New Fun With an Old Friend

Two of my last three acquisitions have been 1911s (more on the third when I get a little more time), and that's what I've been shooting almost exclusively for the last couple of months. But, the Springfield GI 1911 was not the first .45 I ever picked up. That honor belongs to the Ruger P90, the "big old brute of the P-Series line," as Dick Metcalf of Shooting Times called it. I picked up this gun in early August of last year, not quite three weeks before Hurricane Katrina hit, and made it my home defense gun. I took it out every week between then and February, feeding it a steady diet of 230-grain hardball and Federal Hydra-Shok, cycling a mag or two of Hydra-Shok through each week, as I liked to keep the ammo in it fresh as possible just in case a goblin came calling.
Well, I am ashamed to say, once the 1911s came along, that regimen fell by the wayside, save for the weeks my Springfield was back in Geneseo in March getting a new extractor to fix its stovepipe jams. And last week, I was thinking, you know, I really should get reacquainted with that gun, plus get the ammo out of the mag that had been sitting there since the last week in March. So I took her out, oiled her up and it was off to the races -- or, rather, to the range -- after a trip to Shooter's Supply in Beaumont to pick up a set of Hogue rubber grips for her:



100 rounds of 230-grain Magtech, and about 16 rounds of Hydra-Shok (that stuff is expensive! I try not too shoot too much of it at a time), and not one malfunction of any kind. And, save for a couple of instances of slide stop engagement due to limp-wristing the first time out, so it has gone for over 2,000 rounds since I picked it up. God, I love that gun. It may be big and inelegant, but it shoots like a dream. (And yeah, a lot of people do think it's ugly, but as for me, I don't share that opinion...it ain't a 1911, but as I've said elsewhere, compared to the Glock, the Ruger P-series pistols are the sidearm equivalent of Sophia Loren. ;-)) My pistol experience is still quite limited, I'll admit, but if you're in the market for a good non-1911 .45, you could hardly go wrong with a Ruger P90.