Packin' eighteen rounds of .357 magnum...

After listening to some law enforcement officers talking after church about how there isn't any room left on their duty-belts for anything else with the S&W M&P 40, magazines, taser, handcuffs, ASP baton, rubber gloves pouch, pepper spray, radio, and other assorted items that even Batman wouldn't have thought of for his utility belt... I was thinking about way back to the good ol' days when I worked for a few years in law enforcement.

In the mid-1980s the military had adopted the Beretta M9 and Mel Gibson was shooting smiley faces at fifty yards in Lethal Weapon with the Beretta 92F.  Our department was still carrying .357 magnums... you know... six-shooters... wheel-guns... either the S&W Model 66, S&W Model 686, or Ruger GP100 in stainless steel with four-inch barrels firing Federal 158 grain Hydra-Shoks.

Those revolvers were reliable, built like a brick outhouse, and there was little argument about the stopping power of the .357 magnum cartridge.  We carried six in the cylinder and two HKS speed-loaders for a total of eighteen rounds.  Yeah, there was an extra box of ammo in the cruiser along with a Remington 870 shotgun loaded with 00-buckshot, but our force continuum was limited primarily in range from our gift of gab to our hands or PR-24 and finally to the .357 magnum.

 

It's funny how I wouldn't even consider an open/uncovered trigger holster today and the only vest we wore back then for protection was a sweater in cold weather.  In the late 1980s the department entered the future when they issued everyone S&W 4516 semi-autos in .45ACP.  With three magazines of .45ACPs and one in the chamber... we were packin' firepower with 25 rounds at our disposal.

That good ol' GP100 has had somewhere north of 20,000 rounds through it over the years, six at a time, and has never failed me yet... but looking back, we must have been just a step or two ahead of Barney Fife's one-in-the-pocket...

We were packin' eighteen rounds of .357 magnum...