Last week I decided that a Sturm & Ruger Co pistol was to be my default pistol in this project, and it will be; I’ve narrowed down that search to a couple of their pistols, and introductions will be coming soon. But you may have noticed that the drawing above is of a Colt…
I could not find a Ruger (for short, from now on), in their regular models (read: highest selling, still in production) that had a chrome finish. And there’s so little about the weapon that killed Quonterio Davis, except that it was a “chrome semi-automatic pistol”. So the search was back on.
I went back to my top-5 of top-5’s list of pistols from last week. Most of those guns came in black, black or black. In fact, among the advertised regular finishes for these weapons, only in the Colt M1911 did I see a chrome version. And because you want to know, I found the two biggest gun stores as listed by the Washington Post as the “U.S. gun dealers with the most firearms traced over the past four years.” (article is admittedly from 2010 but is partially explained in the opening paragraphs) and used weapons found within their wares for my research.
The Colt 1911 has a long and storied history that I’m not going to get into here, apart from to say that it is on Wikipedia’s list of Most Produced Fire Arms (of Self-Loading Pistols it’s at #3, with over 5 million made [including variants], and is the only one of those 3 that’s made in the US – though I don’t know if they were all made here), and that it was originally made for the US government/armed forces, so has a long and storied career in military and policing.
While this is probably not the weapon that killed Davis, it fits the description and is a common pistol in the USA. And the version above comes in a finish called hard chrome.