Caution: pistol pedantry follows.

Is there something I can do to cause people to stop using the odius term “double-action only”? I doubt it, but someone has to speak out. And today, that someone is me.

Back in the good old days when ships were wood and men were steel the revolver to have went by the name “Single Action Army”. The name describes the action of the piece, which is that it works in only one way: the hammer must be “thumb-cocked” and the trigger trips the sear, releasing the hammer. The Single Action Army took the counter to the double-action revolvers of the day that could be fired one of two ways: By thumb-cocking the hammer and using the trigger to release it, or by using the trigger to draw the hammer to the rear and release it. It may have been in the 1890s or the 1970s when it happened, but some people started thinking that the term “double-action” meant that the trigger did two things: cock the hammer and drop the hammer. I cannot be any more emphatic about the wrongness of that thought. The problem is that for the most of recorded history when the terms were used correctly by the learned and incorrectly by the ignorant they were still talking about the same thing. This provided no opportunity for the illuminated to gently rebuke the wrongheaded fools of the day and the problem grew unnoticed until the 1980s or so.

In the ’70s or ’80s American police realized that they were carrying antique fighting tools (double-action revolvers) around and started the migration to autoloading pistols. As a quick aside, a revolver is a firearm with multiple chambers in a rotating wheel, a pistol is a handgun that has it’s chamber built into the barrel. Now, Americans had a (the) world-class fighting handgun in the Model of 1911. The 1911 is a single-action pistol that is designed to be carried with the hammer cocked -that’s the single way the action works. the cocked hammer and the larger calibre seemed alright for warfare, but police administrators thought them too agressive for civil duties. A more European style pistol, double-action and 9mm designed to be carried with the hammer down would be a nice compromise. Manufacturers rushed in to fill the need and soon one couldn’t swing a dead cat within a mile of a magazine stand and not hit a glossy photo of the latest double-action wunderneun. Finally even the military took a giant sip of the kool-aid and adopted the M9 double-action 9mm.

An alternate, and just as feasible history is that the military decided that they wanted that and the police departments followed suit. I’m going from memory here. This is a rant, not a research paper.

Around this time the Austrian military had adopted a pretty fair single-action battle weapon in the Glock 17, and it was imported and marketed in the USA. Now the Glock marketing folks, faced with the task of selling a single-action pistol with the only safety on the trigger to a culture bombarded by “single-action is scary” marketing, opted to obfuscate the operation of the piece by insisting it’s operation was something new called “safe-action”

All was going along fine and people could debate the relative merits of double-action toys and single-action pistols until trainers or competitive shooters or Glock marketers or someone figured out that having two distinct trigger pulls on the same weapon was stupid and the manufacturers of double-action pistols started making thier wares available in a configuration without the sear catch that made the automatic cocking of the hammer possible. This rendered them (you guessed it) single-action pistols. the manufacturers loved having a new product for negligible research and developement costs, but had already spent millions on shills to write Guns and Ammo articles about the dangers of anything “single-action” and so embraced the now ubiquitous “double-action only”. This turned their old double-action pistols into the just-as-dumb “double-action/single-action” guns.

Now you know the history as I recall it. It’s probably about half right, but you know in your heart that “double-action only” can’t be right. So follow me and fight the good fight for our language. Here are some ensamples to help you through discussions with the unwashed:

• Single-Action: May be self-cocking only like a 1911, trigger-cocking only like a shrouded hammer Ladysmith revolver or half-cocked only like a Glock
• Double-Action: Smith and Wesson revolvers that allow trigger cocking and thumb-cocking, Sig 226
• Crunchenticker: A 1980s-era double-action abomination that has a decocking lever and trigger-cocks on first shot, self-cocking thereafter –like the Beretta M9

As long as I’m on the subject; a clip is something used to load a magazine. But you
knew that.