re: 5 inch or 8 inch barrel

My meat pistol has a 10" barrel and seems sufficient.

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5 inch or 8 inch barrel

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Can't make a decision without knowing your ethnicity.

LINK

You don't want a handgun with an 8 inch barrel

You can make a 7.5 sbr that will be so much better than a bulky 8" barrel pistol.

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Why?

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Because it's unwieldy.



Better off with a "real" gun at that point, unless you're handgun hunting or some specific activity that requires such an extreme weapon.

"More accurate" is not necessarily correct.

Ballistically speaking, sure

But real world, the added weight and awkwardness of a barrel that long on a handgun with do more harm than good

3.8 the best

Does anyone even make a .45 ACP or Colt with an 8" barrel?

The inherent accuracy of any given pistol's design is pretty much insignificantly effected by barrel length.

In terms of mechanical accuracy, a barrel need only be long enough to properly stabilize the bullet. At that point, the shortest barrel possible is theoretically more accurate than a longer barrel due to there being less vibration/barrel whip to effect the bullet. Though like I said, the impact of barrel length will still be insignificant at pistol distances. It's probably a matter of an inch or two at several hundred yards which with pistols is just an idiotic thing to fixate on.

In practice though, the short sight radius of a shorter barreled pistol makes it harder to shoot accurately, but on the flip side, extremely large pistols are difficult to handle which also negatively impacts a shooter's accuracy.

Anyway, there's also the ammunition consideration. Quality hollow points are typically designed for use in certain barrel lengths - usually either compact to full size pistols with 3.5-5" barrels or for use in subcompact/snub nose pistols with 2-2.5" barrels. It maybe wouldn't matter, but shooting a hollow point at a higher velocity than it's designed for hurts its ballistic performance and in extreme cases could make the bullet comparatively ineffective.

So I say all that to say this:

For your stated purposes of home protection and target shooting, a 5" barrel .45ACP is the correct choice. I'm not aware of any 8" barrel 45's...5-5.5" is the industry standard for full size 45's with 3.5-4.5" for more compact designs. But if you're not ever going to concealed carry the gun then the full size pistol is usually going to be preferable.