If you hail from cowboy blood, no gun really feels comfortable in your hand unless it is a single action revolver. This new Badboy from Cimarron brings a modern and very practical cartridge into a gun that would be a preference for many.

The 10mm is a light, fast, and hard hitting caliber developed for the FBI in the 90s. They only adopted it only briefly though, because it is monster. In the Smith & Wesson alloy frame semi-autos of the day, the 10mm made followup shots difficult, and slight shooters couldn’t really mange it at all.

Defensively, the 10mm tends to over-penetrate, regardless of the load, and the whole expedition actually gave rise to the .40 S&W caliber, which is a slightly shorter version of the same cartridge. Eventually the FBI went back to 9mm regardless, despite the disappointment that it had been in the past.

For handgun hunting the 10mm rocks. It is much more manageable than a .44 Mag, and it shoots flatter at longer distances, so the required holdover is less as targets get further away.

Out on a ranch, where a coyote opportunity may be very brief, and where you just don’t need the extra power of a .44 Mag for even large hogs, a 10mm is kind of just perfect.

In a revolver the 10mm can be a problem though, because it has a rimless case, meaning that it does not have a protruding edge at the back. In a magazine, you don’t want those edges because they can stack up on each other. Bun in a revolver, those edges are handy, because they hold the cartridge at the back of the cylinder.

For rimless cases, in a double action revolver, where the cylinder swings out, generally you have to use “moon clips” to hold the cartridges at the back, or the gun has to have some kind of built in retention system.

In a single action, where the cylinder stays in the gun, and you load and extract through a loading gate, none of this is a concern. You just drop the 10mm cartridges in as you would a .44 Mag, .38 Special, or any other rimmed case.

The MSRP on the Cimarron’s 10mm Bad Boy is $726.05 (I don’t know if that extra 5c is a wooden nickel or not), On GunsAmerica the existing .44 Mag Bad Boys are just north of $600.