Oldie but goodie

American Handgunner, Jan-Feb, 2009 by Mike "Duke" Venturino

Back in 2004 a couple of young Marine friends just home from the Iraq invasion came by to visit and spend an afternoon shooting with me. After looking over some of my handguns they asked if they could shoot a few revolvers. That request was probably spurred by the fact that they had just seen the western movie Open Range.

They both were packing 1911s of one make or another so after some plinking I asked them if they thought something like my Colt SAA .45 could be fired as fast as their 1911s. "No," they agreed. So with one of them as "judge" the other and I stood side by side and on command fired two shots at a paper target about five paces away. The "judge" said he couldn't tell a difference. So the two Marines switched places and we did the same drill with the same results. They were pretty surprised young fellows. The kicker is that I'm not especially fast with a single action. The trick is to just hold the trigger back with the shooting hand's forefinger and manipulate the hammer with the other hand's thumb. That method is amazingly fast and at only five paces, it's not difficult to keep the bullets close to one another on the target.

Let's carry the matter a step further, back to cap & ball revolvers. They are so obsolete that the average modem handgunner probably doesn't even know how to load one of the things with its loose powder, ball, and caps. In fact cap & ball revolvers aren't even governed by Federal forms or paperwork, and if local and state laws allow, they can be shipped between individuals. That sort of gives them the aura of "harmless." They are not, as thousands upon thousands of Northern and Southern cavalrymen proved to each other in the Civil War. Would I like to bet my life on say a .36 caliber Colt Model 1851 Navy? Not especially but I'd pick one of them over some of the more modern junk floating around that I know end up next to some peoples' beds. They will shoot an attacker just as dead as they did 150 years ago.

Now let's reverse the idea. Twenty-five years ago it was a rare cop who carried an autoloading handgun--double action revolvers were standard. Now wheel guns are obsolete, but are cops necessarily more "effective" with their semiautos? Fairly regularly the news media has headline stories of one or more cops emptying their high capacity autoloaders with few, and sometimes no, hits on the evil-doers. That doesn't seem very effective even though their handguns are far from obsolete.

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