If Bill Ruger were alive and running the show in Southport, this three-screw .22 would hold nothing but pleasant memories, including the time Dad shot it into the ground to scare off a bunch of thuggy teenagers who kept farting around in his back yard. (Bad procedure, of course, but it happened to work this time.) And including the buddy I bought it from in about 1970, Mark Brown of Blackfoot, Idaho, a good friend and outstanding journalist who died way too young.
The good vibes stop with a decision to have the "safety" conversion installed and a factory refinish. The reblue was excellent, and a metal polisher in Connecticut is to be congratulated for outstanding restraint and attention to the owner requests.
After that the new Ruger company behaved in a way designed to send gun buyers running to another maker. Any other maker, probably. Not to put too fine a point on things, the damned revolver wouldn't shoot, even though a Ruger "technician" certified he had tested it and been pleased as punch with how well it worked.
Maybe gremlins invaded the shipping box and arranged things so the cylinder wouldn't lock, the hammer wouldn't reliably cock , and, sometimes, the entire set of innards would lock up. Email after email and two USPS letters went ignored until, months later, I was advised to return the gun "for evaluation."
A guy gets angry enough and does something he hates to do. He disassembles a single -action revolver and looks things over. Transfer bar actually broken, its selvage edge snaggable on the firing pin. Bolt burred. The fix on the shop bench took maybe 30 minutes. It taught a lesson: Retain the utmost respect for Bill Ruger, but never again trust the company which has passed into the hands of marketeers and cost accountants.
Now that it shoots, it's a lovely little thing, as is the western rig built for it by Janine Ann for Ottis Rollin.
5 comments:
Except, if Bill Ruger had his way, single action revolvers would be about all he would sell to civilians. Seeing as how "No honest man needs more than 10 rounds in a magazine".
It wasn't until the old Quisling died that Ruger returned to selling standard capacity magazines to civilians and started making guns for the burgeoning CCW market.
I dunno, Joe. Bill died in 2002, and I recall snapping hi-cap magazines into Mini-14s and P-85s long, long before then.
(Didn't some one once asked Jeff Cooper if a guy really needed a 14-round magazine? And didn't Jeff say, "only if he intends to miss a lot." :))
Jim, google: "The Ruger Letter".
If you didn't know about this, you'll be in for some interesting reading.
I was working in Washington in those days, taking an occasional small consulting check from institutional Republicans. That and my enjoyment of guns and the shooting sports kept me I familiar with Bill Ruger's statements which, on the surface at least, were oddly out of character.
My view at the time was that he was looking at a political climate that had a high potential for Britainizing United States gun laws. Assuming he was correct -- and I think he well may have been -- it was a fairly shrewd political move to keep attention focused on magazines.
Among other things, the wounding of Jim Brady in the Reagan attempt was a fresh memory, as was the Lennon slaying. These and other shootings combined to create an era of greater danger to Amendment Two (and 9 and 10, of course), than anything since the Kennedy assassinations.
Ruger aimed, among other things, to head off legislation which would have turned even Ruger 10-22s, Marlin 60s, Colt Woodsmen and the like into NFA weapons or worse.
Of course I can't prove this was Ruger's carefully thought-out dialectical strategy, but we need to leave open the possiblilty that he was reluctantly willing to sacrificing an important principle to save an even more crucial one.
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