- November 24, 2024
The Rossi Brawler is a weird gun, but it’s a good kind of weird. Due to a fortuitous quirk in American firearms law, this rifled single-shot .45 Colt pistol will also safely and legally run .410 shotshells. A man-sized, break-open handgun, the Brawler is the very manifestation of ballistic versatility. The applications for such a curious thunderstick are limited solely by your imagination.
Family Heirloom
I have a friend who has in his possession a high-mileage, .58-caliber, 1855 Harper’s Ferry single-shot percussion horse pistol. This massive handgun has been passed down since 1863, when a slave owned by his family killed the Union officer who previously carried it. The uniformed drunkard showed up at the family estate outside Vicksburg during the siege and began making untoward advances toward the fairer members of the clan. The men were all off prosecuting the war. The slave, who was busy digging a flower bed at the time, observed the goings on and spontaneously buried his pickaxe in the back of the man’s head.
While the matron of the family was justifiably mortified, the slave simply disarmed the corpse and buried what was left of him underneath the fresh rose bushes. The man’s mortal remnants remain there undisturbed to this very day. His liberated pistol is now a venerated heirloom.
The 1855 Harper’s Ferry pistol was obsolete at the outset of the War Between the States. Sundry revolvers offered greater firepower and portability. However, there yet remained a tactical niche for a profoundly powerful single-shot handgun on the Civil War battlefield. That niche still exists today.
Rossi Brawler Details
The Brawler is as big as a hubcap. However, at 36.7 ounces, it’s not just stupid heavy. By comparison, a GI-issue M1911 .45 weighs 39 ounces.
To get the weight down, the good folks at Rossi built the gun around a steel receiver encased within a polymer shell. That might have offended our sensibilities back in the DBG (Days Before Glock) era. Now we know that such stuff is tougher that Margaret Thatcher’s backbone and longer-lived than Casey Kasem’s face. All the pressure-bearing bits are good old-fashioned steel. They also took the 9-inch round-profile barrel and cut flats in the sides to trim the weight back even more.
There is a 4-inch length of Picatinny rail up top for optics along with fixed factory iron sights as a backup. The forend and pistol grip are nicely textured. A neat soft rubber insert rides in the back to help mitigate recoil.
A polymer pushbutton sits flush with the receiver and breaks the action open for reloading. The safety is a simple crossbolt that locks the hammer in either position. Disassembly requires that you turn out a single screw that retains the forearm.
The trigger has minimal take-up and breaks at about 4.5 pounds. The manual hammer sports a generous spur, along with a transfer bar ignition system. The gun simply cannot fire unless the trigger is pulled. Running the gun is not unlike the same chore with your grandad’s favorite single-barrel shotgun.
The 1934 National Firearms Act severely restricts any smooth-bore shotgun with a barrel shorter than 18 inches. However, in the case of the Brawler, the barrel is rifled and the chamber cut for .45 Colt. It is simply that this also happens to fit standard .410 shotshells. Unlike the fake sort hallucinated up by gun control advocates, that’s the good kind of loophole.
Practical Tactical
The effectiveness of the Brawler turns on the veritable cornucopia of ammunition it will eat. My .45 Colt handloads are just for fun. I pack those with either hard cast lead bullets or the 230-grain jacketed sort I use for my 1911s.
Winchester .45 Colt PDX-1 antipersonnel hollowpoints are for personal security and hunting such stuff as whitetail deer. These cartridges use the same bonded technology as is incorporated into all of Winchester’s high-end social rounds. The results downrange are veritably explosive.
The Brawler is chambered to accept 3-inch, .410 shells. That means there is 1.4-inches’ worth of dead space between a typical .45 Colt bullet and the Brawler’s glacial 1-in-24-inch rifling. That could potentially trash such a gun’s accuracy potential. Not so in this case. At reasonable defensive ranges, the Brawler grouped solids quite nicely.
Both 2.5 and 3-inch .410 shotshells run like a lawyer after money. The barrel is only 9 inches long, so scattergun patterns open up quickly. At across-the-boat ranges, however, they remain plenty tight to send the errant water moccasin straight to snake heaven (Not a cool place. Nobody wants to go there).
Lots of ammo companies make epic .410 defensive loads these days. Brenneke slugs make reliably big holes and punch deep. However, my personal favorites are the PDX-1 Defender .410 rounds from Winchester. They offer a variation on the classic buck-and-ball theme with a handful of plated BBs nestled in alongside what the company calls Defense Disks. These are like little copper-plated lead SweetTarts of Death. All that chaos will remain within a standard man-sized torso at typical 7-meter defensive engagement ranges.
The Brawler ejects empties the way Space-X launches rockets. A couple of my .45 Colt cases simply disappeared. They may yet still be out there someplace orbiting Uranus. (You can take the boys out of second grade, but you’ll never take the second grade out of the boys).
Of course, the gun was unflinchingly reliable with everything we fed it. It’s a manual single barrel. There’s nothing to break. That’s the reason folks might opt for an indestructible single-shot pistol in a world of gas-operated autoloading everything.
So, What’s It Actually Good For?
Well, how creative are you? As a camp or truck gun stoked with .45 Colt antipersonnel rounds, the Brawler will blow massive holes in most anything that is warm, soft, and gooey. If you think plugging Bambi’s dad with a bolt-action .308 is not adequately sporting, then try the same exercise with the Brawler resting across a tree limb and stoked with a proper hollowpoint.
Swap over to .410 PDX-1 rounds, and that dude trying to break into your kitchen at 2 o’clock in the morning will wish he’d paid closer attention in school and just gotten a regular job. If you make that standard shotshells and keep the range close, you can put paid to bunnies and tree rats should your palate gravitate toward such robust fare. We already discussed venomous snakes.
Made in Brazil by folks who clearly know how to make nice firearms, the Brawler is just so refreshingly different. Thanks to a fortuitous bit of physics, it also allows us to shoot shotshells through a handgun without paying a $200 tribute and waiting a coon’s age for the BATF paperwork to clear. The company posts the MSRP as $257.99. The cheapest I found on GunBroker was $200. The gun averaged about $230. That’s not a whole lot of cash for a cool, weird smoke pole that will outlive your grandchildren’s children.
About the Author
A native of the Mississippi Delta, Will is a mechanical engineer who flew UH1H, OH58A/C, CH47D and AH1S aircraft as an Army Aviator. He has parachuted out of perfectly good airplanes at 3 o'clock in the morning and summited Mount McKinley, Alaska, six times…always at the controls of an Army helicopter, which is the only way sensible folk climb mountains.
After eight years in the Regular Army, Major Dabbs left the military in favor of medical school. He has delivered 60 babies and occasionally wrung human blood out of his socks. Will currently works in his own urgent care clinic, shares a business building precision rifles and sound suppressors, and has written for the gun press since 1989. He is married to his high school sweetheart, has three awesome adult children and teaches Sunday School. Turn-ons include vintage German machineguns, flying his sexy-cool RV6A airplane, Count Chocula cereal and the movie “Aliens.”
