Handgunning: The Recoil Effect

By Patrick Sweeney

You’ve heard the adage, “You must suffer for your art,” right? Well, sometimes you must suffer for knowledge. This column began when G&A editor Eric R. Poole read a long-ago Guns & Ammo column by Col. Jeff Cooper. My predecessor commented on the marking on some new revolvers. “Not for use with bullets less than 120 grains,” he wrote. The reason? Bullet pull. Lightweight revolvers can have the last bullet in a cylinder “grow” in length, as the bullet is pulled more and more out of the case for each preceding shot.

The cause is simple: inertia. Newton’s Third Law states: “For every action, there will be an opposite and equal reaction.” When we fire a handgun, that reaction is felt recoil. When the bullet moves forward, from the moment it starts moving, it generates recoil.

If that’s the case, then why doesn’t a heavy handgun cause bullet pull the same as a light one? Velocity of the recoil. With a heavy firearm, we feel recoil as momentum. That is, mass times speed. That happens because we are much heavier than the object slamming into us, and we’re flexible. The object being accelerated is heavier than a bullet and still much lighter …Read the Rest

Source:: Guns and Ammo