What guns did crime fighters use during
the Prohibition Years?
The square butt was standard on early models and not rounded by Colt until later.
When I was a kid growing up, one of my favorite TV shows was The Untouchables, starring Robert Stack as Eliot Ness, the leader of the real-life squad of Federal agents who took down the murderous Chicago gang boss Al Capone in one of the great law enforcement victories of the Depression years.
Even then, I read magazines like GUNS and knew Stack wasn’t just an actor, but one of us, a certified pro-Second Amendment gun enthusiast. Indeed, he was more. Bob Stack was a former national champion clay bird shooter. It was good to see at least one actor on the screen who knew what to do with the guns the scriptwriters put in his hands.
Narrated melodramatically by Walter Winchell, The Untouchables seemed to shoot at least one bad guy almost every episode, with Stack as “Ness” leading the killing parade. The whole squad of Feds was armed with Colt Official Police revolvers, and if my memory serves, they were late model guns with the flattened, semi-ramped front sights produced from the mid-1950s to 1968.
All the TV Untouchables carried them in butt-up shoulder holsters of the Heiser and George Lawrence style, which actually were correct to the period. The choice of gun was more or less correct, too. Colt’s Army Special was indeed the most popular law enforcement handgun of the first half of the 20th century, a .41-frame .38 Special whose name Colt changed (changing virtually nothing else) to Official Police in 1927. The Official Police was reportedly the first official service revolver of J. Edgar Hoover’s fledgling FBI, and you don’t get better “Federal law enforcement officer” creds than that from the history books.
The trouble is, Eliot Ness didn’t carry one. Neither, apparently, did any other member of his squad whose choice of weapons made it into printed history.
Even then, I read magazines like GUNS and knew Stack wasn’t just an actor, but one of us, a certified pro-Second Amendment gun enthusiast. Indeed, he was more. Bob Stack was a former national champion clay bird shooter. It was good to see at least one actor on the screen who knew what to do with the guns the scriptwriters put in his hands.
Narrated melodramatically by Walter Winchell, The Untouchables seemed to shoot at least one bad guy almost every episode, with Stack as “Ness” leading the killing parade. The whole squad of Feds was armed with Colt Official Police revolvers, and if my memory serves, they were late model guns with the flattened, semi-ramped front sights produced from the mid-1950s to 1968.
All the TV Untouchables carried them in butt-up shoulder holsters of the Heiser and George Lawrence style, which actually were correct to the period. The choice of gun was more or less correct, too. Colt’s Army Special was indeed the most popular law enforcement handgun of the first half of the 20th century, a .41-frame .38 Special whose name Colt changed (changing virtually nothing else) to Official Police in 1927. The Official Police was reportedly the first official service revolver of J. Edgar Hoover’s fledgling FBI, and you don’t get better “Federal law enforcement officer” creds than that from the history books.
The trouble is, Eliot Ness didn’t carry one. Neither, apparently, did any other member of his squad whose choice of weapons made it into printed history.
There's More Handguns in
the January issue...
• Dick Special
• Ness In Action
• M1917 .45s
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