American Gun

9 THE .38 SPECIAL POLICE REVOLVER

President Harry S. Truman was in his underwear, fast asleep. Fifty yards away, two men in pinstripe suits approached, carrying hidden semi-automatic 9mm pistols, one a Walther P38, and the other a Mauser-produced Luger. They were going to kill the president.

They planned to storm the steps of the temporary presidential residence at Blair House, across the street from the White House, then undergoing renovations. They would shoot the guards, hunt down Truman, and execute him.

It was 2:20 p.m. on November 1, 1950. Truman was catching some rest as he often did in the afternoon, napping in a front bedroom on the second floor of Blair House. His room was just a short dash up two flights of stairs from the street and sidewalk. If the president had been looking out the room’s window, he would have seen the two approaching assassins: Puerto Rican revolutionaries Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola as they walked from opposite directions toward the house.

Defending the building was a small force of White House Police and Secret Service officers, all carrying .38 caliber revolvers. The Secret Service had two-inch-barrel Colt Detective Specials, and the White House Police, who were under the command of the Secret Service, had four-inch Colt Official Police models on their hips. Both Colts were very good handguns, members of the .38 Special family used by police everywhere in the country. The wheel guns were reliable, nearly cop-proof, and best of all, inexpensive.

The Blair House property was actually two buildings; the Lee House sat on the Blair’s west, attached inside though from outside they looked separate. They were close to the sidewalk and the street, both of which were open to the public. A tiny guard house stood on the sidewalk at each end of the property. A decorative wrought-iron fence flanked the sidewalk. Canopies covered the stairs in front of both houses.

Seeing his accomplice approaching the western guard house, Oscar Collazo walked past the post on the east side and took out his Walther P38. Walking toward the steps, he pointed it at uniformed White House police officer Donald Birdzell who was standing on the sidewalk near the street, his back to him.

Collazo pulled the trigger.

The pistol didn’t fire. Collazo didn’t know the gun well, and in his rush he’d gotten all confused. Most likely he had accidentally flicked on the safety; the hammer snapped down without doing anything but making a loud click.

The assassin struggled with the gun. The officer turned to face him. Finally the German-made Walther fired, and Officer Birdzell fell, bullet in his knee. Stumbling as he tried to get up, Birdzell pulled his gun and tried to answer Collazo’s shots with his own. Another White House Police officer and a Secret Service officer drew their guns and opened fire, but their bullets were wild or deflected by the bars of a wrought-iron fence between the assassin and themselves. Then a bullet ripped through Collazo’s hat, grazing his scalp. He didn’t seem to notice it, pulling the trigger to return fire.

Meanwhile, Griselio Torresola stepped in the guard house on the west side and fired three times point-blank into White House policeman Leslie Coffelt’s chest and stomach. Torresola then spun from the guard house and walked on toward the steps to help Collazo. Along the way he shot a plainclothes White House policeman in the hip, chest, and neck.

Inside Blair House, a Secret Service agent heard the gunfire and ran to fetch the Tommy gun from the gun cabinet. It was locked, and he fumbled with the key.

In the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue, Birdzell regrouped. He saw Torresola coming at him, and tried to line up a shot. Torresola was quicker. He fired a bullet into the policeman’s other knee. Birdzell collapsed, out of the fight. Torresola calmly reloaded his Luger and kept moving toward the steps.

His accomplice, Collazo, suddenly realized he was out of bullets. He sat down and started to reload.

It’s never good to have to reload when people are shooting at you, but it’s especially bad when you have no cover and are extremely close to your enemy. The president’s guards kept firing. One of their bullets finally made him stand up, wobble, then slam face-first to the pavement.

Harry Truman, startled awake by the gunshots, went to his second-story bedroom window. The president raised the window and looked down at the scene, trying to figure out what was going on.

Torresola was slapping a fresh magazine into his pistol some thirty feet away. It was an easy pistol shot. But before Torresola spotted him, Leslie Coffelt staggered out of his guardhouse. The severely wounded officer raised his .38 and fired.

The forty-year-old officer’s aim was true. A 158-grain lead bullet spun into the skull of Griselio Torresola. His body shook as if it were possessed by the devil as he fell.

It was the last of about thirty shots fired during the forty-second gunfight. Someone saw the President at the window, and yelled at him to move away. But it was all over.

Leslie Coffelt died of his wounds. He is the only officer serving under the command of the U.S. Secret Service to ever have died while protecting a president. Oscar Collazo survived and was sentenced to death for the murder of Coffelt. Harry Truman commuted his sentence to life so he’d stew in jail for the rest of his days, instead of becoming a martyr to Puerto Rican nationalists. For reasons I haven’t been able to understand, Jimmy Carter pardoned him in 1979, and Collazo returned to Puerto Rico to a hero’s welcome.

Truman was said to have been deeply shaken by the close call, and haunted by the memory of Leslie Coffelt sacrificing his life for him. It’s been argued that the bloody events contributed to his decision not to run for reelection to a full second term.

Given what the Secret Service goes through today to protect the President, the security around the Blair House that day in 1950 looks ridiculously thin. If Collazo knew his weapon better or packed two pistols instead of one, odds are he would have been inside Truman’s bedroom before the President pulled on his trousers. But consider this—America was the kind of place in 1950 where the president could walk around Washington, D.C., with only a single Secret Service agent tagging along. Usually he went with four, but Truman took a walk just about every day and didn’t like waiting; the rest of the detail had to catch up or catch hell. The buck stopped on Truman’s desk, but he didn’t stop for anything, and didn’t think much about his personal security.

That was all going to change. America was becoming a different place. And the police were the ones who’d be caught in the middle.

The first full-fledged municipal police force in America was started in New York City in 1844. The police started carrying pistols in the late 1850s. For the next forty years or so, they armed themselves with a hodgepodge of guns. The officers got about as much training as a SEAL gets dance lessons. When he came on as police commissioner, Teddy Roosevelt made the .32-caliber Colt New Police revolver the regulation police handgun. He also set up a marksmanship program, led by national shooting champion Sergeant William Petty.

Other big cities moved in the same direction. They were all dealing with similar problems: booming population, crowded living conditions, corruption, vice, immigration, criminal gangs—the entire dark side of an increasingly urban nation.

Once police departments decided to arm their officers, they faced difficulties armies don’t have. Like the military, they needed weapons that were dependable and could stop a bad guy cold. But whatever they picked had to be suited to everyone on the force, big or small. That might not seem like much when a police force has mostly oversized Irishmen who like to crack heads, but step away from the cliché to modern forces with officers of every size, shape, and gender, and you see the dimensions of the problem.

In “traditional” warfare, armies didn’t waste much thought worrying about civilians getting hurt. Police departments, on the other hand, spend all their time around civilians. They have to suit their weapons to the threat they face, but not go overboard. A bullet that stops a criminal and then goes into the next building can turn a clean collar into a tragedy.

Even in the worst crime pits, most police officers never have to fire on a suspect. Many officers usually only fire a handful of times in their career, if that. So they need guns handy, but still tucked away. Last and not least, whatever they get has to be inexpensive. Not cheap, but a good value. A buddy of mine from San Diego, Mark Hanten, is the commanding officer of the SDPD SWAT team. Mark pointed out recently that his department has some eighteen-hundred-plus cops, and some, like the LAPD, well over eight thousand. Buying a weapon for all of them can put quite a dent in the taxpayers’ pockets.

The money isn’t just in the weapons. The officers need ammo, both to use the gun and, just as important, to practice with. And practice takes time—every hour a policeman spends on the firing range is one less hour on the street, which means someone else has to do his job there.

So police weapons evolved toward efficiency, and just enough stopping power to get the job done. While rifles, shotguns, and automatic weapons fill certain roles, the sum of what a policeman needed meant a pistol would be his primary weapon. And if you were thinking about a pistol for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, odds are you were calling to mind a product from one of two companies: Colt, or its chief competitor, Smith & Wesson.

Colt scored big with their revolvers in the mid-nineteenth century, but Horace Smith and Daniel Wesson were right up there with them. The New England gunmakers teamed up in 1852 in a failed attempt to launch the lever-action “Volcanic” repeating pistol and rifle with a fully self-contained cartridge. As we’ve seen, the business flopped and Oliver Winchester ended up with the company. But Smith and Wesson didn’t ride off into the sunset. The pair patented a rimfire cartridge in 1854, then used it to design a new revolver. In 1856, their new company, Smith & Wesson, unveiled the Model One Revolver. The .22-caliber seven-shooter launched the company on a road that would include a number of historic guns.

Coke versus Pepsi, Chevy versus Ford, Colt versus Smith & Wesson: the all-American pair duked it out for decades. Their guns got better thanks to old-fashioned competition. After making improved versions of the Model One, Smith & Wesson topped itself in 1867 with the Model 3 .44, the first big-bore cartridge-firing revolver. Colt came back with the classic Single-Action Army revolver of 1873. Then they followed up with the first successful double-action revolver, the Model 1877. In 1889, Colt unveiled a new line of Army and Navy revolvers, the first double-action revolvers with swing-out cylinders.

On a swing-out frame, the cylinder pivots away from the body, making it faster to load than a fixed frame gun. At the same time, the frame is stronger than the break-top, a design which also makes for quick reloading by letting the cylinder and the front of the gun forward.

In 1899, Smith & Wesson came out with Model 10, also known as the Military and Police revolver. Colt followed with the New Police, the Police Positive, and then the Colt Official Police.

The weapons from both companies have a lot in common. Together they defined the category of police handgun, and even the word “revolver” for sixty or seventy years. And through most of that time, they shared one critical ingredient: the .38 Special cartridge.

The family of .38-caliber bullets can be almost as confusing as the guns that use them. It probably won’t help to mention that the rounds were first supplied to replace the old ammo used by .36-caliber Navy revolvers. It especially won’t help to point out that the .38 round’s diameter is really .357—exactly because of that heritage. But those are the facts. The family includes the .38 Special, the .38 Short, .38 Long, and .357 Magnum, all at the same diameter. There are a bunch of cousins and near-strangers under each heading.

The .38 Special cartridge was one answer to the question of how to stop raging maniacs, the same problem the Colt 1911 was invented to solve. The .38 Special was more powerful than the .38 Long, which was a bit stronger than the .38 Short. First filled with black powder, smokeless powder became the standard about a year later. The .38 Special cartridges packed enough wallop for a while. But when stopping power became an issue again, improvements led to the .38 Special +P and .357 Magnum rounds.

Colt’s history gave it a leg up in the police market. The Colt 1911 also helped with what marketers call a halo effect. It was like Ford or Chevy with NASCAR. Associating with a wartime hero made the other guns look that much better.

But it wasn’t just the weapon’s marketing that made it popular. “As a personal defense weapon, Colt’s Official Police with a four-inch barrel is as dependable a gun as you could find,” wrote police weapons expert Chic Gaylord. “The Colt Official Police revolver in .38 Special caliber with a four inch barrel and rounded butt is an ideal service weapon for densely populated metropolitan areas. The Colt Official Police is probably the most famous police service arm in the world. It is rugged, dependable, and thoroughly tested by time. It has good sights and a smooth, trouble-free action. This gun can fire high-speed armor-piercing loads. It can safely handle hand loads that would turn its competitors into flying shards of steel. When loaded with the Winchester Western 200-grain Super Police loads, it is an effective man-stopper.”

By 1933 the Colt Official Police was standard issue for the police forces of New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Kansas City, St. Louis, and Los Angeles, plus the state police of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, and Connecticut. The FBI issued the gun to its agents.

The standard pistols were meant to be carried in holsters at a policeman’s hip, and had barrel lengths varied from four to six inches. As a general rule, the longer the barrel, the more accurate the gun was likely to be in the average policeman’s hands. On the other hand, the longer the barrel, the harder it was to get out of the holster.

Both Colt and Smith & Wesson also came out with short-barreled “snub-nosed” pistols. These were usually meant to be carried under clothes or in a hidden holster as a backup weapon. In his patrol days, my SDPD friend Mark Hanten carried a Smith & Wesson 342PD in an ankle holster as a backup weapon, and frequently carries it as an off-duty gun as well. The J frame—the company’s generic term for the small size, post-WWII guns—was popular with police chiefs, detectives, and others who needed a weapon with them but didn’t want one that was too conspicuous.

The downside of the smaller guns is the kick that they have when firing. Mark used a .38 +P; think of it as a .38 Special round on steroids. It let you know you’d fired when it went off. “It’s the kind of gun that you want to have but never want to shoot,” as Mark puts it.

The granddaddy of the snub-nosed guns was the Colt Detective Special, also known as the “Dick gun” since it was first worn by detectives who were carrying it in concealed holsters. Introduced in 1927, the little wheel gun, like its big brothers, was popular in a lot of old movies. Edward G. Robinson, James Cagney, Charlton Heston, Chuck Connors, Burt Lancaster—all packed the snub nose. A lot of the same stars had the bigger Colt Official Police or some other version of the .38 Special in different films.

The .38 Specials were solid and reliable guns. They worked well for most police forces right through the 1950s and early 1960s. They were also more or less the weapons the police faced, when they encountered weapons at all. But little by little, more powerful guns popped up in the hands of criminals. Most police didn’t realize it, but by the late sixties they had fallen behind the times.

Then one day they got a wakeup call in the form of a radio bulletin: Officers Down.

A number of serious shoot-outs and cold-blooded murders had a big impact on police thinking. One of the most famous happened in 1970, when four California Highway Patrol officers were killed in a shoot-out with suspects from a road rage incident. The two men who were stopped turned out to have a wide range of weapons, from a .38 Special to a sawed-off shotgun. After that, police departments began rethinking weapons and procedures, both.

Things kept ratcheting up. Like a lot of other police officers, Bob Owens, a lieutenant with the Dallas City Police Department, points to an FBI shoot-out in 1986 as the real turning point. Two Florida felons took on eight FBI agents in a gunfight outside Miami and outgunned them with a shotgun and a Ruger Mini-14 semi-automatic rifle. Before the fugitives were finally put down, two FBI agents were killed and five others wounded.

While .38 Specials were used by lawmen in both incidents, even more powerful weapons were outclassed. Rounds from automatics and .357 Magnums didn’t do the damage that police thought they would. More importantly, the training that even the FBI agents received was faulted.

“Training’s a key thing,” says Lieutenant Owens, who as you might have guessed is a friend of mine. “It’s time-consuming, though, and it takes officers off the street. It’s hard to keep things balanced.”

Owens’s department uses training that is a lot more realistic than in the old days, when policemen busted paper firing at targets on the range. Trainers now try to anticipate what situations officers might encounter, and try to make things as realistic as possible.

The other half of the equation is getting law enforcement the tools they need to do the job.

Gun manufacturers had seen the problem coming. Smith & Wesson introduced the .357 Magnum cartridge and the large-frame .357 Combat Magnum/Registered Magnum revolver in the 1930s. Colt cooked up the .38 Super Automatic round, capable of penetrating both bullet-resistant vests and automobiles. But many departments didn’t have the money to refit their forces.

“At a time when full-power ‘big-bore’ handgun rounds ran in the 300 to 350 ft/lb. muzzle energy range, S&W upped the ante to over 500 ft/lbs,” wrote NRA firearms historian Jim Supica in 2005. “Results of actual law-enforcement shootings suggest that the .357 magnum round, with 125 grain hollow-point loads, may be the most effective ‘stopper’ still today.” Maybe, but .357s were used in both the California and Miami incidents, with mixed results. While training was absolutely part of the problem, police not only needed bigger bullets, but they needed more of them. Revolvers carried too few bullets and were too slow to reload when you were facing a determined criminal.

Owens carried a .357 Magnum for a while on the force, and remembers that some departments used what are called dump pouches to carry speedloaders. The speedloader held an extra set of bullets, and a practiced cop could slide them into his revolver fairly quick under the best conditions. The problem is, few gunfights are ever held under the best conditions. Owens would often find the bullets fell out of the loader during a patrol. Luckily for him, he never needed to use it.

Semi-automatic pistols were the obvious solution. They held more cartridges and were quicker to reload. Equipped with the right bullets, they had sufficient stopping power against all but the most well-armored opponents.

But getting new guns for an entire police force was an expensive proposition. In Dallas, officers were helped by H. Ross Perot, who after hearing how the locals were outgunned, bought every officer an automatic of his choice. My friend Rich Emberlin still remembers the Sig Sauer Mr. Perot bought him; it was a 9mm semi, and certainly a fine weapon. But even the semi-automatics were soon outclassed. Rich tells a vivid tale of the day 9mm subsonic rounds from a friend’s gun simply bounced off the head and body suspect during a desperate shoot-out. So it’s no surprise he traded his original Sig for a model that fires larger rounds. It’s almost like a chess match—the bad guys counter every move the good guys make.

There is no one universal police gun or caliber anymore. Police departments use a wide range of pistols, including ones made by Smith & Wesson and Colt. But given its popularity, we can’t take off without mentioning the big ugly that changed a lot of minds about what a pistol should look like when it first came to the public’s attention in the mid-1980s: the Glock 17.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Gaston Glock was a plastics expert in Austria. He ran a company whose main products included curtain rods. An engineer by trade, he was talking to some Austrian military officers one day and heard them bad-mouth gunmakers for failing to produce a handgun that could meet their requirements. That got him thinking: Why not make a gun? Not just any gun, but the perfect gun.

Glock bought a bunch of pistols, stripped them down and put them back together. He checked every detail. He tinkered and researched, asked questions and messed around some more. It was easy to list what military people wanted in a handgun: a high-capacity magazine, light weight, accuracy, safety, and simplicity. It should be ready to fire at any time, but be safe otherwise.

Glock came up with a game-changer, the Glock 17. It was a super-light semi-automatic pistol with just thirty-four parts. Learning the gun took one day. It held seventeen rounds of 9 × 19mm Parabellum in its double-stack magazine, more than any other pistol at the time.

The thing about the Glock though—it didn’t look quite like any other weapon that had come before, unless you happened to be shopping in the toy department. Because the block-shaped body of the semi-auto was made of “synthetic material” or “polymer”—what you and I call plastic.

But it held up. Police and military buyers around the world subjected the Glock 17 to torture tests. The gun aced them. You can submerge it, subject it to high temperatures and massive sequences of firing, and the thing just keeps on working. The Glock is so rugged that some salesmen drop it on the floor to impress customers.

Glock bagged the Austrian army contract, and a firearms empire was born. American police and military officers loved the new black-plastic gun, and started swamping the company with orders starting in the late 1980s. Glock gave excellent trial discounts to the police. “This was smart,” noted author Paul Barrett, “because the point was to get the police departments to adopt the gun, and that would give the gun credibility in the much larger, much more lucrative civilian market, where you can charge full price and get your full profit margin.”

Glocks popped up in Hollywood movies and rap songs. It became a pop culture hit. It also found its way to criminals, who liked the Glocks for much the same reasons the law did.

There’s an urban myth, still popular in some quarters, that the Glock can’t be detected by X-ray machines. The myth was spread by a Bruce Willis line in the 1990 movie Die Hard 2: “That punk pulled a Glock 7 on me. You know what that is? It’s a porcelain gun, made in Germany. Doesn’t show up on your airport X-ray machines.” Every bit of the line was false: there was no such thing as a “Glock 7”; Glocks are made of polymer, not porcelain; it was made in Austria, not Germany; and they do show up on X-ray machines. But in a strange twist, the firestorm of controversy triggered by the false rumors may have helped goose publicity and aid Glock sales.

Today, more than four million Glocks have been sold, and at least two-thirds of American police departments use Glocks, including the nation’s biggest, the NYPD, plus federal agencies like the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration, and some military special-operations units also use Glocks as their standard sidearm.

As for myself, I prefer the M1911. To me, a Glock is about as good-looking as a lump of coal.

I started this chapter with a presidential assassination attempt. It’s hard for a Texan to do that without thinking of Lee Harvey Oswald and that awful day back in 1963 when John F. Kennedy was shot down here. There are still plenty of folks around who were there and remember what all happened.

One of them is Jim Leavelle, who was walking Oswald down the ramp of the garage under police headquarters two days later when Jack Ruby shot him.

Jim, a friend of a friend, was a Dallas police officer for going on twenty-six years. If you’ve ever studied the JFK assassination, or even spent a bit of time looking at the photos, you’ve seen him at Oswald’s right in the light suit on the garage ramp as they walk down to take Oswald to court. Just as they come into view in the famous TV footage, Ruby ducks past an army of reporters and policemen. Leavelle starts to yank Oswald toward him out of the way, but Ruby’s too close. He fires into Oswald’s middle, then gets gang tackled.

Leavelle says he spotted Ruby’s pistol in the half-second after Ruby ducked around one of the other officers near the car. The retired officer is often asked by people why he didn’t shoot Ruby.

“It just happens so fast,” he tells them. “It always does. Sometimes you don’t have time to draw. You just react. That’s all you can do.”

That’s some hard-earned experience talking there. Training helps, good weapons help, but nothing beats dumb luck.

Leavelle was in a bunch of close scrapes over his career. He packed a number of weapons—a lot of .38s in just about every barrel length, a .45 Colt, a .38 Super, a .357 that he thought was a bit too heavy for an everyday carry. The day he escorted Oswald, he had two Colt .45s with him, but never had the chance to use them.

Ruby, by the way, killed Oswald with a .38 Special.