I just picked up one of these last week and, for what it is designed to do, it seems to do a great job. I got it for a drop-in-the-pocket-on-the-way-to-the-door-gun. Even though my wife and I carry outside, and keep a gun handy in the house, we both have the unfortunate habit of going to the door in the middle of the day without anything on us; and one of these days it will bite us in the butt, if we don't stop it. We run a small business and routinely get multiple deliveries each day, so we get used to running out to meet the UPS or FEDex or Mail carrier, often without anything on us, because the automatics we normally carry are a little heavy and bulky; and in just a tee-shirt and jeans there's no place to put them. We know that one of these days, it may not be the mail man that we meet when we get outside, and we've tried to make ourselves stop and strap on our pistol and throw on a covering shirt, but we'll do it once or twice and stop, and fall right back into our bad habits. So, our solution is this .38, and a fanny-pack, made to hold a pistol, which now hangs on the coat rack by the door. It relieves us of any excuses. The .38 Undercover Lite weighs in at only 12 ounces, so you barely know that you're carrying it. I wasn't immediately sold on the grips - a little on the ugly side, I thought. At this point though, I'm sold. I've never shot a more comfortable gun. It fits like a glove, and practically no recoil. We ran a variety of loads through it, from 90 grain lite loads to 158 grain +P loads. I was very surprised at the lack of recoil with the heavier loads. I had assumed that with the gun's light weight, it would kick like a mule by the time we got up to 158 grain. Not so. You could barely tell a difference between the 158 grain and the 138 grain, which was itself just slightly sharper than the felt recoil from the lighter loads. There's no doubt that my wife and I can both benefit from some more range time with this gun; our limited accuracy was a little humbling from what we're used to out of our every day guns, but I think the fault lay with our inexperience with a short barreled revolver rather than with the gun itself. It still performed well for its intended purpose - I'm pretty sure I could stop the mail man from leaving that next fruit cake. Its out the door price was just under $400, including the inevitable taxes and such. If anyone is looking for a lightweight revolver, my initial experience with this one is very positive.
Thanks for the evaluation. I've had a couple of the older Charter Arms revolvers over the years that I picked up mainly for trading stock or some such. The ones I had all worked fine.
Had a Smith ultra light that was rated +P---had---was stolen. Charter Arms makes a good shooter--would not want to shoot comp with it but for the money it makes a good "belly gun".
