It is the year 2025.
I am not a math wiz, but that means it’s been at least 114 years since the inception of what many would say is John Moses Browning’s greatest triumph, the M1911 pistol.
While I was aimlessly wandering the approximately one million acres of SHOT Show earlier this year, I was struck by just how alive and paradoxically relevant this design still is, in all its various forms. This is despite the incessant mewlings of forum armchair gunfighters and self-proclaimed “experts” who decry the many perceived shortcomings this design faces in modernity: heavy steel construction, single-stack capacity, manual safeties, and expense due to the amount of hand-fitment required during the construction of this pistol.
Despite all of these things, and the monomaniacal focus many shooters have on practicality uber alles, I was struck by the fact that John Browning’s brainchild is still alive and well in all of its various forms. Colt, Dan Wesson, Springfield Armory, and Ed Brown, all still making wildly popular traditional-minded .45s. On the other hand, you have Staccato and Triarc and Atlas and the Prodigy — all the 2011s with their double-stack magazines and optics cuts and integral compensators.
In the newly-coined words of one of my favorite modern 1911 enthusiasts, comparing these two iterations of the 1911 is a bit like comparing “apples to motherfuckers.” But being spoiled by all of this choice isn’t a bad thing.
American Hot Rods
If there’s one thing I love as much as shooting, it’s old Fords. I can get real deep in the weeds here, but I won’t. For the layman, the 1932 Ford has been the quintessential hot rod from the time they rolled off the assembly line in Dearborn.
Hoodlums obsessed with speed immediately took oxy-acetylene torches, Bridgeports, and lathes to every square inch of these vehicles in order to improve not only their performance, but also the aesthetics of the thing. They are the absolute perfect marriage of form and function and new cars built today, in the traditional manner, still hit the same way and still check all of the same boxes that they did 80 years ago. It is a uniquely American art form brought about by the American way of life.
So it is with the 1911 pistol. Immediately after hitting the shelves (and holsters), gunfighters started tinkering to meet the needs of changing battlespaces. Seems like it started with a strip of rawhide to permanently disengage the grip safety, and went from there. Through two world wars, Korea, Vietnam, the Central American operations, Desert Storm, and then up through GWOT into the modern era, the 1911 has been modified to mete out death with utmost efficacy.
If you’ll take the time to peruse The Jalopy Journal — which is something I highly recommend every red-blooded American to do — and read through some build threads you’ll find that folks generally strive to shoot for a specific era of build: a 1930s hop-up or gow job, a 1940s lakes car, a 1950s spin with an overhead valve motor and whitewalls… so it goes with custom 1911s. Perhaps the best example of these period-correct 1911 builds come from the Alchemy Custom Weaponry Restomod catalog. If you like authentic GI-looking builds or flashy two-tone homages to the fabled Pachmayr Combat Special, the Restomods are carefully curated to capture a specific zeitgeist, a specific point in time, in the history of custom 1911 pistols.
I pondered this connection while walking around the floor of the Venetian conference center, and lamented the fact that I had stumbled through 30 years of life in the Land of the Free without owning one of its crowning achievements. Of course, I set about to rectify this immediately.
The Mule
The fix came for the low, low price of just $400, signed, sealed, and delivered courtesy of Gunbroker.
“The Mule.” It fits her, but like anything else, the moniker subject to change.
She’s a ’40s GI slide and barrel on top of an A.R. Sales frame, which is an enigmatic manufacturer that I am still researching. It appears to be the byproduct of a mail-order kit from the late 60s or early 70s. Everything else seems GI, other than the checkered, flat mainspring housing. I’ve never thought the re-arsenaled parkerization is the best thing to look at, and this gun hasn’t changed my mind.
The most heinous offense to the sighted, though, comes in the form of NRA-branded Crimson Trace grips. I’d like to throw these in the trash immediately for a variety of reasons, but she’ll probably wait until the big reveal for new stocks.
Like the ugly girl that takes off her glasses, lets her hair down… and then completely disrobes.
The Mule won’t be a safe queen, or much of a looker even when she’s through. She’ll be a no-compromise example of a fighting 1911 that will be shot often and carried even more.
The formerly-great Swedish hardcore band Refused once stated, “They told me the classics never go out of style, but they do…“
It seems unlikely that that line was aimed specifically at the 1911, but if it was, that band is just as wrong about that as they are economics.
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