When is a pistol not a pistol?

James has written an interesting post discussing the modern trend of not calling a revolver a pistol. Technically any handgun is a pistol from the early matchlocks to single shot handguns to autoloaders.

I personally use the following terminology:

A revolver: revolver
A single-shot: pistol
A Derringer: Derringer
An Autoloader: pistol (unless it is also a revolver. I would call that an automatic revolver)
A Matchlock: pistol
A fully-automatic handgun: machine pistol (if it was specifically designed to he held like a pistol, otherwise it is a submachine gun)
A handheld cannon: handheld cannon, hand cannon or Handgonne

Matebaautorevolver6In
The futuristic looking Mateba Auto Revolver (from Wikipedia)

800Px-Yuan Chinese Gun
Chinese Hand cannon (from Wikipedia)

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Steve Dec 29th 2008 handguns Tags: , , 4 Comments

4 Responses to “When is a pistol not a pistol?”

  1. James R. Rummelon 30 Dec 2008 at 7:45 pm link comment

    Thank you kindly for the link!

    James

  2. jdun1911on 01 Jan 2009 at 11:23 am link comment

    I should have bought a Mateba from CDNN 8 years ago for around $600 IIRC. I still have the old pdf catalog on my HD. What a shame.

    I don’t think they are in production anymore or no one is importing them to the USA.

  3. Steveon 01 Jan 2009 at 11:27 am link comment

    Is that all they were going for back then? Wow. Used Mateba’s are $1500-2000+ now!

  4. jdun1911on 01 Jan 2009 at 6:00 pm link comment

    I really wanted that auto Revolver tho. Just didn’t have the money in my firearms collecting budget at that time. By the time I did CDNN sold them all. A damn shame.

    The old CDNN online pdf catalog format has price listed. The newer ones doesn’t. You have to call them. The paper catalog that they sent to my home has the price listed tho. Weird.

    I’ll send you the old CDNN pdf catalogs via email, Steve.

    Latest catalog.
    http://www.cdnninvestments.com/dowournewcat.html

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