The Gun Digest Book of Combat Handgunnery. Massad Ayoob

Nationale plant in Belgium mattered only to the most rigid purists.

      Like the Colt 1911, the P-35 is slim, easy to conceal, and comfortable to carry. The 13+1 magazine capacity seemed to be its big selling point. But if people bought it for firepower, they kept it because it had a more endearing quality: It simply felt exquisitely natural in the human hand.

      Before people used the word “ergonomics,” John Browning clearly understood the concept. No pistol is as user-friendly. Col. Cooper, who has been called “The High Priest of the 1911,” once wrote that no pistol had ever fit his hand better than the Browning. What a shame, he added, that it was not offered in a caliber of consequence.

      Produced for the most part in 9mm Parabellum and occasionally in caliber .30 Luger, the Browning got a boost in popularity stateside during the 1990s when it was introduced in .40 S&W. The bigger caliber feels rather like a 1911 slide on a P-35 frame, but it shoots well. There were early reports of problems, but the factory quickly squared these away. The 9mm Browning has always been a rather fragile gun when shot with heavy loads. I’ve seen baskets of broken Browning frames in English military stockpiles and in Venezuelan armories. The hammering of NATO ammo, hotter than +P+ as produced by England’s Radway Green and Venezuela’s CAVIM arsenals, was the culprit. Fed the hot loads only sparingly, and kept on a practice diet of low-pressure standard American ball ammo, the 9mm Browning will last and last. The massive slide of the .40 caliber version, along with its strong recoil spring, is apparently enough to keep the guns in that caliber from breaking epidemically.

      The Browning’s mechanism does not lend itself to trigger tuning in the manner of the 1911, that is one reason it has never been popular with target shooters. For most of its history, its magazines would not fall free unless the pistol was deprived of one of its trademark features, the magazine disconnector safety. The latter, when in place, renders a chambered round unshootable if the magazine has been removed. In the 1990s, Browning came up with a magazine with a spring on the back that positively ejected it from the pistol.

      The timeless styling of the Browning made it a classic, but make no mistake: Its easy “carryability,” and especially its feel in the hand, have made it an enduringly popular defense gun. From petite female to large male, every hand that closes over a Browning Hi-Power seems to feel a perfect fit. One caveat: Though it will hold 13+1, serious users like the SAS discovered that it wasn’t very reliable unless the magazine was loaded one round down from full capacity. Just something to think about.

       Classic Double-action Autos

      Some gun enthusiasts would argue whether the words “classic” and “DA auto” belong in the same sentence. Can there be such a thing as a “classic” Mustang? Only to the young, and to fans of the genre. Ditto the DA auto.

      Surely, in terms of firearms design history, there were at least a couple of classics. The Walther designs of the 1920s and 1930s are a case in point. There is no question that the P-38 dramatically influenced duty auto designs of the future, though no serious gun professional ever made that pistol his trademark if he could get something else.

      European soldiers and police dumped them at the first opportunity for improved designs by HK, SIG-Sauer, and latter-day Walther engineers. South African police, who stuck with the P-38 for decades, told the author they hated them and couldn’t wait to swap up to the Z88, the licensed clone of the Beretta 92 made in that country.

      The Walther PP and PPK have timeless popularity that comes from small size and ease of concealed carry, splendid workmanship in the mechanical sense, and a cachet more attributable to the fictional James Bond than to genuine gun experts who shot a lot, though the great Charles “Skeeter” Skelton was a notable exception who actually carried the PP and PPK in .380. By today’s standards, the ancient Walther pocket gun is a poor choice. If it is not carried on safe, a round in the chamber can discharge if the gun is dropped. If it is carried on safe, the release lever is extremely awkward and difficult to disengage. The slide tends to slice the hand of most shooters in firing. Walther .380s often won’t work with hollow-points, and though inherently accurate thanks to their fixed-barrel design, often require a gunsmith’s attention to the sights to make the guns shoot where they are aimed. There are not only better .380s now, but smaller and lighter 9mm Parabellums!

       Here is a circa 1930s production 6-inch S&W M&P with factory lanyard loop and instruction guide.

      In the historical design and “influence on gun history” sense, one could call the Smith & Wesson Model 39 a classic. But it, too, was a flawed design, and it would take Smith & Wesson almost three decades to really make it work. The S&W autoloader was, by then, a redesigned entity and a part of the new wave, rather than a true classic like the 1911 or the Hi-Power.

       S&W Service Revolvers

      In 1899, President William McKinley signed the treaty that ended the Spanish-American War, the first of the Hague Accords were drafted, and Jim Jeffries was the heavyweight-boxing champion of the world. Born in that year were Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Swanson, James Cagney, Fred Astaire, and the Smith & Wesson Hand Ejector .38 revolver that would become known as the Military & Police model.

      The Smith & Wesson double-action was the “Peacemaker” of the 20th century. As the M&P’s name implied, it was the defining police service revolver for most of that century, with many thousands of them still carried on the streets today. S&W revolvers fought with American troops in both world wars, Korea, and Vietnam.

      There are doubtless still some in armed services inventories to this day.

      One of the first of many small modifications to the design was a front locking lug that, many believed, made the Smith & Wesson a stronger double-action revolver than its archrival, the Colt. While the Colt had a better single-action cocking stroke and trigger pull for bull’s-eye target shooting, the S&W had a smoother, cleaner double-action trigger stroke for serious fast shooting. It was largely because of this that, by the end of WWII, S&W was the market leader in the revolver field. It remains there to this day, though at this writing Ruger exceeds S&W in total firearms production.

       Markings show that this pre-WWII S&W M&P was worked over by Cogswell & Harrison of England.

       S&W’s Military & Police Target model .38 Special predated the K-38 Masterpiece series.

      The most popular by far was the .38 frame, now known as the K-frame. One thing that makes a classic handgun is perfect feel. The average adult male hand fits the K-frame perfectly. Larger hands can easily adapt. Smaller hands adapt less easily. In 1954, Border Patrol weapons master Bill Jordan convinced Smith & Wesson to beef up the Military & Police .38 and produce a gun of that size in .357 Magnum. This was done, and another classic was born: S&W’s .357 Combat Magnum, a staple of the company’s product line to this day.

      The same mechanism was adapted to a .44/.45 frame gun, known today as the N-frame. In 1917, S&W engineers created half-moon clips to adapt rimless .45 auto cartridges to revolver cylinders, to fill the Army’s need for more handguns during WWI. This concept lives today in S&W’s Model 625 .45 ACP revolver, a gun all the more practical since more recent full-moon clips allow the fastest possible six-shot reload. The first of the classic N-frames was the exquisitely crafted .44 Special Triple Lock. 1935 saw the next giant step, the first .357 Magnum revolver. That gun lives today as the practical, eight-shot Model 627 from the Smith & Wesson performance center. The N-frame was also the original home of the mighty .44 Magnum cartridge in the legendary “Dirty Harry” gun, the Model 29.