writwing said:
Looking to buy a Henry lever action and would like to get the best all around caliber for home defense, emergency hunting etc. Considering the 357, 44 or 45 since I have revolvers in each caliber already.
BTW I do not hunt now.
Most of my "serious" revolver-caliber shooting involves the 45LC cartridge. That is because my personal experience has shown it to be quite accurate, easy to manage, and exhibit more stopping power than it's paper-ballistics suggest, even when loaded to "standard-level" pressures. About the only problem with that that I can foresee for non-reloaders would be having to rely solely on store bought ammo, which is both expensive and somewhat hard to find.
Getting past the above, I've also owned lever-guns in 357 and 44 Mag.
I found the 357 and my carbine's 20" barrel to be a wonderfull combination that actualy approached 30-30 ballistics, but in the end, I kept the 45LC because of two reasons; (1)I was already heavily-invested in .45 cal componants and (2)my personal goal was to have a "go to" rifle and revolver that used interchangable ammo. Not saying that the 357 won't "do" in a revolver because we all know that it certainly will. My personal problem there is that I find a 357 revolver too obnoxious to enjoy shooting on a regular basis and even moreso when using ammo which was developed to ring the most out of my carbine's longer barrel.
My one and only experience with a 44Mag carbine was with one of the early Marlin-'94 rifles. The thing kicked like a mule, was plagued with feeding issues and wasn't nearly as accurate as the Ruger SBH that I also owned at the time. To put that into perspective, a factory 240/44Mag cartridge has about the same recoil energy as a 150/30-06 cartridge. I didn't find that to be much fun out of a skinny, straight-stocked, light weight lever gun, and didn't see much sense in having a long arm which wasn't as accurate as my sidearm.
As far as the uses you plan to put your choice to, either of the three will do. Thing is though, bear in mind that hunting is more about feild craft and shot placement than which rifle you end up picking. That and stopped is stopped and dead is dead. After that, anything else is overkill. Even the "lowly" SAMMI-spec 45LC will shoot clean-through an average sized deer, and will stop most adversary's with a single good hit, so with that in mind, the question becomes just where the line lies between "enough" and "too much" for the circumstances at hand. Maybe you have a need for the biggest-boomer cartridge that you can find, maybe not....I dunno.
Them's my thoughts on the matter. Hope something helped.
DGW
