Scratches Tell Stories
Flaws To Some, Character To Others
The scars a gun earns tell stories, even if their history is only relevant to the owner.
I’ve bought a lot of used guns. The holster-worn ones silently speak of years serving to protect the owner and often others. They’re salty. They tell stories.
And they tell you something about the people who built them, as well as the ones who own them. I watched Ron Power build Power Custom #500 for me in his shop, and wrote about it back in the 1970s. I won some matches with it (and of course, lost some) and got a plaque for firing the first shot at the first Bianchi Cup with it in 1979. I have it still. It reminds me of some great times. It bears Ron’s mechanical DNA of course but also that of Smith & Wesson and of Douglas in its barrel and BoMar in its sights. It’s an exquisite piece of purpose-built machinery and a testament to American craftsmanship.
I have a military surplus Colt .45 auto built in 1918 that would make a collector recoil from what I did with it. It was a Christmas present when I was 12 years old and already a follower of Jeff Cooper’s work. The sights, hammer, grip and thumb safety are all updated, and even the stippling and mag well-beveling deface it in the eyes of a Colt purist. But it was the gun I carried when working in my dad’s jewelry store, the first service auto I holstered on police duty, and the first of one of my favorite breeds of firearm. And, yes, it has the “idiot scratch” from so many times re-assembling it per the 1911 guide the NRA sold. It may be ugly but it’s still special to its owner.
The Harder-Earned Scars
I know a retired California cop who still has the S&W 25-5 in .45 Colt he carried on the job in his early years. He has mentioned the teeth marks on it from the time he had to use it as an impact weapon so he wouldn’t have to shoot the particularly violent suspect he finally subdued.
Retired in my gun safe is a Colt National Match, the predecessor of the Gold Cup. It has been touched by many gunsmiths, the first of whom were armorers for the USAF Pistol Team out of Lackland Air Base. Its original owner sold it to me for $100 when I was 21, at a bulls-eye match in New Hampshire. There it later felt the ministrations of Nolan Santy, probably the best all-around gunsmith I ever met, and finally Bill Laughridge. Its once-exquisite Royal Blue finish is heavily marred along the slide from countless practice draws and it has a little white circle worn on the left rear of the slide from the safety strap of a duty holster. I carried it at various times on all three police departments where I worked part-time over 40+ years, took suspects at gunpoint with it, shot it with 185-grain Federal Match semi-wadcutters at Bianchi Cup, with hot 190-grain Super Vel at Second Chance and with 230-grain hardball IIRC at the IPSC Nationals in Los Angeles in the late ’70s. It ain’t pretty anymore, but it holds lots of memories.
On my 21st birthday, my dad gave me a new S&W Model 36 Chief Special with a 2″ barrel and semi-square butt. He said, “I hope to Christ you never need to use it, but if you do, don’t miss.” I did need to use it a few times but never had to pull the trigger: The sight of it always did its job. Its lovely blue finish didn’t last a year. Carried in a fabric MMGR belly band when I took my SATs at Dartmouth on a day when the A/C was out, salty sweat had turned the left side of it brown by the time I got home and noticed it. A decade later, carrying it in the same rig lefty after I broke my trigger finger on the way to Chapman Academy Advanced shooting school, it had matching pitting on the other side. “The brown stuff comes off, but ya can’t grow back the steel.”
“Scratched-Up Guns”
If a gun collector tells you “I bought one that was kinda scratched up,” it’s collector-speak for an engraved handgun. Sometimes it’s simply fine artistry in steel, and sometimes it’s an inscription meaning something special to somebody. Let me tell you about a couple of Colt .38 Special snubs in my collection.
Twenty or so years past at the great old Riley’s Sport Shop in Hooksett, NH, I bought a square-butt Detective Special lettered to the New Jersey State Police in the year 1930. It was inscribed “Tpr. Caisse.” No one at NJSP could tell me anything about the trooper, but the wear on the gun showed it had spent a good deal of time helping its wearer protect the citizens.
A decade ago at Chuck’s Guns on the outskirts of Chicago, I found a Colt Agent that had been hard-chromed, and engraved with a detective’s name. Thanks to the good offices of Chicago Lodge 7 of the Fraternal Order of Police, I was able to find the retired detective who’d traded it in. He shared some great stories of his time on Chicago PD.
Don’t disdain the marked-up gun. It has a history with somebody, somewhere. It has … character.