would you buy a 4 inch barreled .38 special ?

The history of one of the most successful revolver designs of all times, the Smith & Wesson's "Military And Police", began in 1899, when S&W began to manufacture its "Hand Ejector" model in .38 Long Colt caliber. In 1902, S&W introduced the .38 hand Ejector revolver in its new chambering, the .38 Special, and during the following years continued to slightly improve the design. The 38 Hand Ejector took its shape in 1915. In 1920s, Smith & Wesson renamed the 38 Hand Ejector into Military and Police model, and in 1958, after introduction of the model numbering system, S&W assigned to the Military & Police revolver a model number 10. During the century, the total numbers of the M&Ps manufactured by S&W could be estimated at rough six millions plus, give or take. This included some 1 million or so revolvers, delivered to the US Government during the WW 2, and a large numbers of revolvers, manufactured for export into British Commonwealth countries.

In general, the M&P was one of the most popular police revolvers in the USA. Some sources said, that at some time period, some 80% of ALL US Police departments were armed with M&P revolvers! These guns were also used by US Military, especially in US Air Force and US Navy. The M&P's were widely copied by numerous manufacturers in Spain, France and other countries.

Technically, all M&P revolvers are double action, swing-out cylinder revolvers. All M&P family revolvers featured similar medium sized frame (S&W nomenclature code: K-frame); All M&Ps featured dual-locked 6 chamber cylinders (one lock is manually operated by the latch, located at the left side of the frame behind the cylinder and locks the rear part of the cylinder axis; another lock is a spring-loaded one that locks the front part of the cylinder axis/ejector rod under the barrel). Standart M&Ps featured fixed front sight and fixed rear sight, in the form of the groove, cut in the top of the frame. Some target versions (sse below) featured ramp front sight with ajustable rear sights. Original material of the frame was the carbon steel, blued or parkerised; later, lightweight alluminium alloy frames and stainless teeel frames were introduced. Original barrels were from 2 to 8 1/2 inches long, of thin profile, with exposed ejector rod. Later, "heavy barrel" models were introduced. Some later models also featured barrels with upper rib and / or enclosed ejector rod.

Here is the list of the most common M&P models, manufactured during the last 100 or so years.


38 Hand Ejector - opriginal model. In 1899, introduced in 38 Long; in 1902 in .38 Special.
Military & Police - Hand Ejector .38 Spl, renamed somewhere in 1920s.
Victory model - WW2, military issue M&P's with rough finish, plain wood grip panels and lanyard ring. manufactured for US Military in .38Spl and for British Commonwealth in .38/200, with 4 or 5 inch barrels.
Military and Police, Model 10 - M&P, numbered in 1958. Curently in production.
Military and Police, Model 11 - M&P, chambered for British service .38/200 cartridge. In production since 1936, discontinued in 1965
Military and Police Airweight, Model 12 - similar to Model 10, but with alluminium alloy frame. In production since 1953, discontinued in 1986
Military and Police Magnum, Model 13 - M&P with thick, heavy barrel, chambered in .357 magnum cartridge. In production since 1973, discontinued.
K-38 Masterpiece, Model 14 - Target version of the M&P, with 6 or 8 inch barrel and ajustable sights. In production since 1947, discontinued in 1982
K-38 Combat Masterpiece, Model 15 - Version of the Model 14, with ribbed barrels of 2, 4 or 6 inches long and ajustable sights. In production since 1949, discontinued.
K-32 Masterpiece, Model 16 - Target version of the M&P, chambered for .32 S&W Long, otherwiose similar to K-38 model 14. In production since 1947, discontinued in 1973
K-22 Masterpiece, Model 17 - Target version of the M&P, chambered for .22LR. In production since 1946, discontinued
K-22 Combat Masterpiece, Model 18 - Version of the Model 15, chambered for .22LR. In production since 1949, discontinued in 1986
Combat Magnum, Model 19 - M&P with heavy barrel, chambered for .357 Magnum, with ajustable sights. In production since 1955, discontinued
Military and Police Stainless, Models 64, 65, 66, 67 - M&Ps with heavy barrels (2, 4 or 6 inches long) and stainless steel frames; Models 64 and 67 are chambered in .38 Special, models 65 and 66 - in .357 Magnum. Models 64 and 65 featured original, model 10-like fixed sights, models 66 and 67 - ajustable sights. Currently in production.
These stailess steel models replaced previous, similar carbon steel models in the following order:
Model 13 - replaced by Model 65.
Model 19 - replaced by Model 66.
Model 15 - replaced by Model 67.
Model 10 - complemented by Model 64.

In 1955, the year GUNS magazine was born, the police handgun situation in the United States had been static for decades. The revolver ruled, with only a handful of small town cops and felony squad detectives carrying semiautomatics, usually the Colt Government Model .45. For the rest, the choices were stark: a Colt or Smith & Wesson double action sixgun, typically .38 Special, and in rare cases .357 Magnum. A handful of cops were authorized S&W .44 Specials, and the New York State Police were just transitioning from the Colt New Service .45 Colt to Smith & Wesson .38 Specials.

Colt and S&W introduced two revolvers apiece, which would ultimately vault the .357 Magnum cartridge into newfound popularity. In 1954, Colt debuted the "357" model; the first affordable service revolver police chiefs perceived as "holster size" for that high-powered round. Until then, only the deluxe, expensive S&W .357 on its massive .44 frame was available.

Smith & Wesson had, for the first time in the history of their long duel, outsold archrival Colt in the police sector. They couldn't let this magnum challenge from Colt go by. Bill Jordan, famed Border Patrolman, suggested to S&W CEO Carl Hellstrom the firm make a .38-frame .357 with heavy barrel and shrouded ejector. Year 1955 saw the Combat Magnum introduced to instant success. Slightly smaller than the Colt 357 (later named the Trooper) and definitely sleeker, the Combat Magnum instantly took a huge lead over Colt. In the same year, Colt introduced its deluxe, hand-fitted Python, which became the ultimate "status gun" among street cops. S&W also introduced the plain-Jane .357 Highway Patrolman, which tied the Colt 357 for price point at the bottom end of the bid-intensive law enforcement market.

1954 had seen the introduction of Smith & Wesson's Model 39 sleek double-action 9mm semiauto pistol, but the 39 would not catch fire until 1967. That was the year that Louis Seman of the Illinois State Police, disgusted with lousy qualification scores with the 2" Colt and Smith .38s the troopers carried off duty, convinced the Superintendent that by adopting the Model 39, a single lightweight, concealable handgun could be carried by all personnel in uniform and plainclothes.

ISP's adoption of the 39 earned major stories in the police professional journals and gun magazines alike. (It would later be a key element in one of the finer multi-part stories published in GUNS, "The Saga of Smith's Parabellums" by Jan Stevenson.) However, most American law enforcement thought this too radical an approach, and no other state police organization adopted an autoloader until the early 1980s.

The Firepower Race

A number of police departments in California, Arizona and New Mexico either authorized or outright adopted the Colt .45 automatic. Jeff Cooper's articulate articles had a lot to do with that. So did the Heene Report, published in the authoritative police journal Law and Order, which systematically determined the 1911 .45 to be the most logical of police handguns, particularly with the round-nose non-expanding ammunition of the period.

In the early 1960s, Lee Jurras and his Super Vel Company introduced commercially manufactured hollowpoint ammunition, emphasizing lighter bullets at higher velocities. Two good things happened. Those with .38s now had ammo more likely to help them survive a gunfight. The .357 Magnum (anathema to most police chiefs for fear that it would overpenetrate and strike down bystanders--a well founded concern) got a lighter, faster, expanding Magnum slug not only likely to stay in the body, but inflict a wound more likely to end a fight. Only now, 30 years after its introduction did the .357 Magnum become hugely popular among American police with the combination of more portable handguns and more effective ammunition.

If the .357 Magnum was a huge success, the .41 Magnum can only be judged a huge failure. Introduced in 1964 by S&W and Remington, it was touted as the gun to replace the .38 Special. It didn't. Built on the big .44 "N" frame, it was too large and heavy for most cops, and even with its non-Magnum "police load" recoiled too violently for many.

That '70s Show

The period around 1970 was spectacular in terms of change in U.S. police handguns. The changes hit first among service revolvers. Circa 1969, Ruger introduced the Security-Six revolver, and the two-party politics of Colt and S&W had suddenly become a three-lane race, with the new dark horse coming up fast. Built with the latest manufacturing principles and design, Ruger's .38/.357 fit holsters for K-frame Smiths and had the durability of the bigger Magnums.

Desperate to regain its market dominance over S&W, Colt cashiered its labor-intensive I-frame revolvers (keeping the prestigious Python) and introduced the new Mark III, which used sintered metal technology in the action parts. Most avoided this new Colt as inferior. Ruger quickly swept into the No. 2 spot and was soon biting the backside of market leader S&W.

That had become a vulnerable butt to chomp. The '70s saw court decisions such as Popow vs. Margate, which mandated more realistic training. In 1970, four young California Highway Patrol officers were slaughtered by two hard-core felons in a gunfight in Newhall. One factor unearthed by the subsequent investigation was most were carrying Magnum ammo, but trained with light .38 loads and couldn't deliver hits when it counted. Cops with .357s started doing all their training with Magnum loads--and doing it faster.

When S&W introduced the first stainless steel revolver in 1965--the Model 60 variation of the five-shot snub-nose Chief Special .38--it was a huge success. S&W followed with service revolvers culminating with the Model 66, a stainless version of the Combat Magnum. The 66 became the new status gun in American law enforcement.

About the same time, Remington introduced what would become the .357 Magnum police load, a 125-grain semi-jacketed hollowpoint at a blistering 1,400 feet per second. It soon proved to, as some Texas cops said, "Drop the bad guy like a lightning bolt." Federal upped the ante with a similar bullet at 1,450 fps. Winchester followed suit, and Remington kept up with them. Departments which got into a lot of shootings with this round--Indianapolis PD, the Kentucky State Police, and others--soon developed awesome records of one-shot stops, which Evan Marshall would later quantify as being in the 90th percentile of likelihood.

The three trends crashed together. Some of these hot Magnum rounds delivered more than 40,000 psi pressure and battered guns. They were being fired very rapidly--all the more so since speedloaders were becoming the norm. The guns they were most often used in were Smith Model 66s--K-frame guns originally sized for low-pressure .38 Special rounds, now running at more than double that pressure, and made of stainless alloys that heated up and expanded more rapidly than chrome molybdenum steel.

The 66s' parts expanded, locked up, and jammed the revolvers. S&W tried fix after fix. Meanwhile, the durable Ruger Security Six absorbed heat better with a slightly larger cylinder and shot merrily along. Departments began trading Smith 66s for Rugers in epic proportions. S&W eventually fixed the 66's problem with a gas ring swaged into the cylinder, but in the meantime introduced the slightly larger L-frame Models 686 (stainless) and 586 (chrome moly).

Ruger, of course, introduced the GP100 in 1986 to take an unlimited diet of the hottest .357 Magnums. Significantly, the Python, 686, and GP100 would fit the same holsters and accept the same speedloaders. The Ruger, positioned for better price on bid and now with the best reputation for durability, was on track to surpass S&W as the most popular police service revolver.

However, something else was brewing. Circa 1971, S&W offered a gun built for the military during Vietnam, a high capacity Model 39 dubbed the Model 59. The 39, with an eight-round single-stack magazine, had frequent malfunctions, impairing trooper confidence. A risk of a jam seemed a poor tradeoff for only two more cartridges than the revolver. But the 59's 14-round mag (soon upgraded to 15 rounds) was a new ball game. An in-gun firepower reservoir two and a half times greater than a revolver was a huge payoff worth a little risk. Meanwhile, back at the Illinois State Police, Bob Cappelli (who had taken over the ordnance unit) and Sebastian Ulrich figured out how to make the 39s work more reliably. S&W drew from that knowledge to improve the reliability of the Model 39-2 and Model 59. The trickle of autos was swelling into a fast-running stream, led by S&W's 59. The race for primacy in the service revolver market would soon become moot.

Smith & Wesson led the police handgun market in revolvers since before GUNS had been founded and owned the tiny police auto market. Now, the rest of the world's pistolmakers began to drool over the huge new market, all the more so because a high-cap 9mm would be in contention to replace the 1911A1 .45 pistol for the U.S. Armed Services.

The main overseas players were Beretta, Heckler and Koch, and SIG-Sauer. Beretta's 92 series and the SIG P226 duplicated the 16-shot capacity that S&W had achieved in the 9mm, and HK's squeeze-cocking P7M13 held 14 cartridges. Smith brought out the second generation autos and the early '80s were a four-way race. Each had its adherents.

Departments from Las Vegas, Nevada Metro to Riverside, Calif., to the Tennessee Highway Patrol adopted the S&W 9mm, and the FBI bought them for their regional SWAT teams. The state troopers of Connecticut and North Carolina adopted the Beretta 92F and many more followed. The Los Angeles County Sheriffs Dept. adopted the 9mm Beretta and, in 1988, so did the Los Angeles Police Dept. This, plus the U.S. military's adoption of the M9 Beretta made it the most popular U.S. police pistol for a while.

By the end of the decade, however, the SIG had swept ahead of the Beretta. The KISS era (Keep It Simple, Stupid) had come to police training. Instructors didn't want to teach safety catch manipulation with Smiths and Berettas; the reliable, accurate SIG merely had a decocking lever, and one particularly easy to operate. Michigan, Massachusetts, and other state police agencies adopted the SIG 9mm; so did Orlando, Florida and many other PDs, as did the FBI for new agents and SWAT teams.

Too "foreign" in its operation and priced out of the market by the rising Deutschmark, the HK P7 drifted away after adoption by a few. Early flaws in the Ruger P85 earned it a bad reputation. Only Wisconsin state troopers and San Diego, California, PD adopted it, though the Ruger would become extremely popular with Chicago PD, where coppers bought their own pistols.

Soon all makers were eclipsed by the polymer-framed Austrian Glock. Light, cheap, incredibly rugged and stunningly easy to shoot well with, it took the U.S. police market by storm. Liability-obsessed chiefs on one side and KISSing cousin firearms instructors on the other pushed for double-action-only autos, and when ATF declared the Glock to be such, the dam broke. As the '90s dawned, the high-cap 9mm pistols dominated American policing, and the Glock was their king.

The '90s: Big-Bore Revenge

While the 9mm ruled, the .45 ACP had many enthusiasts. Huntington Beach, California PD adopted a double action .45 Browning BDA/SIG P220, and many agencies followed, including the Texas Highway Patrol. Year 1983 saw S&W's long awaited .45 Model 645 adopted by LAPD's high-gunfight rolling stakeout squad, the Special Investigations Section.

The FBI's adoption of a 10mm auto co-designed with S&W brought a brief certainty that this was the police round of the future, but the 10mm soon went the way of the .41 Magnum. To make the gun manageable, FBI reduced the 10mm's ballistics. It was eclipsed by S&W and Remington's joint introduction of the .40 S&W.

Duplicating the ballistics of the FBI 10mm round, this shorter cartridge fit a 9mm pistol, and was the ultimate compromise. Where the choice before had been a 16-shot 9mm or an eight-shot .45, the S&W Model 4006 split the difference with an even dozen .40s. California Highway Patrol and Alaska State Troopers adopted the 4006 with great results. Meanwhile, Gaston Glock came back from 1990 SHOT Show with some .40 S&W ammo and a plan to create the most popular police auto yet. Built on a reinforced Glock 17 frame, the new Glock 22 held 16 .40 rounds, making the leap from "compromise" to "best of both worlds."

HK was back in the race with the USP pistol, a conventional double action auto but with a polymer frame and numerous fire control options. In 1993 SIG noticed cops loved autos but missed the "lightning bolt" stopping power of the old 125-grain .357 Magnum round. SIG and Federal created the .357 SIG cartridge, a strengthened and necked-down .40 S&W that spat a 125-grain 9mm JHP slug at some 1,350 fps. Delaware troopers adopted it first and the .357 SIG soon "made its bones" with Virginia and Texas troopers. Secret Service and Sky Marshals adopted the .357 SIG. Soon Beretta, Glock, HK and S&W were chambering it, too.

The .45 was also back with a vengeance. Chicago PD, LAPD, and LA County made .45 optional in the '90s. The FBI went to it exclusively for the hostage rescue unit (ParaOrdnance) and regional SWAT teams (Springfield Armory). These were both 1911s.

Into the New Millennium

Led by Kimber, the 1911 pistol began a minor renaissance in the 21st century. Once banned as "too dangerous for the rank and file," the cocked and locked single-action auto was approved by Tacoma, Washington, and San Diego, California PDs, among others. The ParaOrdnance LDA, a 1911 with double action only trigger mechanism, was adopted by a few.

Glock consolidated its rule, rising to more than 70 percent market dominance. LAPD authorized the Glock in 9mm, .40 and .45, with the latter being the overwhelming choice and standard with special high-risk units such as K9 and SIS. LAPD SWAT, which had carried Colt .45 autos since their inception more than three decades before, adopted the cocked-and-locked Kimber.

It is now 50 years since the late George von Rosen conceived GUNS and the publication has borne witness to, literally, a direct reversal of paradigm in American police handguns. In 1955, the revolver ruled, usually the S&W .38 Special, with a handful of cops carrying pocket autos for backup or in plainclothes and a very few wise old gunnies wearing service automatics. In 2005, the service auto rules, with the Glock in .40 S&W the most popular. A handful of cops carry pocket revolvers on plainclothes duty and a number still use them for backup, but only a very few stubborn old heads still carry them as primary duty sidearms. In 1955, chiefs were concerned that revolver-trained cops might not know how to safely unload an auto pistol taken from a perpetrator. Today, there are some young rookies who have to call a sergeant to ask how to unload a revolver confiscated on the street.

The readers of GUNS were witness to change. You--and for some, your forebears--saw it happen in these pages. We in law enforcement can only wonder what the next 50 years will bring.

COPYRIGHT 2005 Publishers' Development Corporation
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group

maybe I should have asked if you would carry one while enforcing the law..our prison guards are armed, I'm told with .38 specials (though I'm sure they rely more on shotguns and Ruger .223s)..every now and then I see armed security guards and armored truck personnel carry them too

[Joshua M. Smith]

Yes, I would carry one. With the right loads they're effective. I'd like a NY reload however as I'm a lefty.

Josh <><

[ducktapehero]

I would feel well armed with a 38 revolver. My 1st choice, even with the newfangled automatics would be a Smith 625. Revolver reliability, 45acp stopping power and lightning fast reloads.

[at4rxj]

While I didn't read all that, I voted no. I'd either go with a 2" for carrying or a 6-8" for target shooting. 4" seems like it wouldn't be as good for either.

[Father Time]

Actually, I did buy one. My main handgun, a 4" Smith Model 60 is 357, but I seldom shoot anything but 38 Spl. In an urban setting, I'm nervous about touching off a 357. I do load 357 for deer hunting though.

My carry gun, a 2" Smith Model 640 is also 357, but I doubt that it will ever shoot 357s.