I grew up during the Saturday matinee era. B westerns are what all of us kids watched. Along came television, and, huzzah, more westerns. So we all wanted SAA revolvers.
That desire to use what my screen heroes used never left me. Until I entered LE, I did not own a DA revolver. I knew about them of course, but westerns were (and are) my favorite genre, so SAA was where it was at.
Fast forward many, many decades, and I still love SAA revolvers. I have both Colt and Ruger. I have a couple of shooters, one Colt which is now a safe queen, and a couple of display models in a museum-commissioned Roy Rogers holster rig. To this day I maintain the best looking handgun is a SAA revolver (nickel, or now polished stainless steel) in a hand tooled Buscadero holster. Granted, unrealistic relative to non-cinema history, but a treasured memory.
With adulthood and LE, DA revolvers took over, until near the end of my career when semi-autos took over. The amount of shooting I have done with my SA revolvers relative to my DA revolvers in miniscule, but logical given my career choice, so zero regrets.
It was the SAA revolvers I watched in the movies that got all of this started.
After Dirty Harry hit the theaters and the unexpected backlog of orders at S&W had cleared, apparently there were a lot of ads for "S & W Model 29 .44 magnum, barely used. 1/2 box of ammo included."
