Kind of a threadjack, but....

I was wondering if anyone was going to bring up that old chestnut. The idea is that a left-handed person can fire and keep a single action revolver in their left hand, while reloading with the right. Left hand stays on the grip, flip open the loading gate with the left thumb, eject the empties with the right hand, load with the right hand, ready to shoot. No switching the gun back and forth between hands needed. A right-handed person would need a single action revolver with a loading gate and ejector rod on the left side of the gun to do this. (The late Bill Grover actually built a line of guns that were mirror imaged in this way, including a mirrored action.) The conclusion is often made that Sam Colt must’ve been left-handed.

A tiny amount of logic will show this is baloney. Colt’s original percussion revolvers were obviously designed for right-handed use. All of the fine motor manipulation needed to load a cap and ball revolver is done by the right hand, particularly the placing of the caps on the cylinder nipples, while the left hand mostly just holds the gun. Keeping the hand (left or right) on the grip simply wasn’t an option, with all the steps that needed to be taken. And the time lost by switching hands would be miniscule compared to the total process.

When the 1873 Single Action Army (and its 1872 Open Top predecessor) came along, they were continuations of the existing basic mechanism of the percussion revolver. A loading gate was installed where the recess for loading percussion caps had been, and an ejector rod added. To switch those features to the opposite side of the gun would’ve required massive retooling to make a mirror image action, something that the company would never consider. And of course Sam Colt himself had been dead for about ten years.

The use of metallic cartridges made reloading an SAA a hundred times faster than reloading a percussion gun. Completely revamping the action for a tiny theoretical advantage would’ve been a gilding of the lily. However, lefties can now rejoice that if they get in a running battle on horseback, they can reload without changing gun and reins from hand to hand.

To keep this from being a total threadjack, I will say that the few times I've experimented with loading a DA revolver while shooting left-handed, I really don't see any way to do it other than the same way a right-handed person would. How do you lefties out there do it?