Читать книгу Gun Digest 2011 онлайн

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The Luger was often slandered by contemporary American gunwriters, perhaps out of an admirable sense of national pride or perhaps because they could do so without offending an advertiser. They attacked “the enemy’s gun,” the Luger, calling it unreliable and saying things such as, “If your Luger jams, use hot ammo. Lugers like hot ammo” and “The Luger’s magazine spring is unnecessarily strong and makes it too hard to load. Clip a few coils off to make it easier.” The truth is that Lugers don’t like hot loads and they won’t work with a weak magazine spring. Today, perhaps as many as nine out of 10 Luger magazines in the country have been shortened, causing jams.

As previously noted, the Luger is very ammo-sensitive and requires the strongest magazine spring possible. Give it this and it is reliable. As for its not working in the dirt, it performed perfectly in the maelstrom of flying mud and dirt of WWI while the vaunted S&W Triple Lock revolvers jammed in the mud. So much for revolver vs. automatic reliability! WWI settled that issue quite nicely. After WWI, the Luger was rather popular with the American cowboys. It perfectly fit the chaps pocket, a notorious dirt and sand trap infamous for tying up revolvers with sand in their guts. When WWII came along, the Luger continued to shine.