The headline of this article, that Taurus signs Jessie Harrison-Duff (formerly Jessie Abbate) to captain their new shooting team was the first thing Shelley told me when I rolled into the office this morning. “It’s too early for April fool’s pranks, and I’ve not had enough coffee yet” was my reply. Then she showed me a link to the Shooting Wire press release about same, which was followed by me checking my email and seeing an email presser about it as well. “I’ll be damned”, I said then immediately doubled checked the calendar just to make sure it wasn’t April 1st.
After decided to sit down and write a proper editorial about this, I really have conclusion that I can reach – this is actually pretty awesome. My objections to Taurus’ quality control aside, I can’t ignore that they make a ton of guns that sell really well and seeing them get into the shooting sports is actually a cool deal. Making a Taurus open gun for competition is as simple as slapping the Taurus logo on an STI slide and calling it good, much the same as Max Michel’s “Sig” 1911 Open guns.
Whenever a company with as much money behind it as Taurus has gets involved in the action shooting sports, the net is that we all as shooters benefit. Does this mean Taurus could produce a competition version of their 24/7 pistol for Production division? Hopefully, yes. A couple of “Jessie Harrison Signature Series” 1911s would be cool as well.
I’m interested to see what comes from Jessie signing with Taurus; especially if she continues to shoot primarily Open and Limited. I would expect to see her at Single Stack Nationals with a rig; that would be very interesting indeed. I’m not going to lie, the Taurus 1911s in 9mm have always intrigued me, and if they end up making one that runs well and is still reasonably priced…who knows?