I can remember when, long ago, I sat in Bill Ruger’s palatial house in Croydon, New Hampshire, asking him why he didn’t bring his company into the market for small concealment guns. “Smith & Wesson, Colt and Charter Arms have that niche pretty well locked up, Massad,” he answered in the gruff but friendly voice you had to be there to hear. “Colt” you ask? Yeah, that conversation was a long time ago.

I wasn’t the only one who told him he was missing a bet. That’s why he came out with his small-frame concealment revolver, the SP101. Bill has been gone for a long time. The Ruger family no longer runs the company and within the past year Sturm, Ruger & Co. has come into the concealed carry handgun market with an obvious corporate intention of making up for lost time.

First, they introduced an established revolver in a new caliber, the SP101 chambered for ATK’s new .327 Federal Magnum cartridge. Then, hitting the 2008 SHOT Show a little like Godzilla hitting Tokyo, came the LCP — a tiny, sub-10-ounce .380 ACP autoloader whose acronymized name stands for Lightweight Compact Pistol. By the time the show closed, Ruger had taken orders for 87,000 LCPs, such a figure is, to the best of my knowledge, a record in non-military firearms. Since the little one made the biggest splash, by far, we’ll start there.

Picture the little Kel-Tec P3AT pistol, wafer-thin and double action only, holding six .380 rounds in its magazine and a seventh in the chamber. Picture it an ounce and a fraction heavier, with a more rugged extractor and “smoother action” in every respect. Its slide lock lever doesn’t lock open at the last shot, but can be locked open when the rangemaster commands, “Remove your magazine and lock your slide open” during a training session, a CCW qualification shoot, or just a day at the public range. Picture it costing $330 retail. Voila: you have visualized the Ruger LCP.

I’ve been sent two of these guns to test. We tried gun No. 1 off the 25-yard benchrest and found we couldn’t reliably keep five shots in 4" from there. The only group we achieved with “minimum service pistol accuracy standard” was just under the 4", and fired by Steve Sager, an IDPA Master shooter in SSP (Stock Service Pistol) category. He did it with Federal Classic 90-grain jacketed hollowpoint .380 ACP. Two other IDPA SSP Masters on the test team could not break the 4" at 25 yards standard at the same 25-yard line off the same bench.

The second LCP was distinctly nicer in the accuracy department. Like the first, it shot somewhat low, but it put five rounds of Remington Golden Sabre 102-grain .380 brass JHP into 3.15" at 25 yards, the best three in 1.15". That makes me feel a lot more warm and fuzzy. At three yards, it put five shots into a silhouette’s head in 1-1/4", rapid fire.

We are talking about a pistol roughly the size of a Raven Arms .25 automatic, except it is much better made and fires a dramatically more powerful cartridge. Now, the .380 ACP is also known as the 9mm Corto or 9mm Short, and Short is the operative term here. The .380 seems to be the Bright Line, if you’ll forgive a little lawyer-ese, distinguishing “acceptable” from “non-acceptable” as the generally recognized power level of self-defense handguns. Only thing is, it’s a broad Bright Line, and some experts call the .380 just under the acceptable power level, while some others call it barely acceptable as a minimum.

Better Than Finger Nails

Whichever side of the Bright Line you stand on, you have to realize this is a close call. This issue ain’t an LCP thing or a Ruger thing or a Kel-Tec thing. It’s a “.380 thing.” Anything straddling the “minimum acceptable” line starts getting awfully fuzzy and debatable, which is why no police department in the USA issues a .380 automatic for uniform patrol duty.

That said, there are way fewer than even 1 million cops protecting way more than 300 million American citizens, and when those citizens need to protect themselves, they often have to do it with a gun so small as to be undetectable when carried concealed in touchy-feely environments. This is the market for which the Ruger LCP .380 is intended.

Please forgive me for saying this, but the reader has a right to know where I’m is coming from. I’m the guy who coined the phrase, “Friends don’t let friends carry mouse guns.” I still stand by that. I would hate to have to respond to a “mall shooting” or get involved in a gunfight across a parking lot with nothing but an LCP in my hand. There are many other Rugers — the P345 .45 automatic I most often carry on police patrol, the .357 Magnum SP101 I often carry to back up the P345 at work, or the GP100 .357 Magnum I’ve used to win more than one IDPA Stock Service Revolver title — I’d rather have in my hand in such a moment.

However, “friends don’t let friends carry mouse guns” has to be balanced against the very real fact “some people can’t carry .357 Magnums or .45 automatics like gunwriters and cops do, and something is better than nothing!”

There is a reason why those thousands of firearms retailers, each with a finger on the pulse of their local armed citizen marketplace, placed orders for 87,000 Ruger LCPs within the first week of the announcement. And even those of us who’d rather have a big-bore or a Magnum or a high-cap, high-tech autoloader at hand, know other people for whom this is their reality. And, what the heck, even I might choose an LCP for a second gun … or for a third.

There was a time when .32 revolvers were standard for metropolitan police, with a revolver in .32 S&W Long being adopted as standard by such departments as NYPD and Boston PD. However, that was something like a 100-years ago. Today, .32 Long ballistics (98-grain lead roundnose bullet, 705 feet per second, 108 foot-pounds of energy) are considered pathetically feeble.

In 1983, Federal Cartridge joined with Harrington & Richardson to bring out the .32 H&R Magnum. This more than doubled the old .32’s power level, with an 85-grain JHP bullet at 1,100 fps, generating 230 ft-lbs of muzzle energy. But when less than half adequate was where the .32 Long started, doubling that with the .32 Mag still wasn’t quite enough. Some experts liked it, and some recoil-sensitive folks still pack .32 Mags, but more was needed.

Now comes the .327 Magnum, an extended and honked-up .32 Magnum, this time a collaboration between Ruger and Federal Cartridge. The first revolver for it, the splendid SP101 with 3.16" barrel, carries six rounds in the cylinder. Federal’s parent company, ATK, offers three rounds for it: a Speer Gold Dot 115-grain at 1,300 fps, an American Eagle 100-grain softpoint at a nominal velocity of 1,400 fps, and an 85-grain JHP Federal Personal Defense load rated for 1, 400 fps and 370 ft-lbs.

Clearly, the .327 is a big step up in the .32 caliber revolver category. They don’t seem to be exaggerating the ballistics. The only one of these new rounds I’ve personally chronographed is the 85-grain JHP. We got an average of 1,467 fps, which comes out to 454 ft-lbs of energy.

The .327 revolvers are in the gun shops. The .327 ammo is harder to find. At this writing, none of the distributors I’ve contacted has any. I found a box of the 100-grain American Eagle, 50 rounds for just under $30, and Federal was able to send me some of the Personal Defense stuff so new, it didn’t have the caliber marked on the box. At this writing, I still haven’t gotten my hands on the most promising .327 load — 115-grain Gold Dot HP.

The test gun, serial No. 573-72729, is the second I’ve had. I rounded out the test with some 98-grain match wadcutter and some 85-grain JHP .32 Magnum. All loads were from Federal. The .327 chambering is made more versatile by its ability to shoot .327 Magnum, .32 Magnum, .32 Long, and — in case you have to shoot a gerbil, I suppose — even .32 S&W.

Accurate

The best group was with the 100-grain American Eagle Magnum load. Five shots went into 2.15", center to center, measured to the nearest .05". Four of those hits were in 1.20", and the best three — probably the best indication of inherent accuracy when the gun is being fired from fallible human hands instead of a machine rest — were in 1" even.

Next best was Federal’s old .32 Magnum load. The five 85-grain JHPs punched a 2.75" group, with the best three in 2.30". With the .327 Magnum 85-grain Federal Personal Defense load, I’d had a 2" group going when one errant shot blew the 5-shot measurement out to 4.90". However, the best three hits were in 1.85".

Finally, I tried some of Federal’s .32 Long 98-grain Match wadcutter. One shot extended the group to 4.40", the other four were in 2.55" and the best three, in 1.45". I was using an old box of wadcutters, and I’m an old shooter. This is normally super-accurate ammo, and my notes from the test of my last .327 showed a fresh box of this ammunition was “best of test” with a 3.35" five-shot cluster. The second .327, the one tested here was more accurate overall than the first. Its grouping ability is pretty darn good for a 3" “belly gun.”

Its double action pull was smooth and consistent, and its single action (used for the accuracy testing above, all at 25 yards) was crisp and clean. Single action pull averaged about 4-1/4 pounds on my Lyman digital scale. There were no malfunctions of any kind.

Between the rubbery “live feel” grips and the 28-ounce unloaded weight, recoil was mild. The .32 Long felt like a loud .22, the .32 Mag was a pussycat, and the .327 85-grain was sort of like a standard .38 Special round, while the 100-grain .327 Magnum felt about like a .38 Special +P carry load from the SP101. The lucky few who’ve fired the 115-grain Gold Dot .327 describe it as a little snappy, but nothing like a .357 Magnum, the SP101’s most popular chambering. I’ve shot +P+ 115-grain 9mm with the same ballistics from a 3" SP101 in 9mm, and it’s not bad at all.

Some are touting the .327 Mag as a hot new defense gun. That may be premature. After all, no human has yet been shot with one to my knowledge. Since my momma didn’t raise me to be a guinea pig, the 5-shot .357 Magnum will remain my preferred flavor of SP101 for now, but I’ll be watching the new cartridge. It does have a lot of promise, and will become more popular when ultra-light 2" pocket revolvers, and slim Single-Six size guns with longer barrels for woodswalking become available. They’ll make sense for small game and all-around light duty “trail” use.

Of the two, the LCP is the big news. In the words of my friend Chris Christian, who writes for one of the gun industry journals, “Small is big in the self-defense market. Ruger has a second shift working overtime at the Prescott plant to satisfy the demand for the LCP.” At $330 retail for the .380 LCP, and $572 for the .327 Magnum SP101, the price is right on both and their value is strong.