If ever there was a handgun chambering that could be called “pointless”, it might be the venerable .30 Carbine. Originally designed for the M1 Carbine of WWII (itself a replacement for the Colt 1911 Government, and carried by support personnel and so on), the .30 Carbine cartridge itself is often derided as being inadequate as a manstopper — although from a carbine-length barrel, it has better ballistics than the .357 Mag fired from a revolver.
It makes even less sense in a handgun. AMT once made one of their Automag models thus chambered, to general derision, but Ruger takes the cake with its single-action Super Blackhawk model (7½” barrel).
Why, one may ask, would one choose a single-action revolver (with its signature clunky reloading mechanism) as a companion piece for a carbine?
I’ll tell you why.
Because pound for pound, there is no more shooting fun than touching off a few (okay, lots of) .30 Carbine rounds out of this bad boy. The 18″ jet of flame comes out the muzzle, the cylinder-gap flash a couple inches too, and the recoil is about the same as a .357 Mag out of a long-barreled gun weighing nearly four pounds (!), i.e. very manageable.
And then there’s the noise. At the range, few guns can cause a “prairie dog” scenario among the other shooters, as they quit shooting their own guns and crane their necks back from the partitions to ask “What the hell was that?” I once even had a Good Samaritan rush over to see whether I’d had a barrel blowup.
As you can tell, and if you are a Reader Of Long Standing, you will no doubt realize that I have owned such a gun before. The only change I made to the Blackhawk was to change the grips into some meatier stuff which a) made it fit better in my hand and b) attenuated the recoil still more.
But lo, there came a Time of Great Poverty, wherein your Humble Narrator was forced by the moneylenders into selling his beloved .30 Carbine Blackhawk, and many bitter tears did he weep in the doing thereof.
However, the buyer was a Longtime Friend and Loyal Reader, who agreed to my terms of not selling the gun in the future unless I go right of first refusal. He never sold it.
Anyway, many years passed by until a couple weeks back, when we were idly chatting about this and that, and we came to discover that I had a gun of particular interest to him, and yes, he would absolutely entertain the idea of a straight swap thereof for the Blackhawk.
Say hello to the Prodigal Gun:
And this, O My Readers, is the gun that I had intended to shoot at the range until the foul pestilence known as the Upper Bronchial Respiratory Infection laid me low.
Next week, I promise.
One additional note: along the way, I (and my buddy) had occasion to lay up an adequate supply (+/- 1,200 rounds) of .30 Carbine ammo to feed both the M1 Carbine and the Blackhawk. Both of us had purchased a couple hundred Remington soft-point rounds (which the M1 carbine doesn’t chamber very reliably) and for reasons of price, also about 500-odd rounds of the steel-cased Wolf ammo — which, according to Reader RHT447 who knows about these things, is not good to shoot out of the M1 carbine because the steel casing beats up the action fearfully (and may have been the cause of the extractor breaking, as chronicled earlier on these pages).
Of course, the Blackhawk pays no heed to such fripperies, and being a Ruger digests the steel casings as candy. So it’s the lovely Korean-surplus FMJ ammo for the carbine, and the Remington SP and Wolf ammo for the Blackhawk.
I wonder which one will run out first.
