Spent some time going down a rabbit hole on the M1892 this week — the gun that essentially built the template for every DA revolver sitting in your safe right now. Worth talking about.

Every double-action revolver you pick up today descends from the mechanical logic Colt put into production in 1889.

That includes your GP100, your 686, your LCR. The swing-out cylinder, the simultaneous ejection, the left-side release — Colt worked all of that out in the 1880s and nobody's fundamentally changed it since. Next time you're running drills at the range and you hit that speed reload, that's 135-year-old engineering doing its job.

There were cases of soldiers emptying their revolvers into a charging Moro and still being cut down.

Six rounds of .38 Long Colt — a round that made .38 Special look stout — and the guy is still coming. The Army's answer was to dig .45 Colt Single Actions out of storage, cut the barrels down, and ship them to the Pacific. That's the kind of field lesson that doesn't get forgotten — and it's a straight line from those jungle reports to the 1911 and the entire American fixation on .45 ACP that lasted most of the 20th century. Every "9mm vs .45" argument at the gun store counter has roots in the Philippines.

The counter-clockwise cylinder rotation is something I hadn't thought much about before reading this — the firing forces literally worked against the design and pushed the cylinder out of alignment over time. Colt reversed it in every DA revolver they built afterward. Makes you wonder how many rounds it took before someone in the field noticed the timing going soft.

What cartridge failure — military, hunting, or otherwise — actually changed how you think about what you carry or load?

Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team