Front Sight, Press

This is my Springfield Armory Mil-Spec. It’s the pistol I bought in 1997 to start shooting IDPA. It’s the pistol that inspired The Sight M1911. It’s the one that, when I fired the first magazine, I said, “Wow!” It’s the one that my son, Alex, prefers over his $1K Kimber for matches, and he never ceases to try to get me to give it to him, and calls it “my pistol,” but I won’t give it to him, at least not yet, not until I’m too old and feeble to shoot it. I haven’t shot it in several years, in part because Alex is always shooting it, and in part because I have come to prefer the Combat Commander for matches. The Government Models are a little slow for me in terms of getting onto the target. Yet, I love this gun like few others. It’s in that rarified rank with the Winchester Model 94 with which I took my first deer. I have other pistols, but none of them have the psychic power that this one does.

My dad was a tremendous repository of bullshit about the Government Model .45. Most of those tales like, “If you hit a man in the thumb with one it will spin him around,” and, “A normal person couldn’t hit a door at 20 feet with one,” I heard first from him. The irony was that he had carried one during his brief stint in law enforcement before I was born. He was Navy and I don’t know if he actually got any training on the gun during the war. But, nevertheless, one of the first tasks I had with the gun was to work through the lore and stories, and separate fact from fiction.

The SA Mil-Spec was a game gun for me from the start. I wanted to check out the sport of IDPA which was new at that time. That’s why I bought a big, heavy gun. I think I only actually carried it for personal defense once. It’s just a bit too heavy to be comfortable for me for carry. Big guns like this are more pleasant to shoot for matches and such. The follow-up is excellent; accuracy is inspiring, and abuse to hands is kept at a minimum. It never was about the calibers. It was about “shoot-ability.” I just noticed immediately that I got better hits faster with the SA/45 ACP combo than with the other handguns I had tried. The inherent accuracy of the pistol, its excellent trigger, and the .45 ACP cartridge make it a rewarding handgun to fire. However, I didn’t get rid of my lightweight snubs and compact 9mm’s that served for personal defense. The rest, as they say, is getting to be history at an alarming rate. The Sight M1911 will celebrate its first decade in January of 07.

The main frame home page of The Sight M1911 has had 1,412,731 hits. That’s over a million hits on one page of that web site, and the site has well over 500 pages at this point. That’s an honest number. I started the counter at 0 in ‘97 and I have never messed with it. I won’t say that The Sight is the “best” thing I have ever done, but it has definitely had the most impact of any piece of writing I have done, and this pistol was the impetus for it.

Unconsciously, this particular pistol has influenced a million people. I find that statistic staggering — the miracle of the internet, I guess. It has never “fired a shot in anger.” It didn’t have to. It’s an icon. I started my e-mail newsletter in 1999 just to alert people on what was going on in gun rights, and on my mind at the time was defending my right to keep and bear this pistol. This pistol is “mythical” in the sense that it is a symbol that points to a reality that is beyond it, and for the most part, inexpressible. How do you describe freedom and heroism? This gun points to that level of meaning. It demands that you search out the stories of heroes and villains who have fought with the M1911, like York, Basilone, Dillinger and Barrow. That’s where this gun takes you — to some of the darkest moments of the 20th Century. There is perhaps one other handgun that has this kind of effect, and that would be the Colt Single Action Army revolver. The old six-gun is an antique, obsolete for anything except cowboy action shooting. The 1911, old as it is, is not at all obsolete, and is probably more popular and more in use today than at any time in its illustrious history.

I do consider the M1911A1 to be the greatest fighting handgun, but that’s just my opinion and you know what they say about opinions. There are other fine pistols that will do the job, but none to my knowledge have seen the moments of greatness that Old Slabsides has. There are none that feel quite as “right” in my hand, or burn up the stages quite as well for me. Most of all, no other firearm has fired my imagination and sustained a decade-long effort to understand and describe it that this one has.

The Mil-Spec is really nothing special when viewed objectively, just a 95% true reproduction of the G.I. M1911A1 of World War II. But to me, it’s something more like a magic carpet.