I posted a while back about my Glock 29, the one that got away – it occurred to me that my list of guns that I wish I hadn’t sold was at least one gun longer than just the Glock. The other gun I really really wish I hadn’t sold was my first revolver, which oddly enough I sold to get the money for the Glock.
My first wheelgun was a Colt Trooper Mk III that I picked up for a song during my junior year of college – first revolver I ever bought. The rigger on that gun was easily one of the finest I’ve ever pulled, crisp smooth pull, accurate as all get out, and the best part is that I got it for $250.
If anyone has a Colt Trooper Mk III they’d like to part with, let me know and I’ll gladly take it off your hands for a very reasonable price.
You know, of all the guns I’ve had and sold or traded, I think that there were only two that I was actually glad to get rid of. The Hi-Point 9mm I had, and a mini-1911 clone in .380 that cut my hand up. Other than that, I wish I had kept every last one of those guns.
But of them all I wish I had kept the Colt Trooper and the Glock 29 the most. Especially the Colt – there was something about it, something that fed the revolver addiction that my Dad’s Ruger had started when I was a kid. Maybe it’s just me, but there is something that seems so right about a revolver with the pony logo on the grip medallions. And if Colt revolvers are wrong, then I don’t want to be right.
So, the Hi-Point was not exactly at the centerpiece of your collection…
Not really, no. I had bought it in an effort to not be a gun-snob, because I wanted to see if a $149 handgun would perform reliably. Accuracy wasn’t my concern, I just wanted to see if out of the box it went bang every time I pulled the trigger.
It didn’t. I had to do a lot of tweaking with the magazines and the gun itself to make it reliably go bang 5 times out 7 in the magazine, and even once I did that it was manifestly unpleasant to shoot, which I should have expected from a blowback operated 9mm handgun.
So I sold it and put a lot of the money towards my Taurus PT92, which has in 1,000 rounds not had a single failure to fire or failure to feed and shot quite well out of the box.
I’m not trashing Hi-Points in general, because I believe in the concept of low-cost defensive firearms, but the key to a defensive gun is that it must be absolutely reliable.