What is the difference between .357 and .44 magnum

Declaring either round the victor in terms of its velocity, trajectory, or ballistic coefficient is to overlook the fact that there is just so much variety in what either one can offer. On average the Mag does deliver a slightly faster muzzle velocity. When accompanied by a higher ballistic coefficient contributes to less bullet drop and therefore a flatter trajectory.

In general, however, neither round offers an inherently superior ballistic coefficient. Neither will give its shooter a marked accuracy advantage, either.

Only training grants that perk. Or, B padding out an article such as the one you are reading. It too is a beast, consistently capable of transferring more than ft lbs of energy at close range. In fact, the 44 Mag is more likely to overpenetrate a human-sized target, which is undesirable since that puts innocent bystanders at risk. Recoil is an important factor to consider. Both rounds are generous in the recoil department, but the 44 Mag certainly kicks more. Recoil is determined by four factors: bullet weight, bullet velocity, propellant charge weight, and firearm weight.

Given those data, the rounds we compared earlier would deliver the following recoil energies:. As you can see, the 44 Mag can consistently deliver twice as much kick as the Mag. This is the natural byproduct of its greater energy. You must either tolerate heavier recoil or get a heavier handgun. Either of these options may dissuade you from carrying a weapon chambered for the larger round. No groundbreaking revelation here: The smaller cartridge is also the more affordable one.

And why is the Mag more popular? Not because it boasts superior ballistics or accuracy, or necessarily because it is less expensive. The other four loads all had handgun velocities that matched what the rifle was doing between 90 and yards.

So if you shoot something with your. The disparity between rifle and handgun was even more dramatic with the. The handgun velocity with the Hornady XTP and the Black Hills were both slightly less than the rifle velocity at yards. For the other three, the converging point was in the to yard range.

If you know the velocity and you know the bullet weight, you can calculate the energy of the bullet. Three of the. The other two. That grain Remington. There are plenty of factory. The Remington just happened to stand out in this batch of five. In this case, I think these numbers demonstrate just how important load selection is and how much of a difference the longer barrel makes. This is showing the energy at the muzzle for each load. The reds represent the rifle muzzle energy and the greys are for the revolver.

Compare the red bars on the left to the grey bars on the right. Just by firing it out of a longer barrel, a. For the ballistic gel testing, I used synthetic gel blocks from Clear Ballistics. Each block is 16 inches long and I lined up two of them longways. I fired one round of each load with the handgun and one round with the rifle.

I would have preferred to fire at least two or three rounds of each load to make sure there was some consistency. But with a short ammo supply, I had to settle for one round per test. Starting with the. This is one of those self-defense loads I was talking about earlier. But in this test, with both guns, it expanded too much and too soon which led to severe under-penetration.

It zipped right through both blocks. With the rifle, it expanded nicely with decent penetration. The next three loads all performed more or less the same with the rifle as they did with the handgun.

Not a major difference in either penetration or expansion with any of those. They all had solid solid numbers. Moving on to the. No expansion with the handgun and lots of expansion out of the rifle with moderate penetration. The Hornady LeverEvolution had nearly identical performance with both guns.

The Fiocchi grain, again turns out to be kind of a powder-puff load. The velocity was just too low to get any expansion out of either the handgun or the rifle.

The Hornady XTP showed us that classic inverse relationship between expansion and penetration. It did okay out of both guns, but we got more expansion with the rifle and more penetration with the handgun. The shape of an expanded bullet crushes and tears tissue more effectively than the shape of an unexpanded bullet.

Both of these cartridges have loads that will do that really well without sacrificing penetration. The final test I performed was the hard barrier penetration test. I lined up 18 sheets with a little gap in between each one. The idea was to just find out how many sheets of plywood the bullet could penetrate before it stopped. I only did this test with the rifles, not with the handguns.

Again, it was an issue of ammo availability. In general, wood is not a great medium for repeatable testing because it changes so much based on its environment. But this should at least show us how these.

The plywood is not meant to simulate bone or thick brush or the walls in your house or any other specific barrier. It just gives us a general idea of how these bullets might behave when they have to punch through hard things. The grain Remington was, again, the poorest performer of the lot. It only made it through four sheets of the plywood and left a big dent in the fifth. The grain Remington went cleanly through five sheets of plywood and almost, but not quite through a sixth.

Both of those bullets expanded and left big nasty exit holes in the wood they penetrated. This does not make the. There are very few situations where the. To get an idea of what each cartridge is capable of for self-defense, we set-up a small test using synthetic ballistic gelatin. We picked a common self-defense load for each caliber. For 44 Magnum, we went with the grain Barnes hollow point ammo. From 10 yards out, we fired each of the cartridges through a 4-layer cloth barrier into the ballistic gelatin.

This follows similar protocol to how the Federal Bureau of Investigation tests ammunition. The Magnum round penetrated beyond the inch gel block and into a second block. It ended up penetrating about 22 inches total.

You can see the wound channel created by the magnum round inside the blue box in the photo above. The 44 Magnum round got to the end of the first gel block and then almost stopped. It just barely penetrated into Block 2.

As far as expansion goes, the Magnum expanded to a final diameter of about. The 44 Magnum really mushroomed out. It came to rest with expansion of just shy of. You can see each expanded bullet we recovered from the ballistic gelatin in the photo below.

Our recovered magnum grain Hydra-Shok bullet left next to the recovered Barnes 44 Magnum bullet right. Although trajectory is more important for rifle ammunition, it still makes a difference in handguns. In this case, the. So which is the best choice for your needs? To be fair, you can use either cartridge for hunting a wide variety of game and both deliver plenty of force for personal defense.