On March 29, 1911 the army adopted the John Moses Browning designed M1911 pistol. And today, 100 years later, the 1911 is still used by some of the special forces groups of the military and is still one of the most popular handguns in the world.
The first gun I bought was a 1911 pistol. It is still my favorite handgun to shoot, although shooting a lot of .45 gets expensive! So I bought a Marvel Precision .22 LR conversion that allows me to shoot .22 LR, and then I bought another (used) 1911 so that I didn’t have to keep swapping the conversion on and off. The collection has grown, but I still shoot both of those pretty often. I’ve even used the 45 in pistol league a few weeks, and it’s a lot of fun!
The 1911 is used in some of my all-time favorite movies, used by Robert De Niro in Ronin (I also love the car chases!), by Benicio Del Toro and Ryan Phillippe in The Way of the Gun (I also love the realism of the tactics they use!), and by Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan, shooting at a tank! (the last 5 minutes of Saving Private Ryan and Monsters, Inc get me teary eyed every time!)
A couple weeks ago, the M1911 officially became the state gun of Utah, more because J.M. Browning was a Utah native, and to celebrate the centennial than ay other reason.
So thank you very much, Mr. Browning, for your innovative work! So innovative, that after selling the 1911 design to Colt, he had to design an entirely new pistol, the Browning Hi-power, to get around his own patents! The hi-power’s centennial isn’t until 1935, so I have some time to get some of those before that rolls around!
Leave a Reply