.44 Remington Magnum, also known as .44 Magnum or 10.9x33mmR, is a rimmed, large-bore cartridge originally designed for revolvers and quickly adopted for carbines and rifles. Despite the “.44” designation, guns chambered for the .44 Magnum round, and its parent, the .44 Special, use 0.429 in (10.9 mm) diameter bullets.

The .44 Magnum is based on the .44 Special case but lengthened and loaded to higher pressures for greater velocity and energy.

Famously called “the most powerful handgun [cartridge] in the world” by Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry, the .44 Magnum has since been eclipsed in power by the .454 Casull, .460 S&W Magnum,

.480 Ruger, .50 Action Express, and .500 S&W Magnum; nevertheless, due in part to more manageable recoil it has remained one of the most popular commercial large-bore magnum cartridges.
Contents

1 Origin
2 Technical specifications
2.1 Dual-purpose use
2.2 Suitable game
2.3 Range
3 In popular culture
4 See also
5 References
6 External links

Origin

The .44 Magnum cartridge was the end result of years of tuned handloading of the .44 Special. The .44 Special, and other large-bore handgun cartridges, were being loaded with heavy bullets, push at higher than normal velocities for better hunting performance.

One of these hand-loaders was Elmer Keith, a writer and outdoorsman of the 20th century.
A high-speed photograph of a .44 Magnum revolver taken using an air-gap flash, clearly showing the bullet

Keith settled on the .44 Special cartridge as the basis for his experimentation, rather than the larger .45 Colt.

At the time, the selection of .44 caliber projectiles for hand-loaders was more varied, and the .44 Special’s brass was thicker and stronger than the dated

.45 Colt case. Also, the .44 Special case was smaller in diameter than the .45 Colt case. In revolvers of the same cylinder size, this meant that the .44 caliber revolvers had thicker, and thus stronger, cylinder walls than the .45. This allows higher pressures to be use with less risk of a burst cylinder.

Keith encouraged Smith & Wesson and Remington to produce a commercial version of this new high-pressure loading, and revolvers chambered for it.

Smith & Wesson’s first .44 Magnum revolver, the precursor to the Model 29, was built on December 15, 1955, and the gun was announced to the public on January 19,

1956 for a price of US$140 ($1,330 in 2020 dollars) Julian Hatcher (technical editor of American Rifleman) and Keith received two of the first production models. Hatcher’s review of the new Smith & Wesson revolver and the .44 Magnum cartridge appeared in the March 1956 issue of the magazine.

Smith & Wesson produced 3,100 of these revolvers in 1956.

By the summer of 1956, Sturm, Ruger became aware of this project and began work on a single action Blackhawk revolver for the new .44 Magnum cartridge.

There is a popular rumor that states a Ruger employee found a cartridge case marked “.44 Remington Magnum” and took it to Bill Ruger, while another says a Remington employee provided Ruger with early samples of the ammunition. Ruger began shipping their new revolver in late November 1956.

The .44 Magnum case is slightly longer than the .44 Special case, not to make more room for propellant, but to prevent the far higher pressure cartridge from being chambered in older, weaker .44 Special firearms, thus preventing injuries and possible deaths.