Nullifidian said:
Revolvers do tend to be more accurate, especially ones that have rifled barrels.
All handguns have rifled barrels. At least, every single design I've ever seen made in the past 120 years or so, leaving aside wartime improvised or over-simplified weapons like the Liberty pistol - and handgun sized shotguns such as the Ithaca Auto & Burglar gun.
Revolvers also are NOT particularly more accurate than any semiauto of comparable quality. That's as sweeping and ignorant of a statement as saying that cars with V6's are all faster than cars with 4 cylinder engines.
That being said, the longer sight radius of a revolver with particularly longer barrels (like an 8 3/4in Smith & Wesson N-frame for example) does offer a bit more precision but the quality of the ammo as well as the actual shooter matter just as much if not more so.
But considering that my own vanilla-stock Sig Sauer P220 shoots tighter groups than my S&W 686 despite the Smith's barrel being almost 50% longer speaks pretty clearly to me in this case.
Nullifidian said:
Revolvers require considerably less maintenance. Decent revolvers rarely if ever jam simply because they are a much simpler design with fewer points of possible failure. Actually revolvers CANNOT jam. If a bullet fails to fire, just pull the trigger again and the next bullet will fire. With a semi-auto, you have to clear the chamber first.
Revolvers can fire faster than SOME semi-automatics, but typically slower; the cylinder in a revolver turns slower than the spring mechanism can chamber bullets into a semi-auto.
Lastly, certain revolvers, like the .357, have an amazingly large variety of calibers of bullet they can fire. A .357 can fire a .38 bullet for example.
On the flipside, revolvers have more recoil than a semi-auto due to zero recoil compensation.
Revolvers reload slower, even when a speedloader is used
Mags for semi-autos require maintenance and should never be kept loaded for long periods of time unless you want to wear out the spring. Revolvers however can be kept loaded indefinitely.
There's so much misinformation in this series of paragraphs that I don't even know where to begin.
Yes, revolvers can jam, and a revolver is considerably easier to damage to the point of being worthless than most semiautos as well - any kind of damage or bend to the crane (thats the lever arm that the cylinder is attached to when it is swung outside of the frame for loading) will almost ALWAYS prevent a revolver from functioning. This kind of damage frequently happens if you're the sort of idiot that regularly snaps the gun to the right to swing the cylinder back into the frame, as seen in the reloading animation for the scoped .44 mag in FO3. At first it usually causes a slight misalignment of the cylinder which will drastically affect accuracy as well as projectile velocity, but eventually it can cause the cylinder to bind up in the frame or be misaligned to the point where the frame breaks open or the cylinder is damaged when the gun is fired.
Also, when the internal guts of a revolver get mucked up or dirty, you better be a gunsmith if you're taking it apart because otherwise you're probably going to just make it worse after losing or breaking parts - whereas I can have any one of my semiautos field-stripped in under a minute and they never need anything more than a hosing-out with some cleaner, with a drop or two of lube on the slide rails, after which they got back together in well less than a minute.
Also, someone else made the very correct observation that the open areas of a revolver are particularly vulnerable to dirt and other environmental problems because of how open the design is, which can also help cause the misalignment symptoms I just described above, or if a chamber in the cylinder is packed up with dirt on the front side of the loaded cartridge, when fired it can cause a massive overpressure spike and blow the whole gun up. Seldom will that happen, but it is a very real risk.
As for revolvers firing 'slower' than semiautos, again, that's a very sweeping and ignorant statment. Most people cannot accurately fire either flavor any faster than the other.
Well-practiced experts on either kind of weapon can sound like a machine gun. The vast majority of semiautomatics cycle so quickly that one must be almost unbelievably fast in order to start shooting faster than the weapon cycles, which of course is well in excess of the typical cyclic rate of most submachine guns.
The revolver doesn't depend on anything other than the shooters mechanical input into the weapon to cycle, hence the trick shooters you can find on Youtube emptying a 6 shot single action revolver in under a second, while getting all six shots onto a playing card at 10 meters.
Note that 6 shots a second is fairly slow when compared to some IPSC shooters that get close to 10 or 12 rounds a second in speed shooting drills with semiautomatic pistols - near as makes no difference as fast as an MP5 on full auto.
As far as ammo flexibility, yes, .357 Mags can fire .38 because '38' is a misnomer of a designation, both cartridges have a .357" diameter bullet - the .38 is shorter than the .357 Mag and since revolver cartridges headspace on the rimmed base of the casing, one can shoot .38's all day long in a .357 quite safely.
(BTW, the .38 SPL is only called a .38 SPL because of the old practice of loading 'heeled' bullets - a projectile that flared out to match the overall width of its cartidge casing like a .22 LR still does, though the practice is now obsolete in all except the .22LR)
Now, there's plenty of semiautos that can perform similar tricks in some cases - my Smith & Wesson 1006 for instance, being chambered in 10mm auto, has a similar short cousin in the .40 S&W which is dimensionally identical to the 10mm auto in everything except overall length (and the corresponding lack of typical projectile weight and powder capacity)
But since its a semiauto and it headspaces on the front rim of the casing you're not 'supposed' to fire .40 S&W in a 10mm because it'd be headspacing on the extractor instead of the actual chamber - but my trusty 1006 has a strong enough extractor that I've never had it fail when shooting .40 S&W in it, though some .40 ammo isn't hot enough to make the weapon cycle reliably.
Yes, that is an atypical situation, but my point is that ammunition flexibility isn't unique to a revolver.
Hell, in plenty of cases one can simply interchange the barrel and magazine to change calibers in a semiauto - I have a .357 Sig barrel for my Glock 22 (.40 S&W) and I don't even need to use a different magazine - just swap the barrels in under a minute and I'm firing .357 Sig or .40 S&W just as readily and reliably.
My Father's Mark XIX Desert Eagle does the same trick with a simple barrel and magazine change to go from .50 AE to .44 Mag. Going down to .357 Mag only requires one to replace the bolt as well, which only takes a little more time.
And those old fairy tales about magazine springs 'taking a set' just refuse to die - I've always kept my Glock magazines fully loaded when I wasn't at a shooting range for almost 10 years now and I've never had a single failure. Similarly, my many of my Grandfather's same old GI M1911 magazines haven't ever had a problem and they've spent the better part of the last FIFTY YEARS sitting fully loaded.
Whew.. that ended up being a novel - but hopefully that adequately explains everything I touched on.
