Taurus Circuit Judge Rifle Review

[Music] hi we're not on the race today we're at one of our training facilities and this is a Taurus judge revolver we have a four-part series on this revolver but recently I've been contacted by a lot of people who've asked to see a review of the Rossi Circuit Judge revolving carbine and I was able to purchase this one because of donations to the patreon account thank you everybody so we'll shoot this today and see what we can learn about it but before we get started there's two very important things I want to point out one this has the word Rossi stamped on it but right here it's also stamped made by Taurus arms Taurus and Rossi are made by the same company - this is caliber 45 Colt and it will also shoot for ten three-inch shells but it is not a shotgun it has a rifled barrel and in the ATF paperwork it's listed as a rifle so we'll start with evaluating our rifles accuracy I have the circuit judge loaded with Remington green and white box 45 colt 250 green LED round nose and I'll shoot this target from 25 yards [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] well that's not very good at all let's try something else now I have the circuit judge loaded with federal American Eagle 45 colt 225 grain semi-jacketed soft point and I'll paste up these shot holes and shoot this ammo from 25 yards and see how it compares so when I switch ammunition a much better group in the one flyer that is just me so it would appear that our accuracy is going to depend at least in part on what type of 45 cold ammunition you use however I have to say I find it curious that anyone would manufacture a firearm in caliber 45 colt that can't shoot accurately with a 250 gram round nose lead bullet the archetype of 45 cold ammunition but now I've got the circuit judge loaded with winchester super x4 10 2 and 1/2 inch one-fifth ounce rifled slug and I'll put up a new target and we'll shoot this from 25 yards and see how the group compares both for size of the group and location of the group [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] this time I fired eight rounds so we'd have more data but obviously if you use the right 45 cold ammunition it's shooting a lot more accurately than our slugs now I'll paste up these shot holes and try something different now I've got our shot holes pasted up and I have a Mossberg model 510 410 shotgun with an 18 and a half inch smoothbore and no sights just a bead and I have it loaded with our winchester super x4 ten two and a half inch one fifth bounce rifled slug and I'll shoot this from 25 yards and see how the accuracy compares to the Rossi [Music] [Applause] [Music] so I had to interpret this target the green pasties are over the slug impacts that were fired with the Rossi carbine with the Mossberg shotgun I fired seven rounds but it would appear that we have more than seven impacts that's because these lower impacts were made by the wads and it was just pointed out to me that the wads are flying more accurately out of the smoothbore of the shotgun then the slugs were fired out of the rifled barrel of the carbine but as far as our group here's our group up here and I'm getting a better group with these slugs out of the smoothbore shotgun with no sights then I got out of the rifled barrel carbine that actually has rifle sights on it and one more thing this shotgun is a little kids gun it doesn't even fit me so this is really disappointing results at least as far as the Rossi carbine is concerned but let's put up a new target and try something else now I have the Circuit Judge loaded with Federal Premium 410 3-inch triple OTT buck five pellet and I'll shoot this target from 25 yards and see what kind of pattern we get now as soon as I say I'm going to shoot a shotgun from 25 yards there are always those who will object that the demonstration is superfluous because you would never do that let me see if I can explain this there are applications for firearms other than just home defense some people have asked about this firearm in a hunting application and some people do hunt deer with shot shells with buckshot that's why it's called buckshot like a buck deer it's made to shoot game with so I'll shoot this from 25 yards and see what kind of pattern we get [Applause] so with the Rossi carbine I fired three shots so a total of fifteen pellets went downrange we have nine impacts on our shootin sea and none on the rest of the target so we'll paste up these shot holes repeat this drill from 25 yards with our 410 shotgun and see how the results compare [Applause] so with our Mossberg 510 shotgun which does have a modified choke I fired three shots that's 15 projectiles and we have 15 impacts 13 on the shootin sea and two just above it so let's put up a new target and try something else so now we have a Rossi Circuit Judge unloaded we saw that this did not shoot buckshot as well as a conventional smoothbore shotgun why there may be several reasons but one of them is that this has a rifled barrel which puts a spin on that shot Cup which can detrimental E effect a shot pattern whether it's birdshot or buckshot and it can cause it to spread out more than a conventional smoothbore would so what can we do about that well there's something installed in this barrel it's put in in the same way a screw in choke would be and it does not affect your 410 slugs or your 45 cold ammunition but you have to have this piece in just to cover the threads so they're not fouled when shooting 410 or 45 colt you also notice that to unscrew this I'm turning it clockwise it turns backwards of what you'd consider conventional because the spin on the rifling is such that it would work it loose any other way and when you're going to shoot buckshot or birdshot you put in another piece that when you look down there it looks like it's rifled but there's no spin on this rifling its object is to stop the spin put on the shot up by the rifling and it's very important to remember that it's in the instructions very clearly do not ever use this piece when shooting 45 colt or 410 slugs but as far as birdshot or buckshot it should stop the rotation of the shot cup and might give us better groups so now I'll reload this with our four ten three inch Magnum triple op buck five pellet shoot from 25 yards and see if our pattern improves so without our rotation stopper in place the results were three shots 15 projectiles 9 on the shoot and see none anywhere else on the paper with our rotation stopper in place we see 8 on the shootin see 1 impact on the silhouette and then 3 impacts on the white portion of the paper so our total number of impacts has gone from 9 to 12 that would seem like an improvement but the number of impacts on the target itself hasn't changed at all but it has gone down from 9 in the shootin see to 8 in the shootin see and then one impact somewhere else on the target and still not nearly as good as the conventional shotgun so let's paste up these shot holes and try some birdshot [Applause] now this might look like a fairly good pattern but inside this 10 ring that represents something small that you might shoot with a 410 like a grouse a quail a squirrel or a cottontail rabbit there's only four impacts and that's four impacts from three shots having been fired so that means that your game may have been hit by very few or maybe no pellets so now we'll paste up our shot holes put in our rotation stopper try this drill again and see if we can improve this pattern so our number of impacts in the ten ring went from four to nineteen so although our rotation stopper didn't help us much with buckshot with birdshot it makes a vast improvement so now we'll put up a new target I'll shoot from 25 yards with the 410 shotgun and we'll see how those results compare to this so with a Rossi Circuit Judge we had 19 impacts in the ten ring shooting the same ammunition from the same distance with our Mossberg shotgun with its modified choke the number of impacts and the ten ring is if I counted right 65 now I want to talk about the power of the Circuit Judge carbine typically but not always the longer the barrel you have the greater velocity you'll get up to a point 45 colt is usually a handgun round when we shoot it through the carbine with this longer barrel we would expect to get greater velocity normally I would shoot at the chronograph at a distance of seven yards because the FBI spent decades telling us that seven yards was the mean distance for a lethal confrontation today I'm going to shoot at a distance of four yards because to be blunt I don't trust the accuracy of the Circuit Judge carbine at the greater distance and as a basis of comparison I'm going to start with my Taurus Judge revolver with its three inch barrel which is loaded with federal American Eagle 45 colt 225 grain semi jacket a soft point let's see what kind of velocities we get with this 8:47 790 804 813 and 807 now let's see how those compared to the carbine and now the circuit judge a thousand and seventy four a thousand ninety-eight a thousand seventy two a thousand eighty seven and a thousand sixty-seven now let's go crunch the numbers well I crunched the numbers into the tourist judge revolver I got a mean velocity of 812 with the Rossi circuit judge curbing a mean velocity of a thousand and seventy nine that's two hundred and sixty-seven feet per second more that's a lot more this is also a good time to mention that the literature that comes with this firearm advises that if you're going to use plus P ammunition it must be Sammy certified and that you should never use plus P plus ammunition so we see there's a great deal of difference in velocity but how much difference will that make in effect well to test that we're going to use the meet target and for those who haven't seen it before the meet target is leather couch skin which was sent to me by a viewer thank you very much steak pectoral pork ribs a bag of oranges simulate lung tissue more pork ribs on the back four layers of t-shirt on the front four layers on the back of the whole thing followed by the new and improved high-tech police bullet stop now the ammunition would chronograph to a soft point but to demonstrate the difference in effectiveness I'm going to use hollow-point ammunition so I've got my tourist judge revolver loaded with winchester silver tip 45 colt 225 grain jacketed hollow-point and I'll shoot from five yards [Applause] well we have our me target taking a partner beefsteak Peck girls just have 45 caliber holes through our ribs on the front of the target just have 45 caliber holster our grapefruit lung tissue has some damage but the ribs on the back of the target just have 45 caliber holes through them and three of the four projectiles were stopped either by the t-shirt on the back of the target willed by the first layer of fleece and one of our projectiles made it through to about the tenth layer of fleece so we don't see a lot of damage here but let's take a close-up look at these projectiles and here's our four Silvertip projectiles and with the low velocity that they're achieving out of the Taurus Judge revolver with its three inch barrel expansion is minimal and now I have a new meat target setup and I'll shoot this from five yards with the Circuit Judge so shooting our silver tips out of our carbine we see that our beef steak Peck curls still just have 45 caliber holes in but the ribs on the front of the target have much bigger holes and a lot more damage there's a lot more damage to our orange lung tissue and our ribs on the back of the target have significantly bigger holes in now I fired four shots and all of these projectiles were stopped by the t-shirt on the back of the target or by the first layer of fleece and now let's take a close-up look at these projectiles so we see one of our projectiles didn't expand very much but the others have excellent expansion and there's a significant amount of fragmentation so now let's see how our 45 colt compares to a 410 slug I've got the Mossberg shotgun loaded with our winchester super x4 ten two and a half inch one fifth balanced rifle slug and I'll shoot this from five yards and let's see what kind of results we get [Applause] [Applause] well we've got some really interesting results here's our beefsteak pectoral a lot of damage there our pork ribs on the front of the target devastating damage there our slugs just annihilated our orange and grapefruit lung tissue and these two grapefruits even have the wads still in the grapefruit now as far as penetration here's our ribs on the back of the target and a couple of the slugs were stopped by these ribs but none of them penetrated also our slugs really fragmented let me show you a close-up of what they look like now and here's all I could recover of our slugs so it would appear that although our slugs can have a great deal of effect they may be lacking in penetration there's a few more things to cover about the surrogate judge first is the concern of escaping gas between the cylinder and the forcing cone with a carbine and your arm on the for stock there's a concern that that gas can do some damage to your arm but they built some protections into this firearm let's take a close-up look at them you can see that the circuit judge has bilateral guards to protect your arm from the escaping gas and the wedge shape of the four stock also deflects that gas away from your hand and that's a real plus but there's a couple of downsides one when I push the cylinder release forward and push the cylinder out of battery there's been a couple of times where this guard has pinched my hand there's also the problem that the ejector rod is behind the four stock so it's difficult to hit the ejector rod you just have to push it and I'll show you how that can sometimes be a problem now when I push this you can see it doesn't push the rounds completely out this problem is compounded by the round that's closest to the frame hits the stock so I have to pull some of them out rotate and then push again this problem is bad enough with the 45 ammo with the 410 shot shells it can make reloading very tedious now there's one more thing I want to add and this could be a twenty minute presentation all on its own but I'm going to try to condense it to just a minute - and that is concerns about the legalities involved with a firearm like this in some hunting applications and rules can be different in different jurisdictions but in some cases if you're hunting game birds you're required to use a shotgun and this is not a shotgun it's not a shotgun with a rifle barrel it is a rifle and so you might have some legal concerns depending on what type of hunting you're doing check your local laws now that having been said what's the take away from all of this well we saw that the circuit judge carbine delivered really mediocre performance with 45 colt ammunition and with 410 ammunition whether it was slug buckshot or birdshot we got much better performance from a conventional 410 shotgun so is there really any application for a gun like this I'm sure some people could find different applications but the one that comes to my mind is under some circumstances for some people this might be a pretty good home defense gun if you loaded this with 410 three-inch triple a buck five pellet the fact that it delivered poor groups at 25 yards wouldn't really matter much at home defense distances and because this is a double action revolver there's no detachable box magazines no concerns with spring fatigue you could keep this loaded for a very long time because it's a double action revolver it's very simple there's no safety to disengage or re-engage when you want to fire this firearm you just pull the trigger when you want to stop shooting you just stop pulling the trigger and this firearm is light with fairly light recoil so something like this could be used by a wide variety of people who have very limited firearms experience now there are concerns that it only holds five rounds and reloading with the shotgun ammo can be tedious but in a legitimate home defense shooting where the citizen is armed with a shotgun those shootings are almost always favorably adjudicated with five rounds or less so as always don't try this tome on what you call a professional and thanks for watching the Rossi Circuit Judge 45 colt 410 rifle video [Music]

Channel: Paul Harrell

Views: 206,659

Rating: 4.976357 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: uTyUPsb9eqw

Length: 20min 46sec (1246 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 13 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Fascistbooksucks]

Paul is the circuit judge, he's just holding a gun.

[u/UncleEvilDave]

He’s back!!

[u/securitysix]

He lives!!!!!