Tag Archives: ruger super redhawk

Ruger and Rabbits from Hats…

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You may not remember this, but FN coughed up the 5.7x28mm round in 1990 after nearly a decade of R&D. The Belgian gunmaker had a wrap on the cartridge and the guns– the Five-Seven pistol and P90 PDW– that used it for decades. This made it very niche and, by 2019, was close to falling out of production.

Then swooped in Ruger with their 57 pistol and it became a hit.

Soon, everyone was talking about 5.7 again.

In the past few years since, CMMG, Diamondback, KelTec, PSA, and S&W entered the 5.7 game while Ruger expanded their offerings to include carbines, forcing FN to release an updated Mk3 variant of the Five-Seven pistol. In the same period, ammo makers saw the writing on the wall and started making the rounds in quantity and variants never seen in the caliber, both increasing supply and halving the cost.

Amazing what can happen when someone takes an almost forgotten round and, through the introduction of a new gun, breathes life back into it.

Well, Ruger may be trying to do a repeat with a new chambering for an old revolver. Last week they announced a new variant of the vaunted double-action Ruger Super Redhawk in .22 Hornet.

I did not see this coming, at all

That’s an odd move for a wheel gun that was typically chambered in big hunting grade/counter bear calibers such as .44 Rem Mag and .454 Casull. Heck, Ruger created the .480 Ruger in 2003– then the largest-diameter production revolver cartridge– just for the Super Redhawk.

Further, it is the only new .22 Hornet handgun on the market anywhere. The last was the old bolt-action Savage Arms Striker bench gun that went out of production in 2005.

What’s so special about the .22 Hornet?

Developed by Townsend Whelen a full century ago, the .22 Hornet is not rimfire like the .22 Magnum and .22 LR but is instead a centerfire round that is about a half-inch shorter than a .223/5.56. The longer 35mm case of the .22 Hornet (the .22 Mag has a case length of 26mm) allows it to carry a heavier bullet at a faster speed, typically twice the velocity of a .22 Mag, while generating almost three times the energy downrange. In short, the .22 Hornet is a blistering fast little round (Hornady’s 35-grain VMax load has a released spec of 3,060 feet per second) and is ideal for use by varmint hunters and in survival guns– a use the military had for it for years.

The old M6 Aircrew survival weapon, which was a .22 Hornet over a 410 shotgun

However, today, the .22 Hornet is still around but should be listed as being on life support.

As far as I can tell, the only production guns in the .22 Hornet these days are bolt action rifles: the Savage 25 in several different finishes and barrel lengths, and the Ruger 77/22. Browning-owned Winchester still markets a Japanese-made Model 1885 Low Wall Hunter in the caliber, but production can’t be very brisk, and odds are they just pulling from a batch made years ago that is sitting in a warehouse somewhere.

Keeping these new guns and legacy models fed is likewise slim-picking but not impossible. The round is still in commercial production both in the U.S. by Federal, Hornady, and Winchester, and overseas by PPU and Sellier & Bellot.

Has Ruger been reading the tea leaves on this one and seen an opportunity to pull another rabbit out of the hat, caliber speaking, when it comes to the fading .22 Hornet? We’ll see.

The Super Silent Super Secret Ruger Redhawk Rifle

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Back in the early 1990s, C. Reed Knight Jr.’s Knight’s Armament Co (KAC) of Vero Beach, California responded to a shadowy call from a government agency as yet unnamed to produce a small and short ranged but devastating suppressed rifle. Their answer was a unique weapon based upon a Ruger Super Red Hawk.

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What was it?

The story goes that KAC built the gun on spec to provide a weapon capable of making effective anti-personnel shots at ranges of up to 100-yards while being capable of a rapid follow-up shot. The rub was that it could not eject shell casings (so there would be nothing left behind by the user to pick up before leaving the area presumably). This ruled out semi-autos, bolt, pump, and lever actions. In fact, it left the revolver as the answer. But everyone knows you can’t suppress a revolver, right?

Well, about that.

History of suppressed revolvers

Back in the 1930s, the Soviets took the Nagant M1895 pistol and added a neat and (reportedly) very effective suppressor to the barrel for use by their secret police and special operations kind of people. These guns remained in service into the specifically designed APB (Avtomaticheskij Pistolet Besshumnyj– automatic silenced pistol) was produced in the 1970s to replace it.

Note the gas-sealed rounds

Note the gas-sealed rounds

What made the earlier revolver special was the fact that the inventor, a Belgian by the name of Emil Nagant, designed his wheel gun to push the cylinder forward at the moment before firing, creating a near airtight seal in the chamber. Further, the gun used a unique 7.62×38R cartridge that had a recessed bullet, which completed the gas-seal when the gun fired. Now Emil did this to add some velocity to the underpowered 108-grain bullet– but the Soviets figured out a generation later that it could also work for a suppressed weapon.

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This made the addition of a can to the 19th Century wheel gun an instant assassination and black ops whacker.

In the West, the U.S. made their own suppressed revolver during the Vietnam conflict for the use of tunnel rats who needed an effective but muted gun (for obvious safety reasons– they were underground!) that was short enough to move around the Viet Cong tunnels with that also had a muted muzzle blast.

In 1966, the Army made a half-dozen tunnel rat kits that included a suppressed Smith .38 with downloaded ammunition for use by these underground gladiators. However, they weren’t liked and weren’t really all that silent due to the escaping gas from the cylinder.

A soldier poses with his Tunnel Exploration Kit, consisting of a silenced .38 S&W, special holster and a mouth/teeth bite-switch activated headlamp.

A soldier poses with his Tunnel Exploration Kit, consisting of a silenced .38 S&W, special holster and a mouth/teeth bite-switch activated headlamp. Great trigger D by the way.

Australian combat engineer assisting American forces in Vietnam with tunnel clearing operations Vietnam, Phuoc Tuy Province, 1966. Note S&W Smith Wesson suppressed revolver (AWM P01595.021)

Another attempted solution was the 1969-era Quiet Special Purpose Revolver, a Smith and Wesson Model 29 .44 Magnum that was chambered for a very low power special .410-ish Quiet Special Purpose Round filled with 15 tungsten balls in a plastic sabot. Since the ammunition itself had about as much powder as a 4th of July party popper, the gun was fitted with a short smoothbore barrel and did not need a suppressor. Just 75 were made and, though quickly withdrawn from Army use, were purportedly still utilized by SOG in places that never existed late into the war.

The QSPR snubby .410 and one of its shells

The QSPR snubby .410 and one of its short-range shells

This brings us to the 1990s when again, for an end-user not currently known, KAC moved to make another suppressed revolver and went Ruger.

knights revolver rifle ruger redhawk

Read the rest in my column at Ruger Talk