Dots Don't Go Everywhere...Yet

I'm on record as mentioning I'm not a huge fan of the 3" J-frame, and that steel J-frames in general don't have a ton of applicability in my world.

Small revolvers fall into one of two categories in my world. Either they're a pocket/ankle gun, or they're a belt gun. For me, a 3" J-frame is too long for a pocket, and a steel-framed one is too heavy for a pocket. I've pocket-carried a S&W 432 (and a 442 before it) for almost 25 years now, but a steel gun would make my winter coat hang funny.

"But you could carry a 3" J-frame in a belt holster!" you say. Well, sure. But I could also carry a Detective Special, a Taurus 856/327, or a 3" Smith & Wesson K-frame in a belt holster with no more real difficulty and get a 20% ammunition capacity boost. In fact I have been carrying an 856 TORO for a year now.

This is what makes the new R.O.C. J-frame red dot mount from Shield Arms a real head-scratcher for me. It mounts to a Smith J-frame using the sideplate screws, but all the photos show it on a Model 442. That effectively makes the gun too big for a pocket and anyone who's actually carried an ankle gun should get a good belly laugh out of the idea of sticking an MRDS in the most dirt-and-lint collecting spot where it's possible to tote a blaster. (Even IWB, the 507k on my TORO needs blowing clean every few days.)

I guess you could use it to mount a dot on a belt-carried 3" 640 or something, but all the J-frame revolvers in Smith & Wesson's current catalog lineup that could really benefit from a small red dot... think the 3" Model 60, Model 63, or Model 317 ...all have adjustable rear sights, which means that they're already compatible with an Allchin-type scope mount.

I mean, I get that red dots are awesome, but we're a ways off from a functional MRDS solution for pocket guns.

(H/T to Gorillafritz.)

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Is Novelty a Necessity?

In a post about the Heritage Roscoe on social media, a reader asked what the new offering from Heritage would do that a double-action revolver hadn't already done, or if maybe it would do it in a different or better way.

That got me to thinking on how a segment of the market demands novelty as the justification for a new model.

In the case of the Roscoe, you only have to look at the name of the manufacturer, "Heritage", to realize that cutting edge novelty isn't exactly their milieu. After all, their bread and butter offerings are inexpensive plinkers that are functional and cosmetic clones of a 151-year-old revolver design.

Sometimes the retro is the point. Colt has done reissues of their WWI and WWII era M1911 and M1911A1. Springfield Armory sold bunches of their "Milspec" model, so much so that they brought the GI, or as we called it in the shop back then, the Even Milspeccer Milspec.

In the case of the Roscoe, what it does is bring the basic blued-steel 5-shot snub-nosed revolver back to market at a reasonable price. Smith & Wesson still offers the Model 36 Classic, but the MSRP on that thing is better than double that of the Roscoe. 

Of course, fifteen or twenty years ago there would have been no call for a gat like this because its main competition would have been the ocean of used Model 36's, but these days even J-frames aren't immune to price pressures from collectibles. A Chiefs Special that's priced like the Roscoe is gonna be a beater, and one that looks like all shiny and new is going to present the owner with that classic quandary: How much do you want to shoot a gun when a turn ring on the cylinder can knock a Benjamin off the value?

You could do like a lot of collectors: Put the pristine Chiefs Special in the safe and buy a beater 36 to shoot. Or you could buy a shiny Roscoe and shoot it.

Classic Blaster

The latest Classic Carry piece at RECOIL: Concealment is about Colt's 1903 Pocket Hammerless (which isn't really hammerless and requires a heckin' big pocket):

"The sights on the M1903 were as was common for their time, which is to say they were rudimentary. There was a skinny little half moon of a front sight, about the size of a toenail clipping set end-on on the slide, and a rear notch that was every bit as skinny. If you want to know why Sykes and Fairbairn were advocating weirdo point-shooting techniques, it’s because they had about 20 rounds of ammo per dude to train recruit officers to hit a bad guy from two wingspans away in a dark alley using these very sights. It’d be almost as effective to forcefully lob the gun at the perp at those distances."

It should be on a newsstand near you any day now.
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Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #241...

Every time someone does a review of the Pedersen-designed Remington Model 51 and its "hesitation lock" design (which is not locked at all) they talk about how the separate breechblock allowed Remington to make the slide lighter and more compact or whatever.

I mean, I suppose that's a side-effect of the design, but it's certainly not the reason for it.

It's because when the Model 51 was introduced, Colt's Browning patent for a one-piece slide and breechblock that extended forward to enclose the barrel had yet to expire. That's the real reason why.

That's also the reason for the baroque method of attaching the 51's grip panels to the frame. That little pin at the heel of the grip gets pushed in to one side or the other and the grips are then slid down off the frame. Screws would have been much easier and cheaper, but the greatest firearms patent troll of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries had got there first.

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It's all about the patents.

From elsewhere this morning...

Pretty much all the major American gunmakers at least took a swing at the semiauto market in the early 20th Century.

Colt holding Browning's patents, which included features now considered mainstream like 'a one-piece slide and breechblock that extends forward to enclose the barrel' meant that everybody else's had to be more complex, and therefore generally more expensive to manufacture and less reliable.

By the early '30s only Colt was still making autos, and it would stay that way until Smith stuck a toe back in the market in the '50s, after the Browning patents had well and truly lapsed.

While obviously not the sole cause, it's definitely a contributing factor in why America was revolver country for as long as it was.

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Monkeys Touching Guns

I'm sure anyone who reads this blog on any sort of regular basis has probably also read the post by my friend Jennifer where she refers to actors as "dancing monkeys". (Here's an archive link since the original seems to be down or loading extremely slowly.) 

This is an especially apt term when it comes to letting actors touch guns. Best practices on set have the guns only handled by gun wranglers except when actually filming. Would you hand a dancing monkey a loaded gun? No, no you would not. Not if you had a lick of sense.

If you let monkeys touch guns, they might haul off and shoot people, all in good clean monkey fun. They don't know any better; they're monkeys.

It'll be a while before all the details come out, but one thing I can tell you with a fair degree of confidence is that this was probably not a squib projectile that was then launched by a blank, like what happened to Brandon Lee. That wouldn't have had the energy needed to go through one victim and wound a second.

Actor Alec Baldwin discharged a “prop firearm” Thursday on a movie set south of Santa Fe, killing the director of photography for the film he was working on and wounding its director, the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office said.

Several news outlets used the term "misfire" to describe what the gun did and, bro, I ain't buyin' it. They were filming a Western movie that was set in the 1880s. I would lay money that the prop gun in question was a single action revolver. Homie had to deliberately cock the hammer on that thing before pulling the trigger.

Almost certainly not one of these.

Firearms safety matters, even if you're a very rich and famous person just funnin' around on a movie set.

EDIT: There's some info from the set that makes this sound like it may have happened during filming. As in, Baldwin was firing toward the director of photography for the purpose of a shot, and the director was behind her and looking over her shoulder. Obviously hardly any details are available yet, but if that was the case and the gun wrangler handed him a gun with a live round in it, that's super messed up

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Two Mavericks

I'm not a huge fan of TV westerns. I mean, I'll watch old reruns of Wagon Train if I'm sick in bed just to see which future stars of '60s-'80s television I can spot in larval walk-on bit parts, but other than that I'll doze through most of them.

I've developed something of a fondness for Maverick, though. The writing's generally pretty good and I enjoy James Garner's character, a roguish gambler who gets by on wits and charm more than fists and firearms. (The fact that it's the first thing on MeTV after classic cartoons on Saturday morning helps.)

One thing about the show that does interest me is the unusually non-anachronistic portrayal of firearms in 19th Century America. Whereas a lot of Westerns tend to have everyone walking around with the big iron on their hip all the time, that ain't how it was.

Even in small frontier towns, Bret Maverick will ride into town with a gun belt bearing a holstered Peacemaker, but that usually gets left in the hotel room and around town, while patronizing the saloon or whatever, he's generally not visibly armed. 

When he is carrying a gun in town, at the poker table or around the streets of New Orleans or San Francisco, it's usually what appears to be a little .31 caliber percussion Colt with ivory grips. The smaller pistol is carried in a crossdraw outside-the-waistband holster with enough of the butt peeking out from under the front of his jacket to presumably avoid running afoul of the prohibitions on concealed carry which were very common in the late 19th Century USA.

His brother Bart Maverick, played by Jack Kelly, carried what appeared to be a tip-up No. 1½ Smith & Wesson, a five-shot .32 Rimfire Short with a bird's head grip, in an episode that was set in San Francisco and on board a sailing tramp freighter. (An episode based on a Robert Louis Stevenson story!)

These were definitely more believable than having everyone running around with horse pistols in buscadero rigs all the time.

Actual handgun from the days of the Old West.

Speaking of mavericks and gun laws, Professor David Yamane is something of an outlier in the sociology field in that he's been doing a deep dive into the sociology of gun culture in America. An outgrowth of his research has been a fascinating and well-researched book into the history of concealed carry laws (and, really, laws pertaining to carrying guns in public in general) that's available on Amazon now: Concealed Carry Revolution: Liberalizing the Right to Bear Arms in America.

It's available on Kindle or in dead tree, and really you should have a copy. It's written in an accessible, easily read style, saving the chewiness for the numerous footnotes. If you want to read about the trend of banning concealed carry in the US (started in Kentucky in 1813, and by the time Alabama banned it in 1839, it was the 8th state to do so) and the long slog back from those bans, this book is a must for you.

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Quick Reference Guides

I mentioned the other day keeping a copy of Green Eyes, Black Rifles near my desk for handy reference, and so I figure I'll list out the other books I keep handy. Sometimes it's easier than opening another tab, and sometimes they contain info that's not really otherwise searchable or available online.

• Some edition of Cartridges of the World. (I'm currently using a fairly old 12th Edition, but the old stuff doesn't change much.)


• The Standard Catalog of Smith & Wesson.


• History of Smith & Wesson by Roy Jinks.


• Smith & Wesson Hand Guns, McHenry & Roper.


• Smith & Wesson 1857-1945: A handbook for collectors, Neal & Jinks.


• Bolt Action Military Rifles of the World.


• Collecting Classic Bolt Action Military Rifles.


• Military Bolt Action Rifles 1841-1918.


• Savage Automatic Pistols*, James Carr.


• Savage Pistols, Brower.


• Kuhnhausen's shop manuals for the S&W revolver and the Colt .45 Automatic.


• Factory armorer's manuals for the Glock and M&P.


• A Textbook of Automatic Pistols**, R.K. Wilson


• Textbook of Pistols and Revolvers, Hatcher

  *The Carr book is essential for anyone who wants to venture into collecting Savage pocket autos. It concisely breaks down the 1907, 1915, and 1917 into all their consecutive subtypes in chronological order by the different distinguishing features, and it's small enough to carry along to gun shows.

**R.K. Wilson's delightful textbook, as complete a guide to early autos as there is, is being reprinted in paperback!

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Mouseguns, Then and Now

A frequently-encountered fixture at the gun store is the crusty old dude leaning on the counter...it doesn't matter if he's leaning on the employee side or the customer side, he's there somewhere...and intoning that all these new-fangled nine millimeter pistols are silly and calibers don't count for self defense unless they start with "four".

Given the persistence of this hoary myth, where did all those .38, .32, and even .25 handguns come from back in the good ol' days?

For starters, dispel the myth of the Old West being someplace where people walked around all the time with spurs a-jingle-jangle-jinglin' and the big iron on their hip. While it wasn't the network of strict gun control laws that revisionists try to paint it, nor either was it the open-carry paradise of Hollywood myth.

In mid-late 19th Century America, walking around a town or city setting with a full-size horse pistol stuffed in your belt would be seen as eccentric as it would in similar surroundings today. Perhaps more so, since 19th Century Americans didn't grow up watching old John Wayne and Clint Eastwood movies on cable. On the other hand, guns were everywhere.

"But wait, Tam!" you say, "I thought you just said people mostly didn't walk around with the big iron on their hip!"

Well, generally they didn't. First, a Colt's M1873, the Peacemaker of Hollywood lore, went for around twenty bucks over most of the time period of the Old West. They made about 175,000 of them, including military contract guns, over that period. (Smith & Wesson, by comparison, made almost twice that many of the big No.3 top-breaks, for what it's worth.)

Twenty bucks was a lot of dough, relatively speaking. About a tenth the cost of a good saddle horse and the equivalent of a pretty nice AR-15 these days. Since cowboys and miners around the various cowtowns and mining boomtowns were overwhelmingly young, single men with fairly low-overhead lifestyles, it wouldn't be amiss to think of the Colt Peacemaker and well-saddled Quarter Horse in 1870s Dodge City as the equivalent of a Daniel Defense carbine and Ford Raptor in 2010s Midland-Odessa. I have no idea what the 19th Century equivalent of truck nuts was, and considering that male working horses are almost uniformly geldings, I'm not sure I want to.

Meanwhile, there were literal millions of .22, .32, .38, and .41 pocket guns, rimfires and centerfires, sold over the same period. Human nature hasn't changed much over the years, and I didn't see no metal detectors at that saloon in Tombstone. Most every person had a gun for pocket, purse, or nightstand and, probably like most gun owners today, carried it if they felt like they were "going someplace they might need it."

In its original black powder format in tip-up Smiths, the .32 Rimfire Short essentially duplicated the ballistics of .31 caliber cap & ball pocket revolvers.

Thing is, most of the little black powder guns really were anemic. An old Colt 1849 Pocket Model, a .31 caliber cap'n'ball number, struggled to hit 600fps with a 50gr round ball and normal loads. The .38 S&W black powder cartridges used in top-break Smiths fired a much heavier bullet, albeit at about the same velocity. The .41 Rimfire Short, used in Remington Derringers and some pocket revolvers, barely got its 130gr conical bullet up over 400 feet per second; I've seen one go through a cardboard target, only to fail to penetrate a hardwood stump a dozen or so yards downrange deeply enough to lodge itself firmly in the wood.

Reel West vs. Real West: Guns like this S&W .32 Single Action and Colt New Line .38 rimfire are a lot more typical of the period than the Peacemaker.

When the French introduced smokeless powder, everybody went a little gaga over the higher velocities offered by the new, small, metal-jacketed bullets. Velocities for pocket pistols were topping 800 or 900 feet per second with the new .32 cartridge from John Browning. Equipped with FMJ bullets, cartridges like the .32ACP and .380 had no problems with penetration, at least compared to the pocket pistol rounds of the black powder era. Newer revolver cartridges, like .32 Smith & Wesson Long and .38 Special, were reaching these dizzying velocities with lead bullets.

I'm sure in the early 1900s you could find someone leaning on the gun counter at the local hardware store speaking in Authentic Frontier Gibberish about how "they didn't make a .46!", no doubt. But that didn't stop the Russians and Japanese shooting each other in job lots in the trenches of Port Arthur and Mukden with service revolvers chambered in cartridges whose bullet diameters would have caused Gun Counter Guy to curl his lip in involuntary disdain, but which were viewed as modern because of their higher velocities relative to the black powder rounds they supplanted. (9mm Type 26's for the Japanese versus 7.62x38 M1895 Nagants for the Russkies.) Heck, gun store guys like Teddy Roosevelt, right? Well, when he had revolvers issued to the NYPD, they were .32 Long Colts.

But, hey, if there's one thing we've learned about the Old West, it's that when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.

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Then and Now

An early postwar (1948) advertisement for short-barreled Smith & Wessons offered for "personal protection, undercover, and combat" use.

Interesting that you could buy three Terriers or two M&P snubbies for the price of a single 3.5" .357 Magnum back then. Looking at most inflation calculators, that Magnum went for a little over a grand in 2021 dollars, which put the Terrier and M&P at around tree-fitty and five bills, respectively. As the saying goes, "In 1873, you could buy a shiny new Single Action Army for a $20 gold piece. In 2021, you still can."

The bluing on those old Magnums, before Bangor Punta went cost-cutting, was incredible, like a "wet-look" wax job on a car.

Also of interest is the notice across the bottom of the advertisement that the Safety Hammerless models had been discontinued. The last of the top-breaks never came back after the war.

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QotD: Smith & Wesson Rules Edition

ZCQOTD: "Actually? The only double-action #Colt revolvers that even kinda interest me have loading gates.#handejector4lyf#yallscylindersturnbackwards#ventribsarewhitewallsandcurbfeelersforrevolvers"
😛#coltpython #meh

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) January 1, 2020

It's like the Jets and the Sharks out here today...
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Caveat Emptor, Baby

Colt's New Line single action solid-frame pocket revolvers are an affordable relic from the days of the Old West, especially considering what Colt's larger revolvers go for.

Most I've run across aren't working, and it's rarely worth the effort to try and get one running, but they're neat little paperweights all the same.

Colt made them for a few years in several different calibers: .22, .30, .32, .38, and .41, all rimfire. The reason they stopped making them was so many companies blatantly ripped them off, selling them cheaper than the quality guns from Colt.

The lower revolver is a Colt New Line in .38 rimfire. The gun above it is a .32 that was sitting on a gun show table with a $25 price tag. I grabbed it up because I'm a completionist...and it wasn't until I looked at it at home that I realizes that the rust bucket I'd snatched was a "Red Jacket No.3".

One of several companies that basically ripped off Colt's design, Lee Arms of Wilkes-Barre sold them under several names via mail order, "Red Jacket" being the most common.

Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #175...

Coming soon to a post on the sadly-neglected other blog, a Colt New Line revolver in .38 rimfire. This one dates to 1875. Unlike many European firearms manufacturers, the Colt plant has never been bombed flat by the Luftwaffe, RAF, or the Eighth Air Force, and so serial number records exist going back to the beginning, and Colt has made them electronically searchable, at least for date of manufacture.
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Prancing Pony or Dead Horse?

Got an press release in my inbox the other day announcing that the Presenting Sponsor of the 2018 NRA World Action Pistol Championship and the NRA Bianchi Cup this year was going to be Colt.

Now, at SHOT this year, Colt had a display half the size of the one they had last year, or the one they had at the last NRAAM. Floorspace in the main hall at SHOT ain't cheap, and that's not a good sign for a company that's been fighting off bankruptcy nearly as long as I've been in the gun biz.

On the other hand, they threw enough dough at NRA to be the Presenting Sponsor for Bianchi Cup, so who knows what's going on?
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Fair Market Value ≠ The Most You, Personally, Will Pay

I've seen whining around the 'nets about the price tags of things like Columbia's Empire Strikes Back repro coats and the forthcoming CMP M1911A1 surplus pistols. People are in full "REEEEEEEEEE!" mode, demanding that these prices should be set at a "fair market value".

I will point out that both these things will sell out with a quickness. (The Star Wars coats likely within hours*.)

I will further point out that there is a limit to the number of units an individual customer may purchase, in order to keep them from selling out too quickly. This is, if anything, an indication that an item is priced below fair market value, since otherwise someone would buy the lot and sell them at the actual market value on eBay or Gunbroker.

The irony is that this is the same half of the political spectrum who can expound at length on market theory and price signalling whenever the topic is minimum wage or anti-gouging laws. Let the topic of discussion be a tchotchke they desire, however, instead of a generator or an hour of a teenager's time, suddenly we're all about some reasonable restrictions on capitalism.
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*EDIT: The Star Wars coats sold out in minutes, and were promptly selling on eBay for better than double MSRP.

Colt collecting is not for plebs...

Historic price chart for @ColtFirearms Python revolvers:
2001: $ WTF
2012: $ GTFO
2017: $ LOLZ

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) March 3, 2017

Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #151...

Harrington & Richardson Self-Loading .25, circa 1920
Steyr Pieper 1908 .25, circa 1922
Colt Model 1908 .25, circa 1909
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From Elsewhere...

New vs. Old...

Keads will be putting the new polymer-framed Colt XSP .380 through a documented 2k round test head-to-head against an original Eighties-vintage Colt Mustang.

Watch that space.
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Tiny Colt

Some blogging at the other blog.
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