.357 Magnum vs Every Predator in America

There is a story that gets told about the .357 Magnum and it goes like this. A professional bear guide up in the North Woods carried a Colt Python as his working gun for years. A good 6-in revolver right there on his hip every day and one afternoon a bear came down out of a tree already worked up, closed the distance before he could do much of anything and got hold of him.

He emptied the whole cylinder into it at arms reach and it kept coming. And he barely  lived through it. He went out not long after and bought himself a bigger gun and he never  carried that .357 into the woods again. And most people hear that story and file the little Magnum away as not enough gun end of discussion. Here is what they miss.

The guide made one specific mistake that day and it had nothing to do with the size of the cartridge. And once you see what it was, this entire question flips over because that same .357 in other hands on other days has stopped every one of these animals cold. So today I am running this cartridge against every predator that can actually hurt you in this country one at a time and I am going to show you the truth of it.

This gun spends its whole life getting away with things it has no business getting away with. It slips through loophole after loophole, animal after animal right up until it meets the ones where there is no loophole left and those are the ones that put people in the ground. By the end, you will know exactly which is which.

So let me start with the loophole that makes all the others possible because it is the one nobody tells you about. Almost everybody measures a gun by the wrong number. You have been shown foot-pounds of energy your whole life as the way to rank a cartridge. Bigger number, deadlier round. It is printed right there on the box and for what we are actually talking about here, it is next to useless and I can show you why in about 10 seconds.

A hunting arrow off a compound bow carries somewhere around 50 foot-pounds of energy. That is less than a .22 rifle makes. 50 foot pounds. And hunters drop full-grown bull elk with that arrow every single fall. And men have killed grizzly and even Cape buffalo with one. Now go the other way.

A little screaming varmint round, like a .223, makes over 1,300 foot pounds. More than 20 times what that arrow carries. And it is against the law to hunt elk with in most of the country. Because everybody knows it will wound the animal and lose it. Think about what that means for a second. The arrow with almost no energy kills the biggest game on the continent.

And the high-energy bullet cannot be trusted on a deer. The reason is simple. And it is the whole key to this video. What kills is penetration. A projectile reaching something vital and wrecking it. The arrow slips deep and cuts straight through both lungs. And the varmint bullet blows apart 2 inches in. And never gets close to anything that matters.

So the number on the box was lying to you the whole time. Which means the real question for this little magnum is never how hard it hits on paper. It is whether the right bullet out of it will drive deep enough to reach the heart and the lungs of the thing standing in front of you. And the answer, once you know how to load it, is a lot more animal than its reputation would ever let you believe.

That word though, right there. That is the whole ball game. How you  load it. That is where the bear guide got it wrong. And it is the hinge everything else hangs on. >>  >> So stay with me. There are really two different .357s. There is the one everybody pictures, the 125 grain hollow point.

That is a tremendous round for stopping a person. Built to open up fast and dump everything it has into soft tissue and quit. On a man, it is close to perfect. On a bear, it is next to useless. Opening fast and quitting is the  exact opposite of what you need when you have to bore through a foot of muscle and heavy bone to reach the the Then there is the other .

357, the one the woods crowd actually carries. A heavy hardcast, 180 grains of solid hard lead with a flat nose. And that bullet does not open up at all. It just bites in and drives and keeps driving. The fellow who builds the most respected heavy bear loads in the country says it about as plain as it can be said.

It is not the energy that yes matters, it is the penetration. That guide reached for the wrong bullet in an era before the good hardcast loads even existed. And that is most of why his gun failed him. Put the right bullet in it and you are holding something else entirely. And while I  am at it, let me knock down the biggest myth attached to this gun because it scares good people off a cartridge that would serve them fine.

You have heard that a handgun bullet just skids off a bear skull like a flat rock off a pond. And for a round nose or a hollow point, there is some truth in that. Those shapes can slide right off heavy angled bone, but a flat nosed hardcast does not skid. It bites down and cracks straight through. Skull, shoulder blade, whatever is in the way.

The skidding was always a problem with the shape of the bullet, not the size of the caliber. One more reason the hardcast is the answer to almost everything we are about to talk about. The people who actually shoot bears with these loads have watched them break bone. The internet swears no  handgun can touch.

A couple more quick things and then we get to the animals. First, barrels. The velocity numbers I am about to give you come out of a real 4-in barrel or better. A cute little 2-in  snub riding in a lot of pockets throws away a big chunk of its speed. The gun in your hand may be a good deal softer  than the one on the box.

Second, capacity. You’ve got six rounds and a slow reload against things that cover 50 ft in a second. So the rounds in the cylinder are realistically all you get. Everyone has to land. Everyone has to bite deep. If you would rather have the real ceiling and floor of a cartridge than the comfortable fantasy that it either kills everything or bounces off everything, subscribe.

There are 100,000 shooters out there who want it straight, and that is the entire idea of this channel. Now, the animals, and I am walking them in the order that actually tells the story. From the ones the .357 waltzes right past, up through the ones where a single choice saves you, to the ones where the loopholes finally run out.

Start at the bottom with the predators that were never really the question at all. The coyote is the one you are by far the most likely to ever meet. And for this gun, it is nothing. They have moved into every corner of the country now, right into the cities, and they have gotten bolder as they lose their fear of us. A 35-lb dog is no kind of test for a magnum.

There are about 150 documented attacks on people in North America, and roughly 11 deaths on the record. >>  >> Nearly everyone traces back to a rabid animal or one that got comfortable around a neighborhood, not to a coyote being hard to put down. One solid hit finishes it. The loophole here is that there is no fight to speak of.

The only wrinkle worth knowing is that the Eastern coyote carries some wolf and dog in  its blood, which makes it bigger and bolder. Some folks have started calling it the coywolf. Does not change a thing here. The gun is wild overkill on every version of it. The wolf sits right next to it, and people fear it far past anything the record supports.

In a whole century, wild wolves have killed something like 33 people in all of North America, and that is the  total, not the yearly number. A healthy wolf wants nothing to do with you, and the few attacks that do happen almost always come back to rabies  or an animal that people fed. For the .

357, a wolf is really just a coyote with a heavier  coat and a few more pounds on it. And even a middleweight load punches clean through. The loophole is the same one. The animal is far more afraid of you than you should ever be of it. >>  >> And the gun has power to spare. Now, the mountain lion is a strange one because on paper it looks harmless.

And in one specific way, it is the most unsettling animal on this whole list. About 27 people killed in a century, which is almost nothing. But the cougar is the only predator out here that will every now and then look at a human being and decide that it’s food. And it does not come at you head-on. It comes from behind and above out of the cover.

The first you ever know about it is 150 lb hitting  your back and teeth closing on your neck. So, hear me clearly because it changes  what the gun can do for you. The .357 is more than enough cat killer. It was never the problem. The problem is that the fight starts with the animal already on top of you. You do not get to aim a revolver in that situation.

Just  jam the muzzle into fur and fire while you try to stay alive. The loophole the lion closes is not about power. It is that  the thing you needed was your own eyes catching it before it ever committed. And no caliber on earth fixes not seeing the cat. And the alligator belongs in this bottom group only [snorts] because of where you have to put the bullet, not because any of it is easy.

It fights like nothing else here because it is not a mammal and none of the usual thinking holds. Fatal attacks are rare, a couple dozen in Florida >>  >> across 75 years. Though the number climbs as the animals recover and people build out into their water. >>  >> A big gator is plated in heavy bone across the top.

Its brain is a target no bigger than a walnut. And it hits you from the water blowing straight up and rolling before your hand ever finds the grip. The .357 will crack that skull with a hard cast bullet without any trouble at all. Putting the bullet on a walnut on a rolling animal that already has your leg in its jaws is the hardest shot on this entire list.

The honest defense is  just not being in the water at dusk. And if it comes to shooting, it is the brain or nothing under about the worst conditions you can imagine. Now, we climb into the middle group. And this is where the video earns its name. These are the animals where the caliber quietly steps back, and your one choice of bullet becomes the entire ball game.

The feral hog is the first place a bad decision actually draws your blood. People laugh at pigs right up until one comes low and fast through the brush and lays a leg open to the bone with a tusk. Wild hogs kill eight or nine people a year around the world. The American population has exploded into the millions, so more of us cross their trails every season.

Here is the piece that makes the hog a real test for this gun. A mature boar grows a shield across his shoulders, a slab of gristle and scar an inch or two thick, armor he builds up over a lifetime of fighting other boars. And that shield will stop a soft, fast-expanding bullet dead right there on the surface.

This is the exact spot where the wrong .357 gets you hurt. And the right one saves you. That famous 125-grain hollow point can splatter on the shield and never reach a lung. The heavy hardcast drives clean through it and into the boiler room behind. Same gun, same distance, and the whole thing comes down to which box of ammo you happen to grab on your way out the door.

The loophole is real, but it is narrow. And you only get through it with the bullet that penetrates. And the black bear is the animal where this cartridge finally steps into the job it was quietly built for. People look at a black bear and assume harmless, all round ears and that clumsy shuffle.

And that assumption is exactly what puts them in the hospital. Predatory black bear attacks are real, and the researchers who study them will tell you. The animals turn more predatory the farther north you go. There are also far more black bears living far closer to far more people than any grizzly ever has, which is why the attack numbers are not small.

And here at last with a heavy hardcast bullet and a level head, the .357 does exactly what it is being asked to do. It drives deep enough to reach the vitals and break the bone that is in the way. This is the top of the loopholes. Loaded right and pointed right on a black bear, this is not a marginal gun. And it is not a compromise.

There is a real record of .357s turning back bear attacks to prove it. It is not the biggest thing you could be carrying. And I would never tell you it is, but it is genuinely honestly enough. This is as high as the loopholes go. Everything from here down, this gun handles. It is the next animal where the arguing starts.

If you want to break down that tells you where the line actually falls instead of pretending there is no line, this is the channel for it. Subscribe. And there is a new one tomorrow. Before we get into the animals that finally close the door on this gun, one quick thing. This is for the person who would rather figure all this out at the kitchen table than out in the field.

That is the whole reason I put together the Prepper’s Firearms Guide. 105 pages on the guns and the calibers that actually earn their keep when things get lean. Everyone with a real dated price and a straight read on how to buy used without getting burned. The code is up on your screen and the link is down in the description and that is the only time I bring it up.

>> [snorts] >> So now the top group, the animals where I owe you the hard truth in both directions because both crowds tell it wrong. The grizzly along with its giant coastal cousins, the brown bear and the Kodiak, is the animal half of you clicked this video to ask about. So let me be careful with it.

First, against the crowd that calls the .357 a toy, it has stopped grizzlies. >>  >> In the real record of people fighting off bears with handguns across every caliber there is, the success rate runs surprisingly high and the thing that decided who walked away was almost never the size of the round. It was whether the person kept their head and put the bullet where it had to go.

A heavy hard cast .357 driven into the right spot can reach the vitals on even a grizzly, and the people who sneer at that are simply wrong. But now, the other side, against the crowd that swears the little magnum is all anybody ever needs. On an animal built like a bulldozer, one that covers the ground between you in about 2 seconds.

This cartridge is your backup, not your plan. A coastal brown can run triple the weight of an inland grizzly. When the shot has to stop a charge, placement is everything. The men who have actually done it do not go for a head-on brain shot. That target is small and low and coming at them fast.

They break the shoulder to drop the animal and get to the spine. If you are walking into big brown bear country, the honest answer is a long gun on your body, a rifle or a shotgun full of slugs. The revolver is the thing on your chest for the moment the long gun gets knocked out of your hands, which is precisely the lesson that bear guide walked away with. The .

357 can win against a grizzly. It can also come up short at the very worst instant, and a man who did this for a living decided the margin was just too thin to bet his life on. That is the whole truth of it. Not a toy and not enough to plan a trip around. When a bigger gun rides in the very same holster, and then, at the very top, the one animal where there is no argument left to have, the polar bear.

It is the largest land predator on the planet. It will hunt a human being on purpose out on the ice. And there is no gentle way to put this. A .357 is not a polar bear gun. That is a heavy rifle animal, flat out. And anybody who tells you a revolver is the answer up there has never stood in that country. This is where the handgun stays in the holster, and the rifle does the work, and there is no loophole to be found anywhere in it.

So, let me hand you the two things that matter more than any caliber on this whole list. And then, the bottom line. The first is bear spray. And I am going to give it to you straight, both sides. Because you have been sold one side or the other your entire life. Spray has real limits and the people selling it do not love to mention them.

Its reach is only 30 or 40 ft. A charging bear eats that up in under a second and a bad wind or thick brush can tear the cloud apart or blow it right back into your own face. People have deployed it and died anyway. So, it is not the magic shield the label makes it out to be. But inside those limits, when the wind cooperates and you get it out in time, spray has turned back a huge number of bears without a shot ever being fired.

And the sharpest people I know who actually live in that country carry both, the spray and the gun. They would laugh at the idea of choosing one. The grown-up answer was never a single caliber anyway. It is traveling in groups, keeping your eyes carrying the spray and the gun both. And when you are deep in the country of the big bears, it is having the long gun as your real answer.

And the revolver as your insurance. That is not me dodging the question. That is what the professionals actually strap on in the morning. The second thing is the one this whole video was built to tell you. And it is the biggest loophole of all. The .357 Magnum is not the most powerful thing you can carry into the woods. And it never once claimed to be.

What it is is very possibly the most gun a whole lot of ordinary people can actually shoot well. And that matters more than any figure printed on a box. It kicks a fraction of what the big bores do. It runs cheap .38 specials all day long, which means you will actually practice with it instead of flinching through a painful cylinder twice a year and calling it good.

And here is the part the woods crowd loves. Drop this same cartridge into a lever action carbine and the whole thing changes character. That 180 grain load that made under 800 ft lbs out of a revolver can push past 1200 out of a 16-in barrel, doubling, sometimes tripling, its punch. Until it is knocking on the door of .30-30 rifle country. So, the .

357 carbine is a genuine hog and black bear gun in a place that  the revolver was only ever marginal, and it feeds from the very same box as the pistol on your hip. One cartridge, two guns, and a lifetime of cheap practice behind both. That is why this 90-year-old round, the original magnum, the very first one Smith & Wesson ever built back in 1935,  simply refuses to die.

So, here is the bottom line, and it splits the difference in a way that will annoy both camps. Loaded with a heavy hard cast bullet, the .357 magnum is genuinely enough gun for the great majority of what can hurt you outdoors. The coyote, the wolf, the cougar, the hog, and yes, the black bear. It is the floor of adequate and the ceiling of comfortable at the very same time.

The one spot where real stopping power meets a gun a normal person can actually run when their hands are shaking. Where it stops being enough is exactly where the animal stops being reasonable. The 2,000-lb herbivore you never should have crowded, and the great bears that have earned a rifle for 100 years running. Below that line, this old cartridge is not the weak compromise its doubters make it out to be. It is plenty of gun.

Just be honest with yourself about where that line sits, and carry the bigger tool on the day you step across it. If you want the whole rundown of which guns and calibers actually earn their keep when it counts, and what every one of them really costs, that guide is linked down below. That is the last I will say about it.

We are a growing crowd here on the road to 100,000. All of us, people who would rather hear it straight than hear it sold. If this one earned it, come on along and stay a while. The bear guide learned it the hard way. It was never about the caliber, it was about the bullet, and knowing where the line sits. Subscribe if this one earned it.