[Pendragon]

The J-frame reolvers are pretty small, and you can get a 6 shot .32mag in that size, but how much smaller could you make a 5 shot .32 revolver?

What if you made it out of modern, lightweight material and made it with a lower barrel and maybe made it break top/auto eject?

I would bet you could make a pretty spiffy little wheel gun that would rival the Keltecs for size and convenience.

I heard there used to be guns in this size back in the early 1900s.

How is the performance on the .32 mag? anemic? near as good as .38sp?

Maybe someone could make a really hot .32 and make it a little longer rather than going fatter...

[JBP]

I doubt if you could get a 5 round 32 H&R Mag to be much smaller than the model 731s offered by Taurus. And for any slight difference in size I'd take the extra round anyway. If you check pasts posts here and back on TFL you'll see some claims that the .32 H&R Mag outperforms the 38 spl but out a 2" barrel I'll take a 148 gr or 158 gr 38 spl over a 100 gr 32 H&R Mag anytime. The 32 H&R Mag is a nice flat shooting round for the recoil sensitive. Here's a picture of my NEF R73 5 shot with a 2" barrrel.

[Old Fuff]

Most of out popular revolver cartridges originated as black-powder loads. When loaded with smokeless powder they had more then necessary capacity. When magnums came along they were made even longer to prevent the possibility of being used in an older 19th century revolver.

Automatic pistol cartridges were introduced in the late 1890’s and early 1900’s, and without exception were intended to be loaded with smokeless powder, and because of this were designed with capacity to hold an appropriate charge of smokeless powder. Anyone who compares a 45 Colt cartridge with a .45 ACP will see the obvious differences.

Anyway, the point of this is, one could have a .32 cartridge that offered performance equal too, or exceeding that of a .32 H&R Magnum in a much shorter case - if something prevented it from being used in an old revolver. In turn a much smaller revolver could be designed around it because a magnum-length cylinder wouldn’t be necessary. While going back to the old S&W top-break .32 revolvers is highly unlikely, the size of a similar hand-ejector revolver wouldn’t have to be any larger, and might be of interest to those that don’t like pocket pistols but find the current crop of snubby revolvers to be too big.

But I doubt that we will see anything like this because both the ammunition and gun manufacturers will have to see a considerable market before they dedicate the resources needed to develop and market such a combination.

[Rangie]

A NAA mini scaled up for .32 S&W long would be an awesome pocket gun. And with modern steel and NAA's one piece frame we could do .32 S&W long +p .