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P.O. Ackley was pretty well convinced that a greatly reduced charge of slow burning powder in a low expansion ratio (strongly bottlenecked) cartridge could give damaging or destructive overpressures. I think his example was a .250 Magnum with about a 70% charge of what we now know as 4831. He didn't come up with a theoretical mechanism for it, but had the broken guns to show.
I really doubt that a very light load of fast burning pistol powder is going to wreck a revolver shooting wadcutters, though.
It would be instructive to clamp a gun you could spare in a rest and shoot successively reduced loads of W296.
A PhD friend said the detonation phenomenon would be a great university research project. Just think how many loads a low-paid graduate assistant could fire in a semester. Enough for some real statistics.
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