By Jim Dickson | Contributing Writer
In 1908 Colt introduced what they billed as the smallest and lightest .38 Special revolver ever made. The company called it the Police Positive Special.
A small frame 21-ounce revolver was about as small and light as a steel frame six-shot .38 Special could be. The name Police Positive Special set it apart from the previous year’s offering of the Police Positive in .32 Colt and .38 S&W, which had a ¼-inch shorter frame preventing the new and longer .38 Special being chambered in it.
The word “Positive” in the name referred to the positive hammer block safety that Colt had just added which positively prevented a gun dropped on its hammer from firing accidentally. This was a great safety feature, as previous guns like the famed Colt Single Action Army were commonly carried with the hammer down on an empty chamber because of so many accidental discharges.
A common accident among horsemen was for a stirrup to flop down and hit the hammer of the gun on your hip when saddling your horse. This invariably would fire any cartridge under a hammer without the newfangled hammer safety and remember that in 1907 there were far more people riding horses than in motor cars. Guns carried in pockets or holsters without a safety strap sometimes fell out or bounced out just as they can in a modern spring clamp shoulder holster when you have to leap over something and your feet land hard on the ground. Thus Colt’s improvement to their New Police revolver was well appreciated.
The early Colt Police Positive Specials had the forward curving front grip reminiscent of the Colt Single Action and this made them point fast and accurate. For such a little revolver they are surprisingly accurate. Later versions drifted away from this forward curve and don’t point as easily and accurately. This also resulted in a different mainspring although Colt did make an adaptor that allowed the newer model mainspring to be used in the older model guns.
The .38 Special and later the .357 Magnum came about as attempts to make a manstopper cartridge out of a .38. They should have listened to the army’s Thompson LaGuardia report which bluntly stated that nothing less than a .45 caliber bullet of 230 grains could be depended upon to instantly stop a man with a hit to the vitals. Thus with each round of failures to stop with .38’s there has been velocity increase that has been touted as the answer. We have gone from .38 Colt and .38 S&W to .38 Special and finally to .357 Magnum and the bad guys still can take a hit to the vitals and return fire.
What the increased velocity did do was increase recoil. A top break S&W in .38 S&W at 17 ounces and a top break Iver Johnson in .38 S&W at 18 ounces are very pleasant to fire. The 21 ounce Colt Police Positive Special is very unpleasant though with the trigger guard of the tiny revolver beating hard on your middle finger. Later versions strove to correct this culminating in the Mark V Police Positive Special.
While the powerful .45 Colt Single Action Army and the .45 Colt New Service double action are true manstoppers and quite fun to shoot they are much bigger and heavier and most of the police of the turn of the century were more inclined to use their night stick instead of their pistol. They wanted the smallest and lightest pistol possible.
The .32 revolver had been a good seller to them for the pistol in civilized areas back then was more of a last resort as a weapon and more likely to go unfired when making an arrest. The truly violent criminals usually got dealt with by armed citizens that they attempted to prey on because packing a pistol was a common practice in those days. Most of the police carried a lot but shot very little and the little Police Positive Special was certainly a joy to carry. Today, carried in an El Paso Saddlery Tortilla Pancake Holster you are hardly aware that it is there. This was enough to keep it popular and in production until 1995, an 87 year run.
There was also a snub nose version called the Colt Police Positive Detective Special which found much favor due to its ease of concealment and it’s light weight which meant that it did not weigh down pockets as much.
A great many people valued ease of carrying over comfort in shooting both then and now insuring the long production run of this pistol. The sad truth is that the average pistol owner does not fire that many rounds through his gun so a gun that is uncomfortable to shoot is not a big deal to them. Many mistakenly associate a bad recoil with more power which is not the case on this early production gun.
The test revolver is a story in itself. It was an early model, made in 1909, the second year of production. It had suffered through a hard life and was showing its age badly. The double action trigger pull was fine when dry firing but as soon as you used live ammo the trigger pull went from normal to a whopping 100 pounds back and forth with random pull weights in between.
Many years ago a very fine gunsmith (now deceased) whom I have the greatest respect for, had thrown up his hands in frustration declaring “I quit! I’m not trying to fix this gun anymore!” Recently I sent it off to Alan Aaronstein at OFM Corp. in Houston, Texas. This is the place that Colt refers repairs of discontinued pistols to. They found that the internal parts were a mixture of parts for other model guns and gunsmith made parts that functioned fine when dry firing but jammed together under the stout recoil of this tiny revolver. It took the aforementioned varying amounts of trigger pull to then unjam them and make the gun function. OFM Corp. ended up gutting the gun and putting in almost all new working parts. It works fine now and has an exceptionally good double action trigger pull which enables this piece to shoot far more accurately than you normally can with such a small, light pistol. Obviously the cost of repair exceeded the value of the gun but there is satisfaction in seeing a formally useless piece of scrap iron restored to service even if it requires the services of world class gunsmiths like Alan Aaronstein.
Upon getting the pistol back I fired it with 1,000 rounds of Black Hills .38 Special and 40 rounds of Steinel Ammunition .38 Special loads.
For accurate and fast pointing with the early forward curved front part of the grip you should grip the gun as high as possible just as you would a Colt Single Action Army. It then points exceedingly well and precise shooting with the superb double action trigger becomes easy. This is a tiny gun, and the middle finger will fill the space between the trigger guard and the grip. That won’t prevent it from transferring most of the sharp recoil to that middle finger though and a glove won’t help. Just get used to it and don’t plan on shooting as many rounds per day as you normally would.
I don’t often shoot a double action revolver single action as they are not as efficient at this as a gun designed as a single action. ALWAYS cock the gun with the thumb held crossways to the hammer as this throws the hand up high where it belongs and greatly lessens the chances of the thumb slipping off the hammer during the cocking motion. This could be fatal in an emergency and that is just when it is most likely to happen.
This is a tiny pistol with an even smaller hammer spur so single action shooting is a bit awkward. Keep you thumb pointed down and engage the trigger with the first joint of the trigger finger instead of the tip so that you have better control of the gun when firing. Remember that this was designed for double action firing and that is what it does best.
The Colt Police Positive Special filled an important niche in the firearms market. The smallest and lightest steel frame 6 shot .38 Special revolver for people who carried a lot but shot it little. That niche still exists today, and the Colt Police Positive Special still fills it very nicely 116 years after its first introduction in 1908.
