.32-20 Winchester

Winchester introduced the .32-20 in 1882 for its Model 1873 lever-action rifle, one of a family of bottlenecked rimmed cartridges — the .38-40 and .44-40 among them — built to let a single rifle and a single revolver share the same ammunition. It necks a rimmed, bottlenecked case down to a .312-inch bullet, small enough to keep recoil light while still reaching out to rifle distances well beyond what a straight-walled revolver round of the same era could manage.

That dual-use design was the round’s real appeal: a rancher or lawman could carry one box of cartridges for both a rifle and a sidearm, at a time when that mattered more than either gun being at its individual best. Colt, Smith & Wesson and other makers chambered revolvers for it specifically so it could pair with a Winchester lever rifle. Black powder loads gave way to smokeless ones early in the twentieth century, and the cartridge has stayed in production since, now mostly for cowboy action shooting and for the older rifles and revolvers still chambered for it.

Case, bullet and pressure figures here are transcribed from the current C.I.P. datasheet and are verified. Remington’s own product page for its 100-grain lead round-nose load states a muzzle velocity but no test barrel length, so that figure cannot be recorded as a measurement; the page does, however, publish a G1 ballistic coefficient directly, which is recorded here. No other manufacturer’s page for this cartridge was found to state a test barrel length either — it is a legacy chambering that has mostly left current manufacturers’ catalogues, and this entry reflects that gap rather than filling it with an unsourced number.