Having, Collecting, Hoarding, Disposing

If you have a hobby that entails accumulating a lot of stuff, have you considered how best to dispose of it when you're gone? Your kids, or other next of kin, may not necessarily be interested in your cameras, guns, or cars.

Some things, like books or action figures or toy trains, are fairly easy to dispose of. Worst-case scenario you can haul the books to Half Price Books and the Beanie Babies to Goodwill.

Other items, like firearms or motor vehicles, may have additional legal entanglements. It's worth thinking about how to mitigated the hassles that'll cause your family ahead of time.

.

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.

Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #242...

Smith & Wesson made literal millions of their famous Military & Police model medium-frame revolver in the .38 Special caliber, but only a little bit more than a hundred thousand in .32-20 Winchester.

The .32-20 was a popular round for small game in Winchester and Marlin lever action carbines, and matching revolvers from Colt and Smith enjoyed a brief period of popularity in the early 20th Century.

While Neal & Jinks's indispensable book claims the Model of 1905 - 3rd Change only came in four- and six-inch barrel lengths, this example is quite clearly a 5" gun and Paul Scarlata wrote up a 6½" model in his review for Shooting Times, so take the Jinks info with a grain of salt.

.

Sneak Preview

Today's Sunday Smith, a pre-World War One K-frame Hand Ejector in .32-20 Winchester Centerfire.

.

"Are you a gun hipster?"

This piece is laugh-out-loud funny...

"Where others embrace threaded barrels, modern optics and tactical pants, you may feel a strange attraction to cold war battle rifles and cleverly engineered fixed-barrel actions. In extreme cases, you may have even considered purchasing a DSA FAL or an HK P9S.

But fret not, fervent friend of hammers, decockers and non-tilting breech-lock mechanisms. You are not alone. There are others like you. Others who think, feel and live like you. Others who know German date codes by heart. Others who feel that same sense of rage, loss and emptiness when they see a Beretta 92 with a red dot.

We call ourselves…

Gun Hipsters."

You should go and RTWT.

I think my own creds are solid in that department...

Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #238...

A fairly early-production Smith & Wesson Model 639. The serial number prefix would seem to indicate that it's from the first year of production, 1984. It's old enough that it still has the round trigger guard, but not so early that it has the wide extractor.

.

Mini Gun

Blogging has occurred elsewhere this morning.

The pistol in question kicked off an interesting discussion between myself and Jeremy Stafford, veteran LAPD officer and Handgun Editor at Guns & Ammo

Any time you post a pic of a vintage piece like this on on social media, gun nerds (like myself) can get a little blinded by nostalgia. Stafford turned a garden hose on some of the more... er, enthusiastic ...responses by pointing out that there are, to put it charitably, much better choices for carry on the market these days, especially from a durability standpoint.

I referenced that they all weren't that fragile, linking my experience recently with that 5906.

He wrote in reply:

"[I]t’s a 2nd Gen, which were even spottier on our department. You’ll still see the occasional gummer rocking one, but it’s usually shot twice a year at old guy quals. Likewise the “legendary” LAPD 4506, carried in drop swivel by dudes that maybe put 100 rounds a year through it, 300 if they bring it to a divisional training day where it will most likely malfunction due to decrepit magazines and weak springs.

The rebuilds were nearly always spring and trigger related. Sear release, sear spring, etc. there was also that weird copper piece that would break off. The CHP just ended up removing those in their guns. In the 45 series guns, the recoil spring was lucky to get to 2k. I’m stoked that yours is a workhorse, it just wasn’t my experience seeing hundreds of them. They were crazy accurate though, especially the bushing guns that Smith built for the Firearms guys.

Seriously, for every 10 purchased, 5 would have to see the armorer and 3 of those would have to be sent back to Smith. My experience with the Smith auto loaders, working the Firearms Unit for many years over two tours was not particularly positive. Going striker was the best thing to happen to us, until of course the great Glock 22 debacle of 2005, which I’m sure Erick Gelhaus and Chuck Haggard remember.

Best thing about my Smith was that a boot bought it and my Hoyt from me for 1800 bucks so he could look like an OG."

And he's definitely not wrong; Lord knows that LAPD has massive institutional experience, especially with the big single stack .45 Model 645 and 4506. 

My response:

"Yeah, the 2nd Gen guns wouldn't be my first choice.

In my experience the Third Gen Smifs are like any pistol, in that the farther away you get from the original basic spec, the worse they are. The 59xx/39xx guns are about as good as any other 9mm pistol of their era. The big bore single stacks, the 45xx and 10xx guns, are way under-engineered if you ask me.

Like you noted, they have a voracious appetite for all manner of springs and break that little copper trigger tensioning dingus so often that it might as well not even be there (and like you said, the fix was to just leave it out since the gun works without it.)

The all-stainless 40x6 duty-size double stacks are the only .40 of their era worth a damn, IMO...but that's because the competition was the Beretta 96, which fell apart in a shockingly small number of rounds, and the Gen2/Gen3 Glock 22, which was its own sort of disaster.

I'd toyed with spending a year shooting/carrying my 3913...but like I wrote in a column, it's because I've got backup guns and plenty of springs, so unless one is really committed to the bit, they should be a normie and go buy a current-production plastic strikergat. It'd be a bit of an affectation, like toting a 1911 or revolver in 2023."

Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #236...

I'd had a Smith & Wesson Model 469 before, but it wasn't the most handsome example and I unloaded it at an Indy 1500 some years back.

When I got a call from Indy Arms Company telling me that they'd gotten one in, I jumped on it. I didn't recollect having ever seen a matte nickel one before. When I got it home and went to look up the serial number in the Standard Catalog of Smith & Wesson to find the date of manufacture (1984, by the way), it turns out that's because the nickel ones were a distributor exclusive run of 1,500 pistols for Ashland Shooting Supplies back in the day.

.

That Nineties Show

I was setting up a photo shoot for a magazine article yesterday and snapped some phone pics to test the layout...

Thanks to a reader for hooking me up with that very Nineties box of Black Talon, complete with the period-correct twelve buck price tag. (Of course, sixty cents a pop was pretty premium stuff back in 1992 or so.)

The 3913LS was released in 1990, a couple years after that Nikon F4 and 35-70mm f/2.8D. The Motorola MicroTAC is a later model, probably mid '90s.

The Nikon and the Smith are still useful tools, but the phone is something I picked up off the 'Bay for ten bucks to use purely for a photo prop.

.

Best Millimeter

So, in going down the rabbit hole about the origins of the frame-mounted decocker on Third Gen Smith autos, I came across this post at Dean Speir's sadly defunct The Gun Zone blog, which is fortunately archived on The Wayback Machine. Apparently the genesis was that the cartridge was decided upon before the gun. Under the direction of John Hall, the FTU had decided that the Bureau was definitely going to the 10mm Auto.

Speir quotes a 1990 Gun Week piece by Mas Ayoob:

"The FTU was given carte blanche to find, or if necessary, create the best possible autoloading pistol for use by FBI agents. Originally, attention had focussed on the 9mm. Expansion of the analysis to include the .45 caliber slowed the process. It was slowed still further when, almost as an afterthought, Hall proposed researching the 10mm as well. When the administration balked, Hall reminded his bosses that a nation was watching them; FBI was a trend setter, and if they adopted a round that turned out to be eclipsed by something else, a disservice would have been done to law enforcement itself as well as to the Bureau."

So the cartridge was decided upon, but that kinda narrowed the pistol choice down a bunch.

Let's hop over to this pistol-forum.com post by (sadly departed) retired Louisiana State Police trooper "LSP972", who was a scholar on such matters:

"Compounding the issue was the fact that The Director Had Spoken; FBI was going to 10mm, despite his FTU people telling him it was a real bad idea; and there were exactly three to choose from... the Colt Delta Elite 1911, the G20, and the S&W. FBI held to the prevailing (at the time) cop perception that any SA gun with a manual safety was bad juju for LE work; one that is still valid today for a general-issue piece. The Glock was still new, and considered by FBI FTU to be the anti-Christ (due to all the negligent injury/wrongful death suits Glock was facing at the time, caused by cops who had not been trained to keep their finger OFF of the trigger, etc.). So that left the S&W.

An amusing aside was the fact that they first approached Sig about making a 10mm P226, and the Sig/USA guys over here said "Sure, we can do that." When the idea was floated in Germany, the Teutonic engineers nixed it, knowing that a complete re-design would be necessary and that an alloy frame would not stand the pounding. What makes it amusing is that , I was told, Sig neglected to inform the FBI of this decision, so after Ted Hollobaugh and his merry men developed the "10mm Lite" cartridge, they informed Sig of this and asked "Where's our gun?"

The answer allegedly was, "Gun? What gun?"

Bottom line, they (FBI FTU) were between a rock and a hard place now, and the S&W offering was the lesser of three evils. The frame-mount decocker was indeed a last-minute add-on. And the rest, as they say, is history..."

The resulting decocker assembly was a kludge. As Chuck Haggard recollects, the decocker lever itself was derisively referred to as the "Bart Simpson" in armorer's classes for reasons that should be obvious. (Trivia: Kansas City, MO issued the Model 4026 as their first autoloader.)

This "Bart Simpson" picture stolen from Midway.

Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #233...

I've been wanting to get my hands on one of these for a while now.

In the Third Generation S&W autoloader nomenclature...at least the original four digit ones before they mucked it all up with the "value series" three digit guns...the third digit nominally indicates the type of action the pistol uses. If that third digit is a "2", "3", or a "7", it indicates a traditional double action pistol with a frame-mounted decocking lever, like the one on SIG Sauer's classic P-220 and its offshoots.

The pictured pistol is a Model 5926. The "59" indicates a full-size double-stack 9mm. The "2" is a full-size pistol with frame-mounded decocking lever and no manual safety, and "6" is for stainless steel frame and slide.

This model was only produced for a short period, from 1990 to 1993, and the prominently hooked trigger guard marks the one in the photo as an early gun.

The frame-mounted decocker was something of a kludge on these, and had to be recalled once because some FBI agents managed to brick their 1076s. Via hearsay (and unconfirmed at this point, so take it with a grain of salt) if the decocking lever were to be inadvertently partially depressed during the firing cycle, something in the mechanism would break, leaving the user with an inoperable handgun. At least an all-stainless Smith weighing 29 ounces...plus whatever ammo was still in the gun...would make a pretty fair bludgeon.

All the frame-mounted decocker pistols were recalled for an upgrade, and upgraded guns feature a couple dots punched into the frame under the lever. This pistol does not appear to have been upgraded, but I'll need to call Smith to be sure; they were upgrading pistols as recently as a couple years ago, but guys on forums were reporting getting the gun back without the punch marks as far back as the late '00s.

So, why did Smith even go with this weird, retrofitted decocking system? It's hard to be sure. One would assume it's involved with going after LE contracts, since the FBI went with the frame-mounted decocker on their Smiths rather than the traditional Walther-style slide-mounted hammer dropping safety used on most S&W autos.

With traditional Smith & Wesson revolvers, you can always turn to History of Smith & Wesson by Roy Jinks, or Smith & Wesson 1857-1945: A Handbook for Collectors by Neal & Jinks and get well-researched scholarship on the origins of the classic models and the reasons for various changes, but there's no scholarly equivalent for Smith's metal-framed autoloaders. It's a shame, too, because one could be written now while a lot of primary sources are still available, but that situation ain't gonna last forever.

.

Do you know what those words mean?

I like this guy on Gun Broker asking big money for a "PINNED AND RECESSED" Smith & Wesson Model 940 that clearly does not have a pinned barrel, nor ever did any 940 have recessed chambers. Plus the gun has a clearly visible 7-digit alphanumeric serial number with a "BKR" prefix that dates to the early Nineties, a decade after any pinned-barrel Smith left the factory.

What do people like this even think "pinned & recessed" means these days? Are they just using it as shorthand for "I think it's old?"

Time Capsule

A Smith & Wesson No.3 top-break owned by Theodore Roosevelt fetched nearly a million bucks at auction.

Not only was the provenance something else, but the condition is eye-poppingly good. When I was scrolling past it on the 'Grams, I almost didn't stop to read the post because I thought it was one of the recent reintroductions.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Rock Island Auction (@rockislandauction)

Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #228...

That compact Third Gen Smif goodness in .45ACP, .40S&W, and 9x19mm flavors:

• Performance Center Shorty 45
• Performance Center Shorty 40 Mk3S
• Model 3913LS LadySmith

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.

.

The Final Savages

The very last Savage .32 pistols were made in the 1920s. Here's one of them.

(If you want to collect Savage's cool Buck Rogers-looking Art Deco auto pistols, I can't recommend Bailey Brower's volume highly enough. It's essential.)

.

The Scars Make It Real

New column up at Shooting Illustrated Online...

I have a PC9111 Professional model that I carried as my regular CCW blaster for years. It’s seen tens of thousands of rounds, been to several classes, was carried and sweated on, drawn and reholstered, bumped off door jambs in gun shops—and it looks it. The Birdsong Black T finish is worn shiny on the edges and the beavertail grip safety. The 20-lpi checkering on the frontstrap has a ding where someone wearing a heavy ring fired it. It’s not battered by any means, but it’s rather obviously been around the block a few times.

I’ve had people actually react in horror at its appearance, though. The Pro is an expensive pistol and hard to come by. Back when I purchased mine, the waiting list was long, and I only lucked into it when someone traded it in used at the shop where I was then working.

I started carrying it because it was designed to be carried—literally. The Professional model was developed at the behest of the FBI to be carried by SWAT-qualified agents. Having people become aghast at the marks of honest wear on a pistol like that seems as unusual to me as hearing “Don’t hit nails with that nice hammer! You’ll get scuff marks on the hammer head!”

High Resolution Savagery!

Blogging has taken place elsewhere today:

• By the beginning of 1917 production of the Savage Model 1915 pistol, a weapon optimized for concealed carry by American citizens, had been entirely displaced at Savage by contracts for pistols and machine guns for European armies.


• Add in the compression of viewing it online on a screen with a fraction of its native resolution, and that's a lotta wasted data. (The RAW file is 57.3MB before processing in Adobe Photoshop Camera Raw. That's bigger than an uncompressed Win95 install.)

Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #207...

I mostly got out of the 3" Smith & Wesson N-frame game except for this Mag-Na-Ported Model 629-1. It felt wrong to not have a .44 Magnum revolver of some sort around the house, and this one's a pretty cool example of the breed.

The pre-"Endurance Package" lockwork precludes the use of heavy loads ("Whee! My cylinder's turning backwards!") but who wants to shoot Elmer Keith Memorial Rhino-Rollers out of a 3" tube anyway? If you can't do it with a 240gr projectile at eleven or twelve hundred feet a second, you need to go get a long gun, not a bigger revolver.

.

It's getting ever more savage...

...over at the other blog!