Are wheelguns making a come back?
- Thread starter kalibear45
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No.
Semi autos and/or single shots dominate all meaningful catagories.
Wheel guns are far from a dead issue though.
There's no doubt that revolvers have been making a comeback. It's not so much that they were in the grave, but that most everyone figured they WOULD BE in the grave by now. Instead, we've got titanium snubbies on one end and the massive super revolvers on the other. I think the high-cap magazine ban had something to do with this, since it took away one major advantage of new production semis. But even without the ban's impact, there would still be interest in them.
Frankly I don't know why LEO's stopped carrying them. I've had several old police revolvers, from a service six to a police positive special. They've all been reliable and potent in spite of their age and milage.
Frankly I don't know why LEO's stopped carrying them. I've had several old police revolvers, from a service six to a police positive special. They've all been reliable and potent in spite of their age and milage.
I know why LEO stopped carrying them. Because at some point they felt they needed to be "ahead of the game" compared to bad guys.
So, the siutuation has flipped. To curtail costs and easier availability of mags the BG have gone to lower capacity and higher power guns and started practicing with them.
As a general rule, LEO agencies have cut training budget and are hoping high-capactiy guns will make up for the deficiencies.
So now we see more instances of cops spraying a target and hitting nothing and BG killing more where as before they were missing or wounding.
Isn't the capacty ban wonderful?
PS: I have absolutely no facts to back this statement up whatsover. It's entirely hot air and speculation. YMMV, don't try this at home, batteries not included, etc, etc, etc . . .
From what I've seen wheel guns have moved markets more to handgun hunting and CCW which seems to be gaining popularity and move away from "standard" size guns to little defensive guns (like an SP101 or AirWeight) and huge guns (like the BFRs, Raging Bull, .500 S&W).
My next wheelgun purchas I'd like to be a Super Redhawk in .454 Casaul. But it's in line behind a CZ-97B and a CZ-75B Compact.
So, the siutuation has flipped. To curtail costs and easier availability of mags the BG have gone to lower capacity and higher power guns and started practicing with them.
As a general rule, LEO agencies have cut training budget and are hoping high-capactiy guns will make up for the deficiencies.
So now we see more instances of cops spraying a target and hitting nothing and BG killing more where as before they were missing or wounding.
Isn't the capacty ban wonderful?
PS: I have absolutely no facts to back this statement up whatsover. It's entirely hot air and speculation. YMMV, don't try this at home, batteries not included, etc, etc, etc . . .
From what I've seen wheel guns have moved markets more to handgun hunting and CCW which seems to be gaining popularity and move away from "standard" size guns to little defensive guns (like an SP101 or AirWeight) and huge guns (like the BFRs, Raging Bull, .500 S&W).
My next wheelgun purchas I'd like to be a Super Redhawk in .454 Casaul. But it's in line behind a CZ-97B and a CZ-75B Compact.
I can imagine droving down a road in a rural state, with two large trucks: one for semi-autos; one for revolvers. Now these trucks would be equipped with super strong handgun magnets that would draw out all handguns from all houses whether the people were home or not, and whether they wanted to give them up or not.
I predict the revolver truck would fill up twice as fast as the semi-auto truck.
And the older the residents, the higher percentage of wheel guns.
Now, let's all forget about such bad dreams!
I predict the revolver truck would fill up twice as fast as the semi-auto truck.
And the older the residents, the higher percentage of wheel guns.
Now, let's all forget about such bad dreams!
Actually, a lot of the reason why so many police forces went with semi-autos, including the ones that simply had no particular reason to do so, was marketing and perception...
Marketers from companies, particularly Glock, were offering killer deals on new guns, and perception was, fueled largely by the media, that every petty crook had an AK-47 and a 50 trillion round magazine that they would use to chop good cops into hamburgery bits after said cop shot his six...
Here's a little rant I wrote on the subject some months ago...
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ah, the joy of conventional wisdom and urban legend...
In the 1980s, revolvers and semi-autos were actually selling fairly close to parity in the United States.
Americans had access to a lot of good semi-autos in SA, DA, and high capacity.
They had access to a lot of good revolvers in blue and stainless steel.
Most police forces still carried revolvers for a number of reasons, including they were cheap, the training regimes were well established, officers were familiar with them, they were reliable, and no doubt that there was a bit of tradition involved.
Then, starting about 1984 as far as I can tell, things started to change.
Drugs became an increasing problem in the cities, only this time the level of violence began to escalate alarmingly.
There were a few, and I mean a FEW, highly publicized police-criminal shootouts where the criminals either used semi-auto rifles or high-capacity semi-auto handguns.
The newspapers and the gun magazines found a hook, an original one, and a VERY effective one -- "OUR POLICE ARE BEING OUT GUNNED!" -- with the unsaid implication being that the streets of America, even the small towns, were littered with the rotting corpses of cops who had shot their antiquated 6-shooters dry and were subsequently hacked into small hamburgery bits by these thugs with another catch phrase that caught on at the time, ASSAULT WEAPONS!
In short order, the gobbling heards emerged...
Gunshops started reporting sales of revolvers and single-action, single stack semi-autos coming to a virtual stand still. GOBBLE GOBBLE GOBBLE!
Gobbling police commissions across the United States met to address the horrible plight of the underarmed police officer, with heavy emphasis being put on arguments that boiled down to essentially "if you're armed with a revolver, you're unarmed." GOBBLE GOBBLE GOBBLE!
As all these police commissions go, so goes the gobbling public, lead by the popular newstand magazines of the day, which fanned the flames of public panic with article after article, month after month, on dead cops (Miami shootout, anyone?), underarmed cops, hyperarmed criminals, and the latest WONDERBLASTDEMONDERAZZES TRILLION SHOT HICAP SCUM SLAYER! GOBBLE GOBBLE GOBBLE!
The situation got so bad that American Traitor Smith & Wesson (new reality show, Fox, are you listening?) had a circular "slide rule" to decipher the bewildering array of features, calibers, sizes, capacities, and finishes. GOBBLE GOBBLE GOBBLE!
Then, enter the Black Dragon... Glock started hitting the American market in serious numbers, and made a HUGE coup... They started offering their guns to police forces across the nation at freaking bargain basement prices. Some companies complained that Glock was essentially dumping guns at below cost to police to get the public on board. Well, it worked. Glock grabbed market share at a pace that no other company could even hope to match, and the gobbling got even louder as the public HAD to have THE gun that the police were carrying to kill the bad guys! GOBBLE GOBBLE GOBBLE!
If you were to read a gun magazine between 1986 and about 1992, you'd get the impression that revolvers had ceased to exist, that they had been run out to pasture as the gobbling police and public.
Police forces across the nation rearmed with high-capacity semi-autos, even small towns where the only use for a police handgun is normally to kill a cow or deer that wonders out onto the highway and gets hit.
The public, fanned into a frenzy, bought all of the high-capacity semi-autos it could lay its hands on, even in places where CCW was a fantasy.
Gun companies couldn't roll out new high-cap models fast enough to meet the public demand. The public scooped them up, even crappy ones, apparently on the theory that if it's high capacity, it must be good! GOBBLE GOBBLE GOBBLE!
As can be expected through all of this, prices dramatically inflated to the public, and most of the gobbling herd got a decent gun at a high price, or a crappy gun at an outrageous price. GOBBLE GOBBLE GOBBLE!
The real effect of all of this, though?
The gun companies made a LOT of money making the guns to feed the frenzy.
The gun magazines made a LOT of money FUELING the frenzy.
The police got new guns, which in many cases were really unneeded.
In some cases in the large cities, though, the results were closer to disasterous. Many cities that rushed to rearm their undergunned, vulnerable, and dying police forces neglected to train their officers properly, with the result being a dramatic rise in unintentional shootings. The situation was FAR worse in those cities where Glock had convinced the gobbling police commissions to take their product. Washington, DC, is a prime example. Training times were being slashed while a new weapon was hitting the streets, with the direct result being that the number of shots, and misses, per incident went SKY high, the number of unintentional shootings (not only of suspects, but of COWORKERS) rose dramatically, and the city began paying out HUGE settlements to those who were shot, or their families.
Other cities that rearmed with semi-autos saw similar jumps in those figures.
And the reason all of this started?
That drug dealers were gunning down police armed with revolvers in the thousands?
Just like most hotly hyped "media trends," it was a flash in the pan that never really existed. It made for GREAT print, though, and sold copies.
Through it all, though, there was a small, silent, voice crying out of the wilderness...
The revolver.
To hear the gun magazines talk about it, revolvers were dead, never to be seen again.
But sales of small-frame revolvers not only remained strong during this time, they actually began to rise in the early 1990s, and began to surge with the passage of the high capacity magazine ban.
Gun companies started bringing out new small frame models at a rapid pace, to the point that now there are likely more small frame revolvers being sold every year than small-frame high capacity semi-autos.
All in all, the Wonder9 or High Capacity craze was one of the most interesting marketing trends of all time, fueled largely by an incidental collusion among the general news media, firearms publications, and a gobbling, gobbling, public.
Marketers from companies, particularly Glock, were offering killer deals on new guns, and perception was, fueled largely by the media, that every petty crook had an AK-47 and a 50 trillion round magazine that they would use to chop good cops into hamburgery bits after said cop shot his six...
Here's a little rant I wrote on the subject some months ago...
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ah, the joy of conventional wisdom and urban legend...
In the 1980s, revolvers and semi-autos were actually selling fairly close to parity in the United States.
Americans had access to a lot of good semi-autos in SA, DA, and high capacity.
They had access to a lot of good revolvers in blue and stainless steel.
Most police forces still carried revolvers for a number of reasons, including they were cheap, the training regimes were well established, officers were familiar with them, they were reliable, and no doubt that there was a bit of tradition involved.
Then, starting about 1984 as far as I can tell, things started to change.
Drugs became an increasing problem in the cities, only this time the level of violence began to escalate alarmingly.
There were a few, and I mean a FEW, highly publicized police-criminal shootouts where the criminals either used semi-auto rifles or high-capacity semi-auto handguns.
The newspapers and the gun magazines found a hook, an original one, and a VERY effective one -- "OUR POLICE ARE BEING OUT GUNNED!" -- with the unsaid implication being that the streets of America, even the small towns, were littered with the rotting corpses of cops who had shot their antiquated 6-shooters dry and were subsequently hacked into small hamburgery bits by these thugs with another catch phrase that caught on at the time, ASSAULT WEAPONS!
In short order, the gobbling heards emerged...
Gunshops started reporting sales of revolvers and single-action, single stack semi-autos coming to a virtual stand still. GOBBLE GOBBLE GOBBLE!
Gobbling police commissions across the United States met to address the horrible plight of the underarmed police officer, with heavy emphasis being put on arguments that boiled down to essentially "if you're armed with a revolver, you're unarmed." GOBBLE GOBBLE GOBBLE!
As all these police commissions go, so goes the gobbling public, lead by the popular newstand magazines of the day, which fanned the flames of public panic with article after article, month after month, on dead cops (Miami shootout, anyone?), underarmed cops, hyperarmed criminals, and the latest WONDERBLASTDEMONDERAZZES TRILLION SHOT HICAP SCUM SLAYER! GOBBLE GOBBLE GOBBLE!
The situation got so bad that American Traitor Smith & Wesson (new reality show, Fox, are you listening?) had a circular "slide rule" to decipher the bewildering array of features, calibers, sizes, capacities, and finishes. GOBBLE GOBBLE GOBBLE!
Then, enter the Black Dragon... Glock started hitting the American market in serious numbers, and made a HUGE coup... They started offering their guns to police forces across the nation at freaking bargain basement prices. Some companies complained that Glock was essentially dumping guns at below cost to police to get the public on board. Well, it worked. Glock grabbed market share at a pace that no other company could even hope to match, and the gobbling got even louder as the public HAD to have THE gun that the police were carrying to kill the bad guys! GOBBLE GOBBLE GOBBLE!
If you were to read a gun magazine between 1986 and about 1992, you'd get the impression that revolvers had ceased to exist, that they had been run out to pasture as the gobbling police and public.
Police forces across the nation rearmed with high-capacity semi-autos, even small towns where the only use for a police handgun is normally to kill a cow or deer that wonders out onto the highway and gets hit.
The public, fanned into a frenzy, bought all of the high-capacity semi-autos it could lay its hands on, even in places where CCW was a fantasy.
Gun companies couldn't roll out new high-cap models fast enough to meet the public demand. The public scooped them up, even crappy ones, apparently on the theory that if it's high capacity, it must be good! GOBBLE GOBBLE GOBBLE!
As can be expected through all of this, prices dramatically inflated to the public, and most of the gobbling herd got a decent gun at a high price, or a crappy gun at an outrageous price. GOBBLE GOBBLE GOBBLE!
The real effect of all of this, though?
The gun companies made a LOT of money making the guns to feed the frenzy.
The gun magazines made a LOT of money FUELING the frenzy.
The police got new guns, which in many cases were really unneeded.
In some cases in the large cities, though, the results were closer to disasterous. Many cities that rushed to rearm their undergunned, vulnerable, and dying police forces neglected to train their officers properly, with the result being a dramatic rise in unintentional shootings. The situation was FAR worse in those cities where Glock had convinced the gobbling police commissions to take their product. Washington, DC, is a prime example. Training times were being slashed while a new weapon was hitting the streets, with the direct result being that the number of shots, and misses, per incident went SKY high, the number of unintentional shootings (not only of suspects, but of COWORKERS) rose dramatically, and the city began paying out HUGE settlements to those who were shot, or their families.
Other cities that rearmed with semi-autos saw similar jumps in those figures.
And the reason all of this started?
That drug dealers were gunning down police armed with revolvers in the thousands?
Just like most hotly hyped "media trends," it was a flash in the pan that never really existed. It made for GREAT print, though, and sold copies.
Through it all, though, there was a small, silent, voice crying out of the wilderness...
The revolver.
To hear the gun magazines talk about it, revolvers were dead, never to be seen again.
But sales of small-frame revolvers not only remained strong during this time, they actually began to rise in the early 1990s, and began to surge with the passage of the high capacity magazine ban.
Gun companies started bringing out new small frame models at a rapid pace, to the point that now there are likely more small frame revolvers being sold every year than small-frame high capacity semi-autos.
All in all, the Wonder9 or High Capacity craze was one of the most interesting marketing trends of all time, fueled largely by an incidental collusion among the general news media, firearms publications, and a gobbling, gobbling, public.
Started w/auto's,left auto's after buying an M10.Now auto's 0,revolvers 4
and counting.Works for me 100% of the time.
John
and counting.Works for me 100% of the time.
John
My last three purchases have been semi-autos. I had fun with them, and now two have been sold so I can go revolver shopping.
I have always been a revolver guy. There is something about a revolver that is beautiful. It's just like a woman, they both have curves.
Semi-autos come and go, but revolvers always stay.
I have always been a revolver guy. There is something about a revolver that is beautiful. It's just like a woman, they both have curves.
Semi-autos come and go, but revolvers always stay.
Unintended consequenses! Bill Klinton's 1994 neutering of semi auto magazine capacities has made the relvolver that much more attractive. Although I've always loved the revolver for its simplicity and style.
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