Another thing that must be considered for those of us living in Paradise. Availability of ammo. Staying with .38/.357 for revolvers helps keep the cost down. Its the most common. You can go to Sports Authority and buy .38 special ammo for 3 bucks a box, while my .45LCs are 24 bucks a box. It almost forces you to stay with 9mm if you go semi-auto, because of cost restrictions on anything else. Forget about mail order too, because everything comes by air frieght. Unless you can find someone willing to ship on the proverbial (but perhaps literal in this case) "slow boat to china", you are out of luck. No form of explosive can be shipped via air freight. Luckily, one of the guys in our club does shipping, so he can get us oddball stuff. But it has to be ordered well in advance and done in quantity. For instance, my Winchester .30-30 is a great little gun, but unusable in my cowboy shooting club. However, I found a guy who will do a conversion for me to make it a .38-55. All well and good, but no one on the island sells .38-55, so unless I can get them sent via this guy, I'll have to order just brass and bullets and load my own.
Anyway, just walk in at Magnum and tell them what you want in a gun. They will help you find what is comfortable for you, and will fill your needs. I'm thinking of using the range a few days myself next week, to work on getting more accurate with my .45. Since I work downtown, its a short drive down Queen St.
Oh, and just so you know. This weekend (the 3rd) is the Civil War shoot out at KokoHead. Alot of guys from the Historic Arms Society will have their CW stuff out. Alot of them arent replicas either, these are real period pieces being loaded and fired. One of our group that will be there has 2 CW Springfiled rifles that fire the minie-ball setup. I think those things are like .69 caliber? Huge. He also has a trapdoor Springfield shooting .45-70s.