.500 S&W Magnum
high-powered revolver caliber
The .500 S&W Magnum or 12.7×41mmSR is a .50 caliber semi-rimmed revolver cartridge developed by Cor-Bon in partnership with the Smith & Wesson "X-Gun" engineering team for use in the Smith & Wesson Model 500 X-frame revolver and introduced in February 2003 at the SHOT Show. It was intended to be the most powerful handgun cartridge to date, with the capacity to harvest all North American game species. It achieved that distinction and remained the most powerful handgun cartridge decades later.
Cartridge history
Smith & Wesson had been at the forefront of the development of powerful handgun cartridges such as the .357 S&W Magnum and the .44 Remington Magnum. However, in 1960, the company's .44 Magnum, which it had developed in partnership with Remington, was eclipsed by the .454 Casull.
In 1971, Smith & Wesson experienced a dramatic surge in orders for their Model 29 revolver in the .44 Magnum chambering. As S&W production was not able to keep up with demand, available Model 29 revolvers were being sold for two to three times the suggested retail price. This surge in interest was largely due to the 1971 film Dirty Harry, where the Model 29 revolver was billed as the most powerful revolver (The .454 Casull, designed in 1955, was not in commercial production until 1997). With the introduction of the .500 S&W Magnum and the Model 500 revolver, Smith & Wesson recaptured the title of "most powerful handgun", which once again proved beneficial for the company's sales.
The .500 Smith & Wesson Magnum was designed from the outset to be the most powerful production handgun cartridge.
“.500 S&W Magnum” enters the record as high-powered revolver caliber. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Magnum, high-powered and revolver can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “.500 S&W Magnum” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.