Duplex ammo for six shooters

[Gabe]

I was talking about this in the rifle forum. What's the opinon here on duplex ammo?

It would be worth exploring loading two bullets in a handgun cartridge, so you get a "double tap" with each shot. Revolver cartridges makes more sense than autos as a starting point because they are longer, and it makes less sense in highcap auto pistols.

So let's say you load two 150 grainers in a 44 magnum, or two 90 grainers in a 357, would it be desirable in a home defense situation?

 

[BigG]

There was a thread about this sometime before. Somebody was loading three buckshot of the appropriate size in a 357 Magnum IIRC. Seemed like a better idea in a straight revo ctg than a bottleneck rifle ctg to me. The Army SPIW testing Art alluded to in the other thread included two spitzer bullets in a 308 case, the base of one slightly angled so it would not follow dead behind the front one once they cleared the bbl. Took too much powder space for one thing. Army never followed thru with any of the ideas they tried. I think THE BLACK RIFLE covers a lot of that testing stuff. I'll have to read it again.

 

[444]

I have fired factory loads like this in .357 and .38 Special and have handloaded cartridges with three "round" balls out of the .444 Marlin.
It works. The balls generally hit in basically the same general area at reasonable ranges.
I am not sure if this is an effective defense cartridge or not. I have read stuff over the years that made the argument that getting hit multiple times at once seemed to be better than getting hit the same number of times sperately. I would imagine that these lead round balls would not have nearly the "power" of two seperate shots from the same gun using regular ammo. With that in mind I don't know if you would get adequate penetration from either ball.
These cartridges are fun to play with if nothing else.

 

[George Hill]

I remember reading about this in Guns & Ammo over 10 years ago. Stacking 3 or 4 short-squatt full wadcutter slugs in a mild loaded .357. You would get 6 to 8 inch shotgroups at average pistol ranges.
I don't see the advantages of this since each hit does a fraction of the deep penetration that could be made with a single slug.