirt on the front four layers on the back and followed as always by the new and improved high-tech fleece bullet stop and we'll shoot from 7 yards and we'll start with a 357 sig so how'd we do well we see a lot of damage to our ribs in the front obliterated our orange lung tissue all the bullets went through the ribs on the back and they were all stopped by the six seventh eighth layer of fleece so we see a lot of damage and quite a bit of penetration now let me show you a close-up of what the projectiles look like and you can see that the expansion of these 357 sig projectiles is very good and very uniform now we've got a new meat target setup and we'll shoot it with our 357 Magnum and occasionally people ask about shooting glasses yes I do wear them when I shoot targets like this I just usually take them off before I get back on camera how'd we do with the Magnum well we see some extensive damage to our ribs on the front just fragmented our Orange lung tissue a lot of these fragments are carried through into our ribs on the back we see some big holes back here a little bit of inconsistent penetration into the fleece bullet stop one bullet went through to the 20th layer a couple of bullets were in the fifth or sixth layer so a little bit of inconsistency there but we see a lot of damage and a lot of penetration and just my subjective point of view it looks like more damage with this than we saw with the Sig now let me show you a close-up of these projectiles now I lost one of these projectiles in the snow but with these we see a lot of expansion we also saw some fragmentation there were bits of bullets scattered throughout the main target well looking at the results of the meet target I can see that both of these calibers are highly effective and that looked to me like the 357 Magnum a little bit more so and that has to do with the slightly greater velocity and perhaps some differences in projectile design but which one is really going to be more powerful and more effective I have to reiterate will have just as much to do with firearms and ammunition choices as it does with the calibers themselves so which one of these is really better well that takes us back to a very old debate now 357 Magnum will almost always be a revolver while 357 sig will almost always be an autoloader and so that brings us to the debate of revolver versus autoloader moreso than a debate over the calibers and revolvers versus autoloader as a subject i could go on about for hours but i'm gonna try to condense it to just a few minutes and hit some of the high points now one of those high points is capacity there are five six seven eight shot revolvers but most revolvers are gonna have a capacity of six followed autoloaders capacities of 15 are very common and last I checked 15 is a lot more six not only that for most shooters they can reload an autoloader faster than they can a revolver let me show you what I mean now you'll notice I've changed revolvers I can reload this one faster than I can the other one and what I've got in here is five empty casings in one live round so I'm gonna shoot one shot reloaded the speed loader shoot one more shot and then we'll time from the first shot to the second now let's see how that compares to the autoloader and with our auto loader I'll shoot one shot reload with another magazine shoot one more shot and again we'll time from the first shot to the second was that a little faster I'd say so now in that reloading drill I mentioned switching revolvers because this one is faster the reality is of all the revolvers I own this is the one that I can reload the fastest while of all the Auto loaders I have the Glock is far from the fastest for me you also saw that the slide lock back on the auto loader if I had reloaded before running it completely dry I could have made that reload just a little bit faster so what I did was I tried to give the revolver some advantages and even having done that the auto loader was still faster and so when you take into consideration the Auto loaders greater magazine capacity and ability to be reloaded faster in the comparison of which of these two platforms can put the most rounds downrange in a hurry the auto loader is the clear winner by a wide margin however that's almost completely irrelevant now when I say that people get very angry with me but let me explain what I mean in a legitimate self-defense citizen involved shooting it is extremely difficult to come up with accurate statistics as to how many rounds somebody fired statistics easy accurate statistics very hard and that's a subject I could go on at length about but to be as concise as I can we have a presentation on gunfight statistics you can look at but let me give you a short anecdote to illustrate my point a long time ago in the city I lived in there was a mass shooting someone took a firearm went into a crowded establishment shot a bunch of strangers a mass shooting it just so happens I was very well acquainted with the first police officer to arrive on the scene and so what he told me was according to the witnesses on the scene and the physical evidence backs them up what happened someone with an autoloading pistol went into a place that was very crowded emptied a magazine walked back out the front door while outside he reloaded came back in emptied his second magazine but then instead of going out to reload he stayed right there in the fray to reload and so while trying to put in his third magazine some people jumped in disarmed him held him for police okay well the next day the newspaper reports that story pretty accurately but on the subject of how many rounds he fired what the newspaper reported was not the specific number they reported that the pistol he had was a 9-millimeter Luger and went on to report that that has an eight shot magazine and he'd fired two magazines okay so that's sixteen rounds let's say he topped off had one in the chamber there'd be 17 he shot 23 people now a lot of people use that newspaper article to make their point of 9-millimeters propensity for overpenetration know it may have a propensity for that but what really happened was the pistol he had although it was a 9-millimeter was not a po8 Luger I don't remember the model number but it had a 15 shot magazine he'd fired 30 rounds to shoot 23 people and so we see a lot of conclusions being drawn on totally erroneous information and when you're trying to get to how many rounds someone fire he really fired 30 or 31 but statistically a lot of people will say he fired 16 or 17 and I could bore you for an hour with anecdotes on this very point I could go on about the police officer who through ignorance or malfeasance was trying to claim that Rock chips in a windshield were bullet holes or the County Coroner who couldn't tell the difference between an icepick stab wound and a small caliber bullet wound and sometime when I've got more time to spend another I'll tell you the story about the police officer who thought someone had died of a stroke when he actually died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound accurate statistics on how many rounds somebody fires are extremely difficult to get that having been said of those few cases that I'm close enough to the I consider the source reliable numbers like three four or five shots are very common which means that the six in most revolvers is going to be enough and even in cases where someone fires seven eight nine rounds most of the time those rounds are unnecessary now you watch security cam footage you see something like someone comes into a convenience store and exchanges shots with the clerk then realising his robbery isn't working he runs back out the door while clerk fires shot seven eight nine at someone who's already left the establishment making those shots unnecessary and from a legal standpoint very dubious so unless you're one of those people who no matter what happens you spaz out the empty your magazine if you're not that kind of guy I wouldn't ever say that having more rounds is a bad thing but it is not the end-all be-all advantage that a lot of people would have you believe now comparing revolver to autoloader there's one other thing and that is reliability traditionally people will tell you that revolvers are more reliable than auto livers and traditionally they are however today's generation of auto motor if you get a good quality auto loader like a beretta a Sig Sauer and block all this goes on and you make sure you've got good quality magazines you make good ammunition choices you do proper PMC S Auto loaders are very reliable and the chances that your Auto loading pistol are gonna let you down when you really need it are very slim however if you put into that comparison something called a shooter caused malfunction all of a sudden your revolver becomes a lot more reliable than your auto loader I can't even begin to count the times I've seen and I don't mean life or death stuff I mean just on the range or hunting where people have aimed in with an Auto loading pistol attempting to fire and the pistol did not go off for many reasons primarily because they forgot to load their pistol forgot to put a round in the chamber forgot to disengage a safety or they had one of those Auto loaders this Glock is not one of them but some Auto loaders did you take the magazine out it fire the round in the chamber and your magazine becomes just a little bit dislodged and now you can't even fire the one you have in the chamber these mishaps are what we call shooter caused malfunctions and they occur in autoloaders a lot more than revolvers so in comparing the two each has a lot of advantages and a lot of disadvantages but how about comparing these two in terms of 357 Magnum versus 357 sig that adds one other dimension to this and that is the availability the versatility and the cost of ammunition both for carry and practice now as far as versatility we saw that in terms of power and effectiveness these two were pretty close but there are some people who think that heavy projectiles is where it's at and for those people there's ammunition available for a 357 magnum with 158 grain 180 grain projectiles not so much for 357 sig and so you had that greater versatility as far as availability and cost there's a lot of stores that just don't have 357 sig ammo and of course you can order it online and when you do the sig amyl is typically significantly more expensive than the Magnum ammo but the real difference as far as an advantage to what a 357 magnum is when you're talking about training ammunition and the great abundance and fairly low price of 38 special ammunition for training not near as much recoil it doesn't have the sharp report that 357 sig or 357 Magnum does and it's a lot less expensive and that is a big advantage toward the 357 magnum revolver so which of these two is better or which of them is right you know really neither it's just a question of which is right for you and of course no one can make that decision for you except you so as always don't try this at home on what to call a professional and thanks for watching the 357 Magnum vs. 357 sig video [Music]

Channel: Paul Harrell

Views: 529,869

Keywords: gun, guns, firearm, firearms, paul, harrell, paul harrell, shoot, shooting, personal protection, personal, protection, 357, 357 mag, 357 magnum, 357 sig, revolver, auto loader, pistol, pistols, 357 sig vs 357 magnum, vs, 357 sig vs 357 mag, smith and wesson, glock, glock 31, snow, gun range, range, meat target, target, meat, paul harrell concealed carry, 357 magnum revolver, 357 revolver, two guns for concealed carry

Id: p9iuN-JBCXE

Length: 19min 9sec (1149 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 15 2017