Jim Taylor
My Opinion
Saturday, October 26, 2019, 06:53

Being an Old Fart of questionable mind and beat-up body I set forth by my hand this day my personal opinion on the subject of handguns. No one in their right mind has to agree with my opinion or accept it as valid. It's mine. Not yours. If your opinion happens to be similar then we might both inhabit the same facility some day. The one with rubber walls and crayons to write with. If your opinion is a polar opposite of mine we can at least to disagree agreeably no matter how wrong you are. And honestly, whatever a person chooses to use, that is up to them. A hero of mine once said, "Every dog has to scratch his own fleas."

That said, it is my opinion that the pinnacle of handgun design was reached quite a long time ago. It began with the Colt Model P ... the Single Action Army if you will. Not too many years later Smith & Wesson brought out their famous "Hand Ejector". And very shortly after that Colt introduced the 1911 .45 ACP semi-automatic pistol.

These 3 handguns set the standard for all that were to follow. All handguns today seek to either copy or else try to improve upon these designs with varying degrees of success or failure. Many of the newer designs are of polymer construction and while some of these work well, they are not the finely constructed firearms of the past. As a friend of mine says of his personal handgun, "It works, it is reliable and accurate, but it has no soul." Handling one of the older handguns from the past, for me, is like a trip in a time machine. The handwork that went into them. The places where that gun has been. The people who used it. It makes me wish the old gun could talk.

But then again, I am an old fart and given to remembering a past that is no longer with us except in things like those old guns. As someone once said, "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there."

Colt .45 SAA circa 1887

USFA .44 Special Shootists Anniversary Model

S&W Model 10's ... The heavy barrel gun I bought through the department when I was with the Arizona Dept. of Corrections. That was what we were issued as our duty weapon.

ATI .45 ACP 1911

Ruger .45 ACP SR1911 Shootists Anniversary Model