Classic Pistol Pr0n: From Belgium with love.

In the spirit of the recent "You can choose only two..." games that we played last week, I had to select a pistol to fly north with yesterday. So after several minutes spent staring into the abysses of the gun safes and agonizing over which one to take and which ones to leave like a chick looking into a shoe closet (This is how it is for you ladies, right?) I finally found the perfect week-end traveling pistol--the Browning Hi-Power.

This pistol began as a John Browning design when Fabrique Nationale of Belgium commissioned him to design a new military pistol for the French back in the 1920s. They wanted a pistol that was compact, yet capable of killing a man at 50 meters, held at least ten rounds, and had an external hammer and a magazine disconnect safety. They also wanted reliability and ease of maintenance. Since Browning had already sold the rights to his incredible 1911 to Colt, he had to work around the patents that they now held, and he was still working on two variations--one a locked-breech and one a blow-back design--when he died in 1926. But his work on the locked-breech design was picked up by FN designer Dieudonné Saive, no slouch himself, and eventually the "HP" or "High Power" came to be in 1935, the name being derived from it's 13-round magazine which held more ammo than most of it's contemporaries of the day. Ironically but almost predictably, the French turned up their noses at this pistol, choosing instead to go with the Modele 35, a pistol designed and built in France, that held fewer rounds and was much less cool. The Hi-Power went on to be adopted by over 50 countries with production in the millions, and thanks to the original French demand, they all came out with that magazine-disconnect safety that muddies up the trigger pull. Originally built in Belgium, it was also used by the Nazis after they overran the FN plant and cranked out plenty of Hi-Powers for their own troops as the Pistole 640(b). Meanwhile, seeing this coming, FN brass sent the pistol's plans to Canada, where the John Inglis company continued to make them for the Commonwealth war effort, thus ensuring that Hi-Powers would battle Hi-Powers throughout the war. Of course they would do so again during the Falklands conflict some four decades later, as Argentina and Britain were both still using them as they sparred over those islands out in the middle of nowhere.

Mine is an old Commonwealth military gun, as evidenced by the black baked-on paint, lanyard ring and black plastic grips (replaced by me with Pachmayrs). It's also got a Cylinder and Slide ambidextrous safety that I added so that I, a leftie, can carry it "Condition One". It has a pretty good trigger as it is, although one day I will pull that magazine disconnector out.

I do love this pistol, and shame on me, but it's languished back in a dark corner of the safe for far too long while I've toted Glocks and Smiths and 1911s around. So just to be fair and give an old classic it's due, I brought it along this week-end, both because I like to fly armed and because I might want to go downtown Detroit for a coney dog this week-end, and a foray into "The D" for coneys requires a credible and reliable defensive tool. In that aspect, I couldn't ask for better gear, absent a Sherman tank, of course.