Back in the late 1980's, Smith & Wesson was in the midst of a radical update of the entire product line. This was the era of the Third Generation autos that ended up filling the holsters of the majority of cops in America. It was also the much-mocked “Gun of the Week” era when an absolute flood of new models hit the market with astounding frequency. The company's marketing was, to say the least, aggressive. Eventually, things calmed down and the product line firmed up. In this period, the old line Massachusetts gunmaker produced some of the finest firearms in their history. These weren't all the self-loaders, either. While not all that well known, the Model 629 Classic DX .44 Mag. revolvers of that era may have been the most accurate wheelguns the company ever produced. There weren't that many of them, but they earned their “DX” marking on the basis of objective evaluation. It makes for an interesting story.

In a lifetime of shooting, I have been involved in a number of forms of competition. My first pistol match was in Basic School at Quantico over 50 years ago. It was a bullseye match fired on the National Match course of slow, timed and rapid fire. Over time, I became an avid, if not spectacularly successful, bullseye competitor. Naturally, I had to have all kinds of specially modified pistols to shoot the course. Later, as a police officer, I was bitten by the PPC bug and traveled all over California to compete. It was a great time (particularly when I was driving a Volkswagen and gas was 30 cents a gallon) and I had the practical advantage of competing on the same course I fired for qualification. Literally, I was training as I was competing—great idea. Then, I became interested the IHMSA game, where we shot at silhouettes of game animals at great distances. This took a powerful and accurate handgun, but the basics of the game were still sight alignment and trigger management. In time, I discovered IPSC, IDPA and SASS and had brief flirtations with these sports. Yep, I have had a heck of a good time competing with handguns. In so doing, I have developed a huge fund of knowledge on how to lose a pistol match, because I have lost more than my share of matches.

One interesting gun that came out of California in the 1970s was the Thomas pistol. The Thomas was a light, mid-sized DAO gun with single-column magazine of .45 cartridges.

There has been a lot of fussing lately about lead bullets. The State of California has banned lead bullets for hunting in certain areas because the endangered California condor was supposedly eating carcass remains, digesting lead fragments and dying.

It must have been the last gallant battle of the Wondernine Wars, but after everybody developed a durable, shootable 9 mm pistol in the 70s and 80s, the ammo industry went into herculean efforts to make 9 mm hollow point ammo that would expand reliably and penetrate deeply.