Originally posted by Old Marksman
The sixth shot can provide a great advantage over five.
Nominally, it would appear to be a 20% increase, but it is larger than that in reality because not every shot is an effective hit.
That is your perception, but it's really beside the point I'm trying to make. Judging from your posts here and elsewhere, it is quite evident that you value capacity highly in your choice of defensive handgun. As such, it's a pretty safe bet that a revolver isn't your first choice in defensive handgun due to their limited capacity. After all, even the highest capacity centerfire revolvers commonly available max out at 8 rounds which is still two less than your recently acquired LCP Max. If capacity is among your top considerations when choosing a defensive handgun, then a revolver makes little sense given what's available today.
That being said, people who choose a revolver in spite of the plethora of much higher capacity semi-automatics on the market usually do not value capacity as highly as you do. I maintain that for someone who has consciously chosen to carry a limited-capacity, slow-reloading gun like a revolver, a six-shot cylinder as opposed to a five-shot one isn't likely to be the determining factor in their choice. The perceived advantage or disadvantage of higher capacity is really a separate, though certainly parallel, discussion from the OP's original question: why are low-capacity semi-autos more widely criticized than revolvers? The answer to that original question is, I believe, that people who prefer semi-autos generally tend to value capacity more highly than people who prefer revolvers, whether or not that preference is correct, wise, or justified is a separate discussion.
Originally posted by Old Marksman
Quote:
Choice of individual carry is a matter of carrying what one is comfortable with and feels secure with. Yes, it really is that simple.
What happens when one's feeling is poorly founded?
It's really impossible to say beforehand because every defensive use of a firearm is a unique event in and of itself with far too many variables to be accurately predictable. You seem to be very concerned with multiple-attacker scenarios and use that as your primary justification for the utility of a high-capacity handgun. I would point out that bad people doing bad things in group nothing new, it's been going on for all of recorded history. As such, people were defending themselves from multiple attackers long before high capacity magazines were existent. Sometimes people did so successfully and sometimes they failed and conversely, people have sometimes defended themselves with a high-capacity handgun against multiple attackers and sometimes they have failed. There are no guarantees in a gunfight, it all depends on a myriad of factors.
Where comfort and feeling of security becomes important is in fostering, as Paul Harrell would say, program compliance. A particular handgun may have every objectively measurable feature that a given person needs in a defensive firearm, but none of it matters if the person won't carry or train with said handgun because they're not comfortable with it and/or don't feel secure with it. I've seen far too many people refuse to train or carry not because they didn't have a high-quality handgun available, but because the one that was did not give them a feeling of comfort or security.