"Worst gun they made in the second half of the century."
I have one and while I have not fired it a lot, it never gave me any problem; further, it seemed to handle any .22LR I fed it, which has not been true of bigger and more expensive .22 autoloaders.
They got a bit of a bad rep when a couple were fired against various "Saturday Night Specials" in 1971 government tests (conducted by H.W. White) of various domestic and foreign handguns. The openly stated idea was to prove that all foreign guns were cheap, unsafe, and dangerous and should be banned in the same way many had already been banned by GCA '68. (Needless to say, a ban was being pushed by domestic makers, some of whom owned influential Congressmen and Senators.)
Two of each model were tested, then shot 5000 rounds or to destruction using proof loads. Except that the results didn't come out the way they were supposed to. Some of the cheapest foreign guns held up, while "high quality" domestic guns failed. Among the failures were the two Escorts, which had their sideplates blown off by proof loads.
Granted, the repeated firing of proof loads was unfair. Normally, a proof load is fired only once for each chamber. But the damage, in any meaning of that word, was done and the Escort was discontinued in 1974.
Jim
P.S. If you have an Escort, don't scrap it; in top shape they bring $500 or so, retail. But don't take it all apart; they are very tricky to get back together.
P.P.S. After having spent a bunch of the taxpayers' money, and failing to prove that foreign guns were evil and dangerous, the subject was quietly dropped and the anti-gun gang went on to attempts to ban other kinds of "evil" weapons, gun shows, and hunting. They are still at it, though most U.S gun makers realized that they had made a deal with the Devils and learned that the anti-gun gangsters simply cannot be trusted.
JK
