For almost the entirety of the 19th century, “repeating handgun” effectively meant “revolver.” Toward the close of that era, however, various mechanisms were employed to harness the energy of a fired cartridge to eject the spent case and feed a new one into the chamber in its place.
Considering that the single most prolific originator of those mechanisms was one John Moses Browning, a citizen of the United States, it’s a matter of high irony that the U.S. domestic handgun market largely remained revolver country until well into the 1980s, nearly a hundred years after Browning ironed out his basic self-loader mechanisms.
A large part of the reluctance of domestic shooters to wholeheartedly embrace the semiauto was because of Browning’s most iconic design, the M1911 (known in its civilian guise as the Colt’s Government Model), and the reasons behind that were twofold.
The smaller of the two reasons
