I just bought a book called:
From 1450 to the Present Day The World's Great Handguns. By Roger Ford
It starts off pretty interesting like most of these type books, history of cannon, gun powder etc... but then it rambles on about gun manufacturers and in a scatter-brained manner jumps around describing different guns, ignition methods, actions etc...
It loosely and haphazardly decribes his pistol designs in no particular order mixing colt dragoons with nambus and flintlocks.
My main problem with the book is the illustrations. They do not match what is being described in the text.
Each photograph or illustration gives the caliber of a gun as a number instead of a cartridge for example:
Colt .38 special Detective
Caliber .38 in 9.6mm
Most people know a .38 is .357in :banghead:
Every illustration unless the bullet size is exact they take the name literally
.44 magnum 11.17 mm
.44 mag is .429 which is 10.89mm
I can't see how the author who is supposedly a weapons expert could let 80
pages of these glaring errors be published.
To make matters worse he turns this supposedly encylclopedic work into a politcal soap box:
The Author Roger Ford is a specialist military and aviation writer who has written the "definitive book on macine guns "The Grim Reaper"
His area of expertise is weapons technology and employment of weapons on the battlefield. He currently lives in France.
From 1450 to the Present Day The World's Great Handguns. By Roger Ford
It starts off pretty interesting like most of these type books, history of cannon, gun powder etc... but then it rambles on about gun manufacturers and in a scatter-brained manner jumps around describing different guns, ignition methods, actions etc...
It loosely and haphazardly decribes his pistol designs in no particular order mixing colt dragoons with nambus and flintlocks.
My main problem with the book is the illustrations. They do not match what is being described in the text.
Each photograph or illustration gives the caliber of a gun as a number instead of a cartridge for example:
Colt .38 special Detective
Caliber .38 in 9.6mm
Most people know a .38 is .357in :banghead:
Every illustration unless the bullet size is exact they take the name literally
.44 magnum 11.17 mm
.44 mag is .429 which is 10.89mm
I can't see how the author who is supposedly a weapons expert could let 80
pages of these glaring errors be published.
To make matters worse he turns this supposedly encylclopedic work into a politcal soap box:
The Black Talon should have probably been on sale only to law enforcemrnt agencies right from the start, but Winchester made them available to the general public for "defensive and hunting purposes" an apologist adding, by the way of explanation 'after all more criminals are confronted by private citizens than by police officers' The black talon round, a bullet designed to rip your guts out (as described by one US legislator) came under such concerted attack that the company withdrew it from sale in 1993 while continuing to insist, perhaps somewhat ingenuously in view of its decision to put it on the open market that it had only been developed in response to demand from law enforecement agencies.
The Author Roger Ford is a specialist military and aviation writer who has written the "definitive book on macine guns "The Grim Reaper"
His area of expertise is weapons technology and employment of weapons on the battlefield. He currently lives in France.