Nagant Rev...or High Point Truck pistol

Looks like pretty much everyone agrees to go with the Hi Point. I totally agree. I was going to get a Nagant for the wife because it is cheap and she only wants revolvers. But, once I saw how much the ammo is I changed my mind. Good grief, I would rather use the Nagant as a short club to defend myself, or a hammer for around the house.

Again, be sure it is locked up in the vehicle. I think the days of being able to leave your stuff in your car are long gone. While it is a cheap gun how would you feel of your gun was used to shoot some guy's wife or kid???
While it wasn't you pulling the trigger......... I would feel real guilty if I didn't take proper precautions.
 
Thanks guys going with the HP I had no idea the Nagant was so weak caliber wise.
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It's not necessarily weak. The problem is most of the 7.62x38R ammo in production today are target loads that don't come close to what the original military cartridge was capable of. The commercial/target loads probably fall into the same class as something like .32acp. Military surplus ammo is available, but is no cheaper or easier to find than the weak commercial loads, however is more akin to the .38 special in muzzle energy. Either way, at present, it's not a practical choice. If ammo were cheap, widely available, and you had a variety of options for defensive loads, the Nagant wouldn't be a terrible choice, given its impressive durability and reliability.
 
Well, the Nagant revolver is a battle tested handgun...from the Russo-Japanese War (which btw, Teddy Roosevelt negotiated an end to and won the Nobel Prize), WW1, the Russian Revolution & Civil War, the Fin wars, WW2, Korea, Vietnam, and countless brush wars.

It will also chamber and shoot 32 H&R mags, and 32 longs. Accurate and reliable. Recall a guy, years ago, who used one as a truck gun.

The Hi-Point looks like a power-drill but it has a decent reputation.

At least when when I shoot the Nagant, some guy always says - "Gee, thats a real nice Webley you got there,"

which brings a smile...
 
[The Nagant] will also chamber and shoot 32 H&R mags, and 32 longs.
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This comes up a lot and there are some caveats that bear repeating.

With either of these types of ammo, you will get the occasional bulged or split case because the chambers are too large. This will result in occasional extraction problems, and you will probably be unable to reuse the brass if you handload; the latter could be a problem because cheap range-pickup brass is usually hard to find for either of these cartridges.

It is an open topic of debate whether .32 H&R Mag is truly safe to fire in these guns. AFAIK no one in the modern Western world really knows what pressure these revolvers are designed to handle. The only information we have is based on firing surplus military ammo through a chronograph and making assumptions based on the ballistics, which suggest that the operating pressure may be close to .32 H&R Mag, but nobody really knows for sure. It's educated guesswork, and guesswork really doesn't give me a peaceful easy feeling when I'm firing a gun held in my hand, as opposed to clamped in a Ransom rest on the other side of sheet of 3/4" plywood with a 20'-long piece of string hooked to the trigger. :rolleyes:

FWIW this is the likely reason for the anemic nature of new commercial 7.62x38R ammo; if I were an ammo manufacturer and I had no data to work from, I'd probably think "cheap pot metal junk revolvers with similar cylinder wall thickness will hold together using .32 Long, so I'll ignore the guesswork derived from milsurp ammo and use .32 Long load data". :rolleyes:
 
Of the two, I'd definitely choose the HiPoint. Remember there are some quality control issues reported with the HiPoints so be prepared to send it back to the company if it's not 100%.
 
Th highest volume private dealer in Ohio told me that hipoint has the lowest rate of return of all the brands he sells.
The company is HQd in Dayton so that may be part of why I like them.
I have owned both. THe Nagant IS not very powerful and the DA is long and in almost all of them VERY hard. I have read numbers like 22 or 30 pounds reported on some.

I used to do this and I used my hipoint. It worked great for the job.
Those lock boxes really are not much more secure than a glovebox.
 
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