"Col. Jeff Cooper was known as someone who believed that there was no point in a handgun whose caliber did not begin with .4. (Had he lived to see it, he’d probably warm up to the .500 S&W)."
Ummm, Jeff attended the Shot Show the .500 was introduced at, I am almost certain, Weaponsman. Why yes, about it he said:
"We have referred to the new giant 50 caliber revolver by Smith & Wesson as the "Dino pistol." The word dino in Greek means approximately "terrible," as with dinosaur (terrible lizard), dinopithecus (terrible ape), dinichthys (terrible fish), and so on. It appears that the 500 Smith & Wesson is quite terrible to a certain political journalist from Chicago who rushed to press with the idea that the new Smith should be just the weapon for street gangs. Just how this fellow got a job as a journalist is not clear, but he obviously does not know much about either pistols or street gangs. Whatever a street punk may have in mind for his "nefarious little plans," this Smith 500 is pretty close to the worst possible answer."
He did publish books after the .500 was around. Don't put the man in the ground too early. And he seems of 2 minds with regard to the pistols purpose.
Why make a .500 revolver? Why, to SELL, of course.
Regarding the street-gang theme:
ReplyDeleteI remember reading at the time that a major newspaper in England was reporting that the .500 Smith was the hot new weapon of choice for street gangs, most of its purchasers were gangbangers, and it had been used in several gang shootings. (I never saw the original reports, just the report of the report, so I can't vouch for any of this.)
At the time the article was published in England, the number of .500 Smiths that had been sold was . . . zero.
In defense of Cooper's love for larger caliber pistols, reliably expanding and feeding 9mm hollow points weren't developed until very near the end of his life. Had they been around 40 or 50 years earlier he might have felt differently.
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