ORIGINAL: bigtim6656
Which would you wont for self defense.
I do not mean home defense or the thinking of maybe the wife will need to use it
I mean for a gun you carry CC out on the street. Or around your land or house. A gun that only you use andknow well
Do you wont a semi auto or a rev.
Why for either
What makes you pick that type over the other
For a person who has no experience with a handgun, I always recommend a revolver as a starter weapon rather than an automatic, for safety reasons. You can always tell if a revolver is loaded, and it is much more difficult to fire one by accident! Just make sure no kid can get ahold of it! Kids can't generally pull back the slide and chamber a round in an auto, but they can cock & fire a revolver!
The old argument about reliability between the revolver and the auto has been raging since when the "Good Lord was a Road Guard", but will never be resolved. A good revolver is very reliable as long as it is kept clean and well-maintained, but a revolver is much easier to put out of action by things like sand, dirt, mud, water, etc. On the other hand, the good old Colt .45 can be buried in a sandy mud puddle for a week, retrieved, and it will fire! The assertionthat a bad round of ammo will require you torack the slide and chamber a new round in an auto, but not in a revolver, is true. But in the many manythousands of rounds of GI .45 Ball ammo I have fired in the last 48 years, and half as much U.S. made factory target pistol ammo I've shot in that same time, I have yet to have, or even see, a misfire! It just doesn't happen. This included a couple of boxes of .45 Ball marked FA 18! It was made during WWI, and still gave standard ballistics 60 years later!
Once you learn to shoot a handgun safely and well, an automatic is by far the superior defensive arm! But you need to get one that is chambered for an adequate cartridge. Personally, I prefer the .45 ACP, and use a variant of the Colt M1911A1.... I do NOT consider the 9mm Parabellum to be acceptable-some people do.
Automatics and revolvers are about equal in the accuracy department. An accurized Colt .45 auto or .38 Super will shoot as well as the finest target revolver ever made. I once has a Colt .38 Super auto that had been converted by Clark in LA to shoot .38 Special wadcutter target ammo. It was every bit as accurate as my Colt single-action only Officers Model .38 Special, which was one of the most accurate revolvers ever made by anyone anywhere.