Why America Blamed the Wrong .38 for 100 Years
Ivan Jackson
3,390 views
The cartridge that every gun counter in America calls weak never failed in the war they're all picturing — and in the war where it did fail, it may not have failed at all. On one side of this story is a dead lieutenant on a jungle trail, still gripping a revolver he had emptied into a man who kept coming. On the other is a surgeon in a San Francisco laboratory, decades later, drawing the path of a bullet by hand. Between them sits one small, clean hole, and the argument over what it means has never once stopped.
So who decided the .38 was weak — the soldiers who bled for the answer, or the writers who never left the office?
In this video:
Why the round everyone blames for failing in the Philippines was the .38 Long Colt — a different, weaker cartridge than the .38 Special still getting slandered on gun shop counters today
What General Leonard Wood's actual 1904 report said, and the detail every retelling leaves out — the weapon he praised most wasn't a pistol at all
The Thompson-LaGarde tests of 1904 — cattle, cadavers on meat hooks, a swinging body used as a measurement of killing power — and why the officers who ran it weren't as certain as the legend that followed it
Why the 1911 .45 automatic, the gun credited with saving the day in the Philippines, mostly wasn't there yet when the fighting that built the myth actually happened
The 158-grain lead round-nose bullet cops nicknamed the widowmaker, and why decades of complaints about the .38 were really complaints about one specific, badly chosen bullet
Jan Libourel, the magazine editor with an Oxford doctorate who went back through the actual Army records — and found no documented proof the .45 ever outperformed the .38 in that war at all
Evan Marshall, the Detroit homicide detective who built a real-world "one-shot stop" database from hundreds of actual shootings — and Martin Fackler, the Army surgeon who spent the 1980s proving penetration, not knockdown, was what actually mattered
What happened in the FBI's Wound Ballistics Workshop after the 1986 Miami shootout, and why the gun that finally ended that fight was a .38 revolver, not the modern 9mm that had just failed
Why Fackler's own colleagues accused Marshall's data of statistical fraud in print — and why Marshall's central instinct about the bullet, not the caliber, turned out to be correct anyway
The 1972 FBI hollow-point load that proved it all along — same weight, same cartridge, a different bullet, and the complaints simply stopped
Same object. Opposite meaning, depending on who's standing at the counter and which side of this hundred-year argument they've inherited without knowing it.
Which side of that counter are you standing on — the story, or the record? Tell me in the comments, and if you want the next argument America got wrong about its own guns, subscribe and stay close.
12 Comments
I can only handle 15-20 rounds through it before I'm back to the 22, due to my hand ✋️ surgery. Whoever says that the 38 is a weak round doesn't know what he's talking about.
Sure, the cartridge they gave the military in the Philippines was crap around 1900.
That does NOT mean that a 38 Special is, too.
Why America Blamed the Wrong .38 for 100 Years
Ivan Jackson
3,390 views
The cartridge that every gun counter in America calls weak never failed in the war they're all picturing — and in the war where it did fail, it may not have failed at all. On one side of this story is a dead lieutenant on a jungle trail, still gripping a revolver he had emptied into a man who kept coming. On the other is a surgeon in a San Francisco laboratory, decades later, drawing the path of a bullet by hand. Between them sits one small, clean hole, and the argument over what it means has never once stopped.
So who decided the .38 was weak — the soldiers who bled for the answer, or the writers who never left the office?
In this video:
Why the round everyone blames for failing in the Philippines was the .38 Long Colt — a different, weaker cartridge than the .38 Special still getting slandered on gun shop counters today
What General Leonard Wood's actual 1904 report said, and the detail every retelling leaves out — the weapon he praised most wasn't a pistol at all
The Thompson-LaGarde tests of 1904 — cattle, cadavers on meat hooks, a swinging body used as a measurement of killing power — and why the officers who ran it weren't as certain as the legend that followed it
Why the 1911 .45 automatic, the gun credited with saving the day in the Philippines, mostly wasn't there yet when the fighting that built the myth actually happened
The 158-grain lead round-nose bullet cops nicknamed the widowmaker, and why decades of complaints about the .38 were really complaints about one specific, badly chosen bullet
Jan Libourel, the magazine editor with an Oxford doctorate who went back through the actual Army records — and found no documented proof the .45 ever outperformed the .38 in that war at all
Evan Marshall, the Detroit homicide detective who built a real-world "one-shot stop" database from hundreds of actual shootings — and Martin Fackler, the Army surgeon who spent the 1980s proving penetration, not knockdown, was what actually mattered
What happened in the FBI's Wound Ballistics Workshop after the 1986 Miami shootout, and why the gun that finally ended that fight was a .38 revolver, not the modern 9mm that had just failed
Why Fackler's own colleagues accused Marshall's data of statistical fraud in print — and why Marshall's central instinct about the bullet, not the caliber, turned out to be correct anyway
The 1972 FBI hollow-point load that proved it all along — same weight, same cartridge, a different bullet, and the complaints simply stopped
Same object. Opposite meaning, depending on who's standing at the counter and which side of this hundred-year argument they've inherited without knowing it.
Which side of that counter are you standing on — the story, or the record? Tell me in the comments, and if you want the next argument America got wrong about its own guns, subscribe and stay close.