Your (informed) Opinions, please

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kBob

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Old High school buddy and I were exchanging emails and got to talking about how I had gotten my first handgun in the late 1960’s and he and our mutual friend had to wait into the early 1970’s to get hand guns.

First one and then the other guilt tripped their dads into getting them pistols… of sorts.

I had a Ruger RST 4 And they “went with” revolvers… that is their dads bought them revolvers.

The one I was emailing ended up with an Arminus .22LR (8 shot?) His dad said it was the cheapest .22 DA revolver in his store’s distributor catalog. It actually was not bad, but not that good either.

The last guy noe told his dad he was imbarassed to not have a hand gun so his dad to out do our .22lr hand guns jumped him to a centerfire….. unfortunately a Clerke First .32 S&W.

After our first session with the thing I made the guy angry when I offered him one of my favorite rocks for it. Looking back it now seems i would have gotten the worst of the deal.

I had by then some experience with the RG DA revolvers in .22Short and Long Rifle and opined that I would rather have had the RG (14?) .22 LR than his Clerke .32 S&W or a Clerke in .22lr.

So how about it?

If you remember them and are not yet in your dotage which was the better pistol, the one GCA ‘68 stopped or the one GCA ‘68 started?

-kBob
 
Never heard of them. Right when I thought I was smart about guns.
 
Those RG's in .22 were selling for $20 at a hardware store in town in about the 1978 timeframe. I remember they were extremely cheap feeling, and the cylinder would only lock when rotated into firing position with the trigger. When the hammer was down the cylinder would spin freely. I bought one in that timeframe and may still have it but it's probably buried in a storage outbuilding under a mountain of other crap.
 
An RG .22lr frightened me badly once at age 13. we were shooting at junk and rats at a dump and the kid with the RGanounced a belief it could shatter an old sink in the pile. unfortunately sinks unlike say toilet bowls are not just enamel, but enamel coated iron. Before I could explain that he took his “two cushion shot” and a much flattened .22 slug ended up bruising my lower right rib as I stood beside and just behind him.

There followed a one sided discussion of his intelligence, patent’s marital status, and his unsavory relationship with his mother.

As we did not share the news of this event with the biguns he would get a High Standard Double Nine a year later, which lead to my RST 4… trigger pull man trigger pull!

-kBob
 
Somewhere tucked in the pistol safe I've got both an RG .22 Short and some kind of Clerke .32Long. The RG works, the Clerke don't. I'll need to hunt them down and take some pictures - for posterity. :rofl:

EDIT: I take it back. The .32 is an EMGE, not a Clerke.
 
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I have avoided RGs for my entire shooting life, almost 50 years. The only two I ever touched were guns two of my students brought to my CCW training class. Neither of them worked, probably because they had been setting in nightstands for years.

By the way, my first handgun was a Ruger SS-Six bought in 1967. And what is a Ruger RST 4?

Dave
 
And what is a Ruger RST 4?
Click to expand...
Ruger - standard 4 3/4" barrel. More or less, what the Mark 1 was/is. The one I bought in the early 1970s came in a red box.
Mine was also a real POS.
Unable to hit anything & jammed like crazy.
I got rid of it and replaced it immediately with a High Standard Sport King.
Fabulous pistol with one of the best triggers on planet Earth.
 
The RG was better than nothing ... I had nothing !

I don't remember the Clerke .

My first handgun was a Italian reproduction of a 1851 Navy Colt cap and ball , black powder revolver .
Cost $35.00 and we shot that revolver so much it literally fell apart ... the steel was soft and it had a brass frame so after a lot of shooting ... cracks developed , the frame stretched out of whack ... but we had so much fun shooting it ...round balls were cheap , black powder was cheap , percussion caps cheap and available ... we had more fun than you should be allowed by law to have ... it more than paid for itself .
Gary
 
I have an 8 shot Arminius HW7. I was just shooting it today in fact. When I bought it a year or so ago it was the most hopelessly inaccurate thing I’ve ever seen. I was fiddling with it one day because I was going to file in the sights to at least get it to shoot to point of aim when I noticed that the barrel was loose in the frame and was jiggling. I punched out the pin that holds the barrel in and cleaned the frame and barrel tenon really well and put it back together with liberal amounts of Loctite sleeve retainer in there. Much to my surprise after doing that it shoots exactly to point of aim and is pretty accurate. The 4” steel plate at 30 yards on my firing line is easily hit. The paint on the zinc frame is starting to wear so I don’t shoot it much as I feel I’ll probably wear it out.
 
I remember those RG 22's selling at the local G.E.M. store for about 30 bucks. Them and the Raven 25 semi-autos. I didn't have any handguns back then and wanted one or the other so bad. I could at least imagine the circumstances that would let me scratch together the money to pay for one of them. A Smith and Wesson or a Colt? Forget it. They might was well have been a million dollars. I had about as much chance of coming up with that, as I did whatever the actual price on the tag was.

I never did get an RG or a Raven. My first handgun came some years later, a Smith and Wesson Model 19. I don't have any idea how many I've owned over the years, but it's in the 100's I'm sure. Those RG's and Raven's had kept the dream alive. I've been tempted to buy one over the years, just for grins and giggles. Never have though. One of the few guns I've never owned actually. :)
 
My first handgun was an RG single action .22 with plastic grips that were supposed to look like ivory. The local B & I in Tacoma, WA had them for $29.99 for the .22 LR and $37.95 with the additional .22 Magnum cylinder. Of course, being flush with Tacoma News Tribune junior dealer money, I opted for one with the additional MAGNUM cylinder. While it was a cheap zinc not very accurate gun, it did have a fairly light trigger pull. I don’t remember what happened to it. Probably sold it after I had acquired an only marginally better center fire double action revolver after college and starting my career (a Llama Comanche .357 Magnum).
 
Geez, I'd forgotten about RG 'til now.
Had a buddy that had one. After I shot a cylinder full from my new model 66 he shot two rounds and the cylinder fell out.
Last time I ever saw or heard of it.
:what:
 
I have a RG SA .22 revolver stored at the bottom of my safe. Sometimes it will fire, but most of the time it only leaves a small mark on the case. And the grip frame is bent. I'm waiting for a "buy back" in my area to get rid of it. Seems like a good demise for it.
 
Long ago in my misspent youth, I bought a .22 lr single action "Buffalo Scout' revolver. It was a cheap knock off of the Colt Scout revolver, produced by what I've come to understand was "Rohm" in some way or other. It was famous for breaking triggers and going out of time (cylinder didn't line up right). There's more to it and I'm trying to forget.

I also had a Llama .380 that was essentially the Llama version of a shrunk down Government Model. Complete with locked breech barrel. The locked breech was switched to blowback shortly thereafter. That was a pretty decent pistol but I understand 'metallurgy' of the Basque gunmakers was 'iffy' at times. The design and workmanship was acceptable if not awe-inspiring.

My considered opinion is 'price' can be a telling indicator. Usually, a really cheaply priced anything is made really cheap. But that's not infallible, either. Inspection of items looking for rough finishes on parts that move against each other, how the parts fit together - especially cross pins - and the interior of the bore are mandatory. Sadly, there is no school or class for this. One is encouraged to find an older friend who has purchased a couple piles of junk and knows what not to buy and why not to buy it. Very seldom will a friend of your own age who claims to ...'know all about it...' really will.
 
I saw a number of the RG 38 .38 Special DA revolvers back when my old club ran a public range. They actually worked…. perhaps because they were so much larger than the RG 14 .22s… and were accurate “enough”

We had one in our training box for gun safety classes and I would on occassion fire it on the range with DEWC target loads.

I had for a while an RG made .38 Special “Remington 1871 style” double derringer. Lacking any sort of safety other than a half cock it got retired…. but it fired a good bit of standard pressure “widow maker” RNL, DEWC, SWC handloads, and some Speer shot loads. Very convenient to carry, but seemed an accident waiting to happen.

Dad bought a RG 66 which was the Single Action Cowboy gun and his was a.22 Magnum. It was minute of soda can at 25 yards if you did your part. Years later Dad found a .22LR cylinder at a car show (go figure) but could not get it on the revolver. I later got it in and it shot though less accurately than with the .22 Magnum cylinder…. but much more economically!

I think the Single Action RG’s best gun…. But its West German contemporary the HC Schmiditt is a better gun for what was then the same price. And Heritage Arms seems to have thought so as well

Nice to see the American “zinc crap” the Raven 25 get a mention. It was the ancestor of all those Jennings and Davis guns. Despite all the crap piled on them the Raven Seemed to work for most of its users…. of course it was still a .25acp and some will put it down for that alone. One wonders how many times the ugly little things ran off a bad guy with out a shot fired … or with loud ineffectual barking!

My son took a Criminalistics class in high school and they were assigned a paper on “crime guns”. Most of the class cut out pictures of Glocks from magazines and did your standard major press screed on “evil plastic guns”

The Boy actually looked up some data and found a ten year old study that showed guns used in Philadelphia by commonality. The Davis 38 .380 (a Raven derivative) was first to third over several years. I then had one from a trade so we took photos of him modeling it and we went out and he shot it (just twice). He did a nice write up on it and Got an A+.

When I handed him a classic book on Firearms and tool marks he asked me why I had it. At 15 he finally understood his Dad had an Associate in Law Enforcement and Bachelors in Criminology from back when Dinosaurs ruled the earth in 1980 ( had to do something to get that GI Bill money!). Kids, got you love them!

Any how cheap guns beat no guns. RGs and such meant that single moms, poor working families, and those on fixed incomes such as the aged had some hope of buying a gun. Of course cheap guns got misused and some will play that up more than the unreported Granny fending off a burglar, or single Mom chasing off an abusive “Ex” that came back with unreasonable demands and threats. Folks do not report such as no one wants the attention of the State.

The Clerkes were so bad they disappeared rather quickly. And I was serious about the rock comments back in post one.

-kBob
 
A good friend was a Deputy Sheriff, worked Vice, on east side of Houston, along the ship channel.

One Saturday night, they hit a "joint". Force stormed in, front and back doors, announcing the raid.
He said it sounded like a hail storm. They get everybody lined up along the wall, turn up the lights and picked up 30-something Raven, Davis, Jennings pistols off the floor.

Heard a screaming and find a 350+# woman, halfway out the bathroom window, stuck, with 2 others trying to push her out.
 
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