ROLLING WITH THE .45 AUTO
Over the course of my life, I’ve frequented dozens of gun shops and countless gun shows. The thing with these routines is that they seldom yield more than passing curiosities and the occasional sporterized atrocity. I find that gun shows today are better for buying and selling silver and gold than they are guns, and guns stores have gone from hubs of information and opinion to sterile retail spaces. On rare occasions, I find something truly valuable and interesting, and on one such foray I happened upon a very rare Smith & Wesson Model of 1989.
THE SMITH & WESSON MODEL 1989
The reason I dropped a cool chunk of change on this gun was that it had personal significance to me: One being that it’s a .45 ACP, my favorite round of all time, and the second that it bore the year of my birth. I simply had to have it and, despite not knowing much about it, I slapped down some change and took it home.
I’d never heard much about the Model of 1989, and I needed to do some research to further my understanding. My immediate observation was that it was one from the “good” years of S&W. It had no lock hole in the frame
