DeSantis Clip-Grip – second impressions

I got to shoot my S&W 442 with the DeSantis Clip-Grip this past Saturday while out at KR Training.

Click here to read my first impressions.

The main thing I wanted to do was shoot the gun with those grips to see how it fared.

It went about as I expected.

You can’t get a great grip on the snub with these grips because they’re small. But you can get enough of a grip that you can shoot, and shoot I could. I could do some slow fire and nail the small steel plate at about 20 yards, once I figured out the hold-under for the load I was using.  I shot some of my .38 Special 158 grain handloads, and I also shot some Remington R38S12 .38 Special +P 158 grain stuff. Everything went about as I expected it would. You feel it, the +P of course stings a bit more, nothing I’d want to shoot a few hundred rounds of, but I can certainly practice with the plinking loads well enough and shoot enough of the carry loads to get by. It’s not horrible, but not the more pleasant thing in the world.

I didn’t really notice much difference between this and the factor boot grips. I expected maybe a little more felt-recoil, and perhaps there was on a meter, but nothing I could really notice.

The one kicker? I didn’t try a full draw as I’m not ready to do that (I like my femoral artery), but I have been working on the draw dry at home. When drawing, due to the way you have to get a “grip” on the gun to draw it, you don’t get a nice “choked up grip” on the gun… you’re a little down the back of the grip. I tried shooting from this grip and it works but it’s not ideal because of course after the first shot the gun now torques back and nestles into that “choked up” position… but now everything has changed, different sight picture, the gun and grip have shifted… not ideal. There may be a different way to draw to mitigate this. I’ll have to experiment.

All in all, I’m alright with these grips. I’m going to keep them on my 442 and see how it goes. If nothing else, they don’t really change the form factor all that much from the regular boot grips, and it gives me options.