I remember one ad from Smith & Wesson when they first came out with their double-action .44 Magnum revolver: 240 grains of hot lead, exploding out of a big pipe in your hand at 1200 feet per second. . . and super-accurate, even on a running target.

Up until that time we'd all thought the .357 Magnum was just about the bee's nuts. FBI-filed tests had proved what the .357 could do: in one case, with FBI agents giving fire-pursuit to a carload of fleeing suspects, an agent in the pursuing car brought the whole chase to an end with a single shot from his .357 revolver. His slug penetrated the trunk of the fleeing car, then the back seat, then the upper torso of a back seat passenger, then the front seat, then the neck of the driver, then the dashboard, and finally imbedded itself in the engine block. Indeed, the .357 was such a terrifying weapon that for ten years only qualified marksmen were allowed to carry them.

So it just about drove me crazy when -- just after I'd qualified to carry a .357 -- I picked up a new issue of The Police Chief and saw an ad for the .44 Magnum, a brand-new revolver with twice the velocity and twice the striking power of the “old” .357.

One of the first real-life stories I heard about the .44 Magnum was from a Tennessee sheriff whom I met one spring at a law enforcement conference in St. Louis. “Most men can't handle the goddamn thing,” he said. “It kicks worse than a goddamn bazooka, and it hits like a goddamn A-bomb. Last week I had to chase a nigger downtown, and when he got so far away that he couldn't even hear my warning yell, I just pulled down on the bastard with this .44 Magnum and blew the head clean off his body with one shot. All we found were some teeth and one eyeball. The rest was all mush and bone splinters.”

Well. . . let's face it; that man was a bigot. We've learned a lot about racial problems since then. . . but even a nigger could read The Police Chief in 1970 and see that we haven't learned much about weapons. Today's beat cop in any large city is a sitting duck for snipers, rapers, dope addicts, bomb-throwers and communist fruits. These scum are well-armed -- with U.S. Army weapons -- and that's why I finally quit official police work.

As a weapons specialist I saw clearly -- in the years between 1960 and 1969 -- that the Army's weapons-testing program on the Indo-Chinese peninsula was making huge strides. In that active decade the basic military cartridge developed from the ancient 30.06 to the neuter .308 to a rapid-fire .223. That lame old chestnut about “sharpshooters” was finally muscled aside by the proven value of sustained-firescreens. The hand-thrown grenade was replaced, at long last, by the portable grenade launcher, the Claymore mine and the fiery missile-cluster. In the simplest of technical terms, the kill-potential of the individual soldier was increased from 1.6 per second to 26.4-per second -- or nearly five KP points higher than Pentagon figures indicate we would need to prevail in a land war with China.