Smokeless powder is powder that burns with little or no smoke. And of course, stainless steel is steel that won’t stain. So a hammerless revolver must be one that has no hammer, right? Uh-uh, I afraid not. The term is often misused. The user of the term is trying to describe an internal hammer revolver or a spur-less hammer revolver. This type of gun has a long history in America, with some models dating to before the cartridge era. The advantages of such a firearm are considerable, but let’s look at the standard features. Usually, there is a humped or rounded upper rear corner on the receiver. Within the receiver, there is a pivoting hammer that includes or contacts a firing pin to fire a round. Since there is no way to get to the hammer from the outside, it cannot be cocked and is fired via long-arc DA trigger pull, or in more modern terminology, a DAO. There’s an advantage to a gun with a closed action that keeps debris out and even more of an advantage to a pocket gun with little in the way of latches, levers and what-not to snag on clothes and equipment. That’s why these internal hammer wheelguns have been on the scene almost from the earliest days. They are not new.

One of the firearms that has always fascinated me is the wheellock. If you have ever seen a Zippo lighter and a clock that has a key to wind, then you will understand the basic concept. The National Firearms Museum has a wheellock that is attributed to John Alden, which is called the “Mayflower Gun” because we are pretty sure that is how it got to North America. Sadly, the museum staff has no sense of humor about shooting national treasures, so we asked Dale Shinn to send us one of his excellent replicas, a Germanic, ornate wheellock pistol.

As a rookie cop, I was issued the typical Saw Browne rig, complete with handcuff case, baton ring, key holder and Border Patrol holster (a crummy one that I quickly replaced with a Don Hume). In those days, ammo rode in dump pouches or a belt slide with cartridge loops. We got dump pouches and thus equipped, I went forth to protect the good people of Orange County. A year or two into my new career, someone came up with a marvelous new device called the speed loader. The first that I saw were made of rubber and were somewhat bell shaped with a flat bottom that had six cartridge slots. The shooter dumped his fired rounds on the ground, indexed a loaded speedloader into the six chambers of a cylinder and peeled the loader away. Thus did the reloading process speed up. In the years that followed, many such devices came on the market and I tried every one I could find. There was something to commend each of them and you had to wonder why no one had ever thought of this before.