.41 Remington Magnum

The .41 Remington Magnum was Remington’s 1964 answer to a problem three well-known handgunners had been arguing over: the .357 Magnum’s law-enforcement loads were, in their view, too light to be a reliable stopper, while the .44 Magnum’s recoil was more than most officers could shoot well under pressure. Elmer Keith, Bill Jordan and Skeeter Skelton pushed Remington and Smith & Wesson toward a round in between the two, built on a lengthened .41-calibre rimmed straight case loaded to a substantially lower pressure than the .44 Magnum.

It never became the police cartridge its designers hoped for — heavy-for-caliber police loads still produced more recoil than many departments wanted, and by the time factory ammunition settled into a milder standard loading, most agencies had already moved toward semi-automatic pistols rather than adopting a new revolver cartridge at all. It has instead persisted as a hunting and handgun-hunting round, loaded from a fairly mild 170-grain jacketed hollow-point up to substantially heavier 240-and-265-grain loads intended for larger game.

Every dimension in this entry comes from the C.I.P. datasheet for “41 Rem. Mag.”, and all four factory loads carry a velocity measured from a stated 6.5-inch test barrel by Ballistics by the Inch, an independent chronograph-testing site cited directly in Wikipedia’s own infobox rather than relayed through it — each velocity reproduces its load’s published energy figure through ½mv² to within a tenth of a percent. No ballistic coefficient is published for any of the four loads, so no trajectory beyond muzzle figures can be computed for this cartridge.