New Taurus 941UL .22 MAG

Eight-shot magnum firepower – 2”/25 yard accuracy – feathery light, this gun has it all for smallbore backup needs!

By Massad Ayoob

Reprinted with permission from The Complete Book of Handguns 2003.

One of my mentors was a man named Bill Jordan.   The old Border Patrol gunslinger was the fastest man with a double-action revolver that I ever saw in person.   He was the man who conceptualized the Smith & Wesson .357 Combat Magnum the gun he called a “peace officer’s dream.”   There was one other revolver that he never get did to see, though.

A devoted and accomplished hunter, Bill had been impressed with the power of the .22 WMR (Winchester Rimfire Magnum) even out of a short pistol barrel.   He wrote in his classic text No Second Place Winner ($19.85 including postage from its current publisher Police Bookshelf, P.O. Box 122 , Dept CH, Concord , NH 03302 ; 800-624-9049) about why he recommended always carrying a backup gun.

Bill did that religiously in his uniformed days.   In act, I can honestly say that Bill Jordon once blew me away with his backup revolver.   

The year was 1974.   Bill had been retired from the Border Patrol for some time, and was working for the NRA as sort of an ambassador at large.   His speaking performances always included his famous quick-draw act.   Bill was putting on the show in New Hampshire .   Apart of the program involved having a cop come up and hold a cocked single-action revolver on him, with finger on trigger, while Bill promised to outdraw the drawn gun and “beat the drop” with his old long-action Smith & Wesson .38 Special Military & Police revolver.   Both gun, of course with loaded only with primer blanks.  

I had just won the NH State Championship in Police Combatshooting, and as the resident state champ, was elected to be the guy holding the gun on (gulp!) Bill Jordan.   I put my finger on the trigger of the cocked Colt Single Action Army .45 and watched his hand.   I was young and cocky and thought I was pretty good, and I knew there was not way this old sixty-something guy could take me.

BANG!   I was dead.   I was aware of a flicker of movement of his right hand and before I could react and pull the trigger, he had drawn and fired the shot that would have killed me had his gun been loaded with real bullets.   “We’ll try again,” Bill told the audience with his kind, crinkly smile.

This time I was ready.   When I saw his hand move, I fired.   Unfortunately, it was a dead man’s shot.   Bill had drawn and fired before my Colt’s hammer could fall through its long arc.   You see, this was a man who was on film reacting to a start signal, drawing and firing his S&W (and hitting the target) in 24/100 ths of one second.

“I think this boy deserves one more chance,” Bill drawled to the delighted audience.   “He almost made it that time.”  

Okay, dammit, this time I’d really be ready.   I had taken up the slack on the cocked Colt’s trigger.   My eyes were on his right hand.   When it moved I would…

BANG!

“What?!? His hand didn’t move!   His revolver is still in the holster!   And…”  

Ah, yes.   “And…”   And, in Bill’s left hand, was a freshly-fired Smith & Wesson Airweight Chiefs Special that he had drawn from his left hip pocket and aimed at my head before he rolled back its smooth trigger on the primer blank that would have blown my brains out had it been a live round.

I got to examine that gun later.   It was the exact same two-inch Model 37 that appears in No Second Place Winner .   Bill liked the sun-one-pound weight of the aluminum alloy Smith Airweight.   Years later, when he was writing for Guns & Ammo , he was one of several staff writers polled on what the single ideal home defense gun would be.    Alone among a field of writers who recommended .45s, Magnums, and long guns for the purpose, Bill articulated why he recommended the Smith & Wesson .38 Special Bodyguard Airweight.   It was small and light enough to double as a carry gun if it had to, no matter what the weather (Bill lived most of his life in Louisiana and Texas , and appreciated concealed carry needs in hot and humid climates).   It offered little leverage to a close-range assailant trying to take your gun.   The Bodyguard, with its factory-shrouded hammer, was snag-free on the draw as it came from the box so you didn’t have to slice off the spur of the hammer as he had done on his personal Chiefs Airweight.

But, in the book, Bill made a telling point.   He said he wished Smith & Wesson would make that same little super-light revolver in .22 Magnum caliber.   It wouldn’t have the nasty kick if the hotter .38 loads in an Airweight and he was satisfied with the caliber effectiveness in flesh.   When I asked him about the .22 Magnum, I believe the term he used to describe it’s power was “wicked.”   This was a man who saw many bullets go through a lot of flesh.   When Bill Jordan talked, believe me, I listened.  

Smith & Wesson never did make exactly that gun.   The Kit Gun was indeed produced in .22 Magnum, both chrome-moly blue steel and stainless.   It was indeed made with two-inch barrels.   However, finding a Smith & Wesson.22/32 Kit gun that has both the .22 Magnum chambering and the two-inch barrel will be a tough job indeed.   Though it may have been chambered experimentally for the WMR cartridge at the factory, Smith & Wesson’s Airweight Kit Gun was made only in .22 Long Rifle to my knowledge, and never in the distinctly more powerful .22 Magnum that Jordan expressly said was what he wanted.  

Smith & Wesson never made Bill Jordan’s “dream backup gun.”   But Taurus just introduced it.   And theirin lies a story.  

The Revolver

When Taurus announced that they were producing their Ultra-Lite in a two inch barrel configuration with an eight-shot cylinder, I flashed instantly to Bill Jordan.   I knew I had to have one.   I think of him when I shoot my Combat Magnum, and I thought of him when I shot this gun.   Bill was a mentor for me and for countless other cops and police firearms instructors.   He wrote the foreword for my first book, Fundamentals of Modern Police Impact Weapons , and when he stopped publishing his own books, No Second Place Winner and Mostly Hunting, he paid me the huge compliment of picking my company to take over publishing those two titles.

It was with pleasure that I took this little gun out of the box.   I was pleased with the finish, a well-executed deep blue.   The rubbery grips came back from the frame more than they needed to, since a .22 Magnum doesn’t have any recoil to cushion, but I liked the feel.   These grips backed the web of the hand away from the rear of the small frame enough to let the index finger get to exactly the right point on the trigger for maximum control, to wit, the surface of the distal joint.   This is precisely the spot where double-action shooting wizard Jordan recommended the trigger finger make contact, and everything I’ve learned in the years since has proven him absolutely correct.  

The gun has adjustable sights like the 94 in .22 Long Rifle, which in turn is Taurus’ homage to the Smith & Wesson Kit Gun.   The high rise front sight is steeply ramped with a   bright red plastic insert complemented by a white-outlined rear notch in the rear sight.  

The gun sports the hammer-mounted trigger lock that Taurus revolvers have come with for several years, and there are two handy keys to operate it that come in the factory box.   I personally don’t need this feature, so I don’t use it, but I don’t see any way it can accidentally “lock on” by itself and therefore have no problem with it.  

The cylinder latch has been streamlined in a manner not unlike that of Smith & Wesson revolvers in recent years.   There is a fully shrouded ejector rod.   Lacking the front-lug lockup at the end of the ejector rod that has characterized earlier .32-frame .22s by Taurus and S&W alike, it has a spring-loaded ball bearing on the top of the cylinder yoke that locks into a corresponding point on the frame.   Master revolversmiths have suggested for years that this is stronger than the farther forward lockup of the older style guns.

It looked great.   But the question was, how would it shoot?   On a gorgeous autumn day, we took it to the Pioneer Sportsman range in Dunbarton , New Hampshire to find out.

Four Into Eight

.22 Magnum is not the most popular of cartridges.   I was able to locate three different loads at the nearest gunshop, two CCI and one Federal, and I found an ancient box of Western in my garage.   These were the four different loads I had available to stuff into the eight chambers of the new Taurus.  

For accuracy testing, each was fired the way I figured a hunter would shoot at a small animal, single-action with the hammer cocked for each shot.   I braced the gun on the bench two-handed in a kneeling position and fired five shots with each load.   The groups were measured once for all five, to determine how close one could hit if he could take a kneeling braced position.   The groups were then measured again for the best three.   I’ve been able to prove over the years that if the sights were right on with every shot, this meaurement will tend to factor out human error to the point where the “best three” measurement comes extremely close to what all five would have done out of a machine rest.   This delivers an accurate portrayal of the gun’s inherent mechanical accuracy.

CCI Maxi-Mag proved the most accurate.   These flat-nosed, solid projectiles punched five holes measuring 2.05 inches center to center.   The best three measurement was a 1.1 inches.   This was literally match grade accuracy!

The same company’s TNT round with a very aggressively shaped hollow tip opened up to three inches with the best three shots going into a 2.85-inch cluster.   Federal 30-grain hollowpoints delivering a 1.35-inch group that included a tight double hit.

That, brothers and sisters, is consistency.   Three-inch groups on the nose for three out of four different types of ammo, and the fourth doing even better than that, just a tad over two inches, is consistent shooting with any firearm, and truly impressive with a snubnose revolver.

Nitpickin’

I could only find two beefs with this slick little gun.   The double-action trigger pull was not at all what I’vecome to expect from small frame Taurus revolvers.   It was heavy and hitched into stages.   Dennis Luosey, a seasoned firearms instructor and inveterate revolver man who shot this gun, described it as a “tow truck trigger pull.”   Sue Pinard shot it, and while she liked some of the gun’s other attributes, was turned off by the DA trigger stroke.

The bright red plastic front sight insert may not have been the best of all possible ideas.   I like the plain black sights on my Taurus 94 in .22 Long Rifle much better.   I had to really work to get a good sight picture at 25 yards, even though I was firing from under a canopy and had a reasonably good silhouette of the gunsights.  

I shot this gun on a 50-shot course of fire designed for five-shot snubbies, which is approved by my state’s Police Standards and Training Council.   Being unaware of any speedloader for an eight-shot .22 Magnum, I started each stage with the gun loaded with eight and reloaded as necessary from the box at my feet or from a pocket containing loose rounds.   True, this is slower than using a speedloader, but with the eight-shot Taurus I was able to reload only once for a 15-shot stage instead of twice as would have been necessary with a .38.   ON the seven-yard line, with ten shots required in 25 seconds, I had only to eject the first eight spent casings, insert two more cartridges, and line up the cylinder before I closed it.   Making the time was no trick.

The first two stages are one-hand only with each hand at four yards.   My fifth shot weak-handed at four yards.   My fifth shot weak-handed drifted right, into the “one point down” zone of the IPSC target.   That lumpy trigger pull was the culprit.   I decided then and there to give up my usual straight-through style of double-action shooting and “stage” the gun with a two-step pull.   With the distal joint of my index finger centered on the trigger, I would quickly roll the trigger back until my fingertip touched the frame at the rear of the triggerguard.   Then I would slow down just a little and continue the second stage of the pull, cushioned with the ginger on the frame, until the hammer fell.   It was slower, but distinctly more accurate, and the groups improved.

No more points were dropped in the next 25 shots ant 7 and 10 yards.   However, during the 15-yard shooting, I found myself dropping four more shots, all drifting to the left and costing me one point apiece.   Without the canopy to shade the sights, that bright red front insert turned into a glaring blob.   Dennis had noticed the same thing.   The final score was 245 out of 250 possible points.

That qualifies, of course; it’s about 98%.   But the last Taurus snubbie I had shot over this course had given me 100% . It was a .38 Special CIA “hammerless” with full power loads, and I had fired it in dim light on a bitterly cold night.   When a .22 in broad daylight in beautiful weather gives you a lower score than an identically sized and stocked .38 by the same maker in frozen darkness, it just doesn’t figure.

That double-action pull definitely left something to be desired.   My CIA, my old Taurus Model 85 .38 Special, and my old 94 in .22 Long Rifle all came out of the “box from Brazil” with much nice double-action trigger pulls than the .22 Magnum tested here.   They also had sights I could see.

If I keep this gun, and there’s an excellent chance I will, I’ll do two things to it first.   First, I’ll carve that red plastic insert right out of there and just use the metal silhouette of the front sight. Second, I’ll either send it back to the factory to make the DA pull lighter (the folks at Taurus do a great job of taking care of their customers), or I’ll send it to Jack Weigand who does one great action job on this brand of revolver.

Perspectives

Don’t let the nitpicking make it sound as if I’m less happy with this gun than I am.   I like the accuracy and I love the concept.   On my first African hunt, I saw a definite need for something like a two-inch S&W Kit Gun to humanely head-shoot downed animals that were still sentient, at once putting them out of their misery and preserving the skull for taxidermist mounting.   There are numerous cases of large animals so toughly constructed that .22 Long Rifle bullets won’t punch through their massive skulls. At a slaughterhouse where I’ve tested many different rounds, they routinely use .22 Long Rifle bullets in the brain to kill big hogs and steers, but they keep a .22 Magnum on hand for the biggest porkers and beef critters.   This tells you something.

In his authoritative text Cartridges of the World , expert Frank C. Barnes said of the .22 Magnum, “It is a very effective 125-yard varmint or small-game cartridge, although overly destructive of animals intended for the pot.”   As a general rule, anything that is “overly destructive” of meat is probably a good thing to have in your gun when you have to shoot something that is made out of meat, which wants to make “meat” out of you or your loved ones.

I haven’t run across that many .22 Magnum shootings in my career.   It’s not that popular a cartridge and therefore doesn’t get used very often in shootouts.   However, I do recall two cases in which it was used, both times out of miniature revolvers with two-inch or even shorter barrels.   In both cases, the result was an instant one-shot stop after a single round to the chest, and both incidents proved quickly fatal.   Hmm…maybe Bill Jordan was onto something with that “wicked” stopping power comment.  

I carried this gun for a while as a backup in my left side trouser pocket, in the state-of-the-art Safariland pocket holster designed three years ago by Bill Rogers.   If I were going to keep it there, I would retrofit the little Taurus with “secret service”stocks from Eagle Grips.   Resembling the famous, expensive, and hard-to-come-by original Boot Grips by Craig Spegel, these reduce the profile of the gun and allow a slightly faster, slicker draw, in my experience.

The recoil of the .22 Magnum is negligible, though the report is surprisingly loud out of a two-inch barrel.   There are eight shots instead of six.   At close range, this Taurus delivers the potential of the “brain shot” that conventional wisdom says should be “Plan A” for any defensive firearm firing a bullet of small bore diameter.   At seven yards, aiming two-handed at the bottom edgeof the head box on an IPSC target, where the brain stem would be, even the lumpy double-action pull of the test gun delivered eight shots into a 2.05 inch-group centered at point-of-aim.   All would have hit home.   None was farther than 1.05 inches from the exact point where it was aimed.  

Would Bill Jordan have sent this gun in for an action job if it had come along in time for him to check it out?   No doubt about it.   Truth be told, Bill had the actions made slicker even on the slickest Smith & Wessons.   He was a perfectionist.  

I wish Bill was still alive to try this gun.   I’d bet you even money that when he was done with it, he would drawl, “It’d do to ride the river with.”