With a 2" to 3" barrel at 50 yards my groups are so bad I'd not shoot at anything but paper. With a 4" barrel on a good day I'd give it a go at a deer as I can pretty much always keep it in the kill zone at that range but it's as far as I'd try and all things have to be working well for me. At times my eyes just aren't clear enough for a barrel that short.
With a 6" barrel I begin to actually do pretty well but I can see a clear improvement with a 7.5" to 8-3/8" barrels. Many years ago when I could see better and had less probelms with the shakes with an 8-3/8" barrel on a Smith I could easily hold 1" groups at 25 yards free hand and could hit 12 oz pop or beer cans at 50 yards most of the time. Now a two liter bottle is in mortal danger most of the time.
Move me to that old S&W 29 I used for so many years with a 10-5/8" barrel and I can do at 75 what I can at 50 with an 8-3/8" barrel.
My best friend Billy Doss (now deceased) had an 11" stub of a Marlin model 60 rifle barrel fitted to a High Standard semiauto many years ago. That pistol was never beaten in a match. Didn't matter which of us used it if only one of us did the one using it won the match we were shooting. It was just unbeatable. It had the longest sighting radius of any handgun I've ever shot.
For me sight radius makes all the difference in the world.
