Showing Some Love for the Underdog

My very first real name-brand centerfire autoloading pistol...well, it really wasn't very cool. It was a Ruger KP91DAO.

If you're not hip to Ruger numerology (and why would you be?) that's a stainless Ruger P-series auto in .40 Smith & Wesson with a double-action-only trigger.

In fairly short order I swapped it for a Glock 23 because I believed the standard wisdom that DAOs were some sort of crappy trigger for proles, undertrained cops, and other yahoos who couldn't shoot. That was the gun counter consensus back during the heyday of the DAO duty gun.

In reality, I was a terrible shot who couldn't make hits with a DA trigger to save my life.

I got better, though.

Most people don't like DAO triggers because most people can't shoot.

By the early 2000's, I was using a DAO Beretta 96D as a bedside gun, since it essentially functioned like an eleven shot .40 caliber revolver. My bedside gun these days is a DAO Smith 4046. I'd have preferred a 5946, but I had the 4046 on hand from a blog project, it was cheap, and in the boat anchor all-stainless Third Gen Smiths, there's surprisingly little difference in shooting 9 and .40.

In all honesty, I think a DAO or LEM type gun makes a lot of sense for a pistol for personal or home defense. Yeah, you're not going to have blind splits as fast as you would with a short-travel 3.5# trigger, but if there's a shooting skill measurement that has less relevance to actual personal defense than blind splits, I don't know what it is. In exchange, you get a trigger that is much more resistant to screwups caused by "woobie-checking".

In fact, just for nostalgia's sake, I kinda want to go looking for a KP91DAO...
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