{"id":397037,"date":"2023-05-12T17:00:33","date_gmt":"2023-05-12T22:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gunmagwarehouse.com\/blog\/?p=397037"},"modified":"2025-08-04T13:34:02","modified_gmt":"2025-08-04T18:34:02","slug":"that-classic-old-fbi-38-special-load","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gunmagwarehouse.com\/blog\/that-classic-old-fbi-38-special-load\/","title":{"rendered":"That Classic Old FBI .38 Special Load"},"content":{"rendered":"

The cartridge that brought the .38 Special \u201cup off its knees.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Let\u2019s go back in time to late third-quarter 20th<\/sup> Century America. The .38 Special is still the most common police service handgun cartridge in America, and <\/em>probably the most popular for armed citizens as well. Its standard loading is a 158-grain lead round-nose bullet which tends to slip through flesh, creating narrow, puckered ice-pick-like wounds that often go all the way through to endanger unseen bystanders behind the perpetrator. Cops come to call it \u201cthe widow-maker\u201d because you can pump six of them into the attacker and he\u2019ll still make your wife a widow before he dies, and in New York, a police sergeant dies exactly that way. Police unions from NYPD to LAPD demand better ammo. Their demands go largely unheard.<\/p>\n

A very few agencies issue the 200-grain blunt-nosed \u201cSuper Police\u201d load, but it\u2019s even slower and develops a reputation for bouncing off car windshields. Lee Jurras debuts light, fast semi-jacketed hollow point .38 Special loads that do indeed expand, but don\u2019t always penetrate deeply enough, though they\u2019re a definite improvement. Some departments go with \u201cthe Keith bullet,\u201d a sharp-shouldered but non-expanding semi-wadcutter. Tests indicate it will work better. NYPD tries it, but their lead firearms instructor will tell me in the late 1970s that it didn\u2019t work a bit better in the field than the round-nose lead.<\/p>\n

And then\u2026in the early 1970s, Winchester introduces an all-lead semi-wadcutter hollow point <\/em>bullet, at a stated +P velocity of close to 900 feet per second.  Shooters simply call it \u201c158-grain LSWCHP +P\u201d: 158 grains of lead, semi-wadcutter shape, with hollow point and added power\/added powder.<\/p>\n

And things change.<\/p>\n

\u201cSuccess Has Many Fathers\u201d<\/h2>\n

It may have been George Washington who first said that success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan. The new .38 Special round was indeed a success, and it had many with a legitimate claim to its parentage.<\/p>\n

The product code for the new Winchester round included the letters SPD, which we are told stood for \u201cSt. Louis Police Department.\u201d Allen Jones at the Dallas PD ballistics lab tested this round, found it good, and gave his input to Winchester. When DPD adopted it, complaints about \u201c.38 Special stopping power\u201d tapered off.  Curiously, though, only the locals there called it the \u201cSt. Louis Load.\u201d  The then-Metro-Dade (now Miami-Dade) county police adopted it, as did the City of Miami Police, and in the Southeast, it became known as the \u201cMetro Load.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chicago was then the second largest city in the nation, hence its \u201cSecond City\u201d nickname, and its police department adopted the round. It became known throughout the Midwest as \u201cthe Chicago Load.\u201d<\/p>\n

Canada\u2019s national police force, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, adopted it, most if not all of the time specifying that it be loaded even hotter, to a thousand feet per second. There, of course, it became known as \u201cthe RCMP Load.\u201d<\/p>\n

But, early on, the USA\u2019s most prestigious law enforcement agency adopted it too, and that gave it the most common nickname we heard then and now: \u201cthe FBI Load.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Three
Winchester, Remington, and Federal FBI loads.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Feedback From the Field<\/h2>\n

How well did the FBI load work in the field? I had just started out as a police firearms instructor and a gun writer when, circa 1972, I got to sit down with a Winchester rep who gave me some of the ammo and told me who to talk to in the agencies which were using it. The result was one of my first articles in a gun magazine.<\/p>\n

Until then, I had been loading my own .38 Specials with either hot handloads, Norma 100-grain hollow points, or the hard-to-find Super Vel\u2026but after talking with the police instructors who monitored shootings on departments that had a lot of them, I switched to 158-grain LSWCHP +P and stayed with it for a very long time.<\/p>\n

\"A
Ed Mireles killed the gunmen in the infamous FBI firefight with Federal FBI loads from his 4\u201d barrel S&W 686.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

FBI:<\/strong> Complaints about stopping power from the field pretty much disappeared. The duty guns included some 4\u201d revolvers; the 3\u201d barrel ones the Bureau started issuing around then; and 2\u201d barrels then authorized for off-duty and backup, and sometimes carried \u201con the job\u201d by Special Agents. In April of 1986, a horrendous shootout occurred in Miami that left two agents dead, three crippled for life, and a couple more wounded but recovering. A big deal was made about a 115-grain Winchester Silvertip 9mm round fired by a member of the local FBI SWAT team mortally wounding the primary cop-killer but not penetrating deep enough to put him down in time\u2026but the killer and his partner were slain by FBI Agent Ed Mireles with 158 grain .38 Special FBI loads from his privately-owned, Bureau-approved 4\u201d S&W 686 revolver.<\/p>\n

\"Ed
Ed Mireles killed the gunmen in the infamous FBI firefight with Federal FBI loads from his 4\u201d barrel S&W 686.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Chicago:<\/strong> No complaints with good hits. St. Louis:<\/strong> the same. Dade County and Miami PD:<\/strong> same. Dallas:<\/strong> same.  RCMP:<\/strong> whether the issue S&W Model 10 was the 5\u201d barrel version issued to uniformed personnel or the 2\u201d issued to plainclothes investigators: no complaints.<\/p>\n

Ohio:<\/strong> the late Bill Groce was head of firearms training then at OPOTA, the Ohio Peace Officer Training Academy. He researched the FBI load and recommended it to all departments using .38 Special in the state. Bill was a Jeff Cooper graduate and a big fan of the 1911 .45 auto for police work, but he told me that the .38 Special FBI load was putting bad guys down just as fast as .45 hardball, which he hadn\u2019t found to be the case with earlier .38 Special ammunition. That comparison was a refrain I heard again and again.<\/p>\n

NYPD:<\/strong> This was the last of the giant departments to go hollow point, in 1999. NYPD had 9mms by then but still lots of .38s among their 30,000-plus sworn officers. They started by issuing the soft lead 158-grain nylon-jacketed Nyclad hollow points and were pleased with their performance. Those were only replaced by the \u201cNYPD Load\u201d .38 Special, the 135 grain Speer Gold Dot designed expressly to expand out of 2\u201d barrels, and which worked remarkably well out of the few 4\u201d service revolvers that were still on the street before the late \u201ctwenty-teens\u201d when the department went 100% 9mm.<\/p>\n

.38 Special \u2014 Brand Comparisons<\/h2>\n

Winchester had made its 158-grain all-lead hollow points relatively hard, perhaps to reduce leading in the barrel. Over the years it became apparent to me that when an FBI load failed to expand in flesh, it was usually one of that brand. Remington made their 158-grain LSWCHP+P bullet softer, and it expanded the most. In the early 1990s when I taught a class at the DEA Academy at Quantico, I was told their testing had convinced them to specifically order the Remington rounds for the many drug enforcement agents carrying snub .38s for duty, backup, or undercover at the time due to its distinctly better expansion. The Federal, as used by Mireles in Miami on that terrible day, was in between. Speer produced some 158-grain LSWCHP +P, but it was not widely distributed and I never did find any shootings with it.<\/p>\n

Fast forward to 2023. Winchester still lists the 158-grain LSWCHP +P .38 Special on their website. I can\u2019t find it on the Federal website at this writing, but Remington has it in their High Terminal Performance (HTP) line. There are certainly other good .38 Special loads today \u2014 I\u2019m partial to the street-proven Speer Gold Dot 135 grain +P \u2014 and an increasing number of experts are comfortable with the mild 148-grain Mid-Range wadcutter target load for personal defense, especially in lightweight \u201csnubbies.\u201d  That said, I keep a four-figure round count of Remington FBI loads on hand, simply because more than half a century in the field shows it worked well for its intended purpose\u2026a success which, indeed, had many fathers.<\/p>\n

\"2
The FBI Load worked very well out of 4\u201d revolvers, and adequately even from 2\u201d guns \u201con the street.\u201d<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\t
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