34. If you’re leaving scorch-marks, you need a bigger gun.
–“The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries“, Schlock Mercenary
Sometimes you buy the book, then you buy the gun.
Sometimes you buy the gun, then you buy the book.
Some days you get the bear, other days the bear gets you.
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When the Smith and Wesson .500 Magnum came out, I didn’t care much for it. I still don’t like pretty much all of the production guns.
What’s not to like about one of the most powerful handguns in existence?
Well, for one thing, the factory guns are shiny. Awful shiny to me.
Secondly, I don’t care much for the barrel options. FotB Andrew is interested in the .500 Magnum, so I’ve taken a look at a few. There’s one with a 10 1/2″ barrel that we got a chance to handle at Collector’s Firearms in Austin. I’m sure that’s great for some people. For me, if i wanted a crew-served weapon, I’d buy a vintage French 75.
There’s an 8 3/8″ version that still seems awkward to me (and we haven’t found one anywhere recently). There’s a 7 1/2″ Performance Center version that seems perhaps less awkward than the 10 1/2″. (Since this is a Performance Center gun, we’d probably have to special order it: I don’t think anybody is going to have one in stock.) There’s a 4″ version that seems too short to me. And there’s a 3 1/2″ version that’s probably great for self-defense: if you don’t hit the bad guy, the muzzle blast will deafen him, and the fireball will set him on fire.
(Smith and Wesson at one point made an “Emergency Revolver Survival Kit” and a bear emergency kit, both containing a .500 Magnum with a 2 3/4″ barrel. I sort of vaguely wanted one of those, just because it seemed so ridiculous. Also, I like the fact that the bear one includes a book on “bear attacks”.)
(And, on a side note, why aren’t there more .500 Magnum lever guns? The few I have seen are from high-end custom or semi-custom gun makers. I haven’t seen any that I’d consider “mass produced”. I have heard rumors that S&W is looking at a .500 Magnum chambering for their 1854 lever gun, sometime in the not too distant future (but not next Sunday, A.D.).)
There is, however, one Smith and Wesson .500 Magnum that I do like. But I didn’t know about it until I read Timothy J. Mullin’s Serious Smith & Wessons The N- and X-Frame Revolvers: The S&W Phenomenon.
Once upon a time, there was a man named John Ross.
I’ve had a little trouble finding information about John Ross beyond what is in Wikipedia and the author biography for one of his books. Timothy J. Mullin wrote an article for the Smith and Wesson Collectors Association Journal (Fall 2022), which I have also drawn on for this entry.
He worked as an investment broker and financial advisor, taught concealed carry classes, did some public speaking, and, at one point, ran as a Democrat (!!!!) for Congress.
John Ross was a serious gun crank. I can’t find it online now (if I do, I’ll add it) but I have seen a photo of an 18-year old John Ross showing Elmer Keith his home-built .50 caliber rifle. He was an inveterate gun tinker and inventor. He also wrote for “Machine Gun News” and the late and much missed “Precision Shooting” magazine.
And he didn’t much like the S&W .500 Magnum when it was introduced, either. Mullin’s article says he didn’t like the compensator, which he thought made the gun excessively loud. He also thought it was big and heavy: he wanted something with a lot of power that a man could carry in the field all day, in case he had to shoot a bear while fishing or a marauding side of beef while farming. He also didn’t like the twist rate of the factory barrel.
So he approached S&W. As I’ve written before, Smith and Wesson will make pretty much anything for you that is legal and doesn’t violate the laws of physics and ballistics, as long as you’ll commit to a minimum number of guns. John Ross offered to buy 500 .500 Magnums, made by Smith and Wesson to his specs, and Smith and Wesson said “Yes”. I don’t know how he pulled this off. As I understand it, he originally sold the guns for $1999. Assuming that he was paying Smith and Wesson at least $1000 (and that’s just a wild-arsed guess) per gun, that’s $500,000. Maybe, as an investment broker, he had money? Or maybe he was paying S&W as the orders came in? But what if he came up short on orders? I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter now.
(I still want that .17 HMR Kit Gun, but I don’t know if I could round up 497 other people to buy one with me.)
He also wrote a book, which was bundled with the guns, “The Development of the Powerful Big-Bore Revolver in General and the .500 S&W Magnum in Particular And The Development of the John Ross/Performance Center 5” .500 S&W Magnum“. You can find PDFs of that on the Internet, if you know how to do a Google or DuckDuckGo search. In the interest of convenience, and with no intent to violate anyone’s intellectual property rights, I am hosting a copy here (unless I get a takedown request).
I think this is a pretty fascinating little book, even if you don’t have a .500 Magnum. It starts with Elmer Keith and goes up through John Linebaugh, Hamilton Bowen, Freedom Arms, and all the way to the .500 Mag. Mr. Ross goes into some detail about how his guns differ from the standard factory guns (and why), as well as giving handloading advice. He did a lot of work with various loads and bullet weights (up to 750 grains).
By now you’ve figured out where this is going, right?
John Ross/Performance Center Smith and Wesson .500 Magnum, with the two-tone finish. There were 250 made with this finish, and 250 made in stainless steel only.
Mike the Musicologist came up around Election Day last year, and we were driving around with Andrew. As I recall, we had just left Cabela’s, and Andrew was expressing his interest in the .500 Magnum. I hopped on GunBroker to see if they had any that looked like one Andrew would want…
…and found a GunBroker listing for a John Ross .500 Magnum. Did I tell Andrew? Of course not. I kept it to myself, because I am an evil and selfish person. Also, Andrew and I both own .44 Magnums, and if I got a .500 Magnum, that would give me an advantage in the metaphorical…size war, if you know what I mean and I think you do. I kept an eye on the auction, and ended up pulling the trigger at the “Buy It Now” price shortly before the end, so I wouldn’t get hosed out of it.
(I’ve sent Andrew links to other John Ross gun on GunBroker since I got mine.)
It was kind of expensive. Embarrassingly so. I don’t want to say how much. But, as I said, I like the looks of the gun, I like owning two of the most powerful handguns in the world (yes, I have a S&W .44 Magnum) and I had recently experienced a financial event that left me with some spare jingle in my jeans. So I don’t regret it.
This is a very quick and dirty lineup that I kluged together, just to give folks some idea of size. From the left: .22 LR, .38 Special, .357 Magnum, 9 mm, .44 Special, .44 Magnum, .45 ACP, .45 Colt, .500 S&W Magnum.
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What was that about a book?
John Ross also wrote two other books besides the “Magnum” one. One of them was Self-Defense Laws and Violent Crime Rates in the United States (according to his author bio), which I have been unable to find anywhere. Unintended Consequences may be what he’s most famous for.
Unintended Consequences, John Ross. Accurate Press, St. Louis, MO., 1996.
More:
The story hinges upon the enactment and subsequent unintended consequences of several important pieces of U.S. gun control legislation and regulation: the National Firearms Act of 1934, the Gun Control Act of 1968, the Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986, the Assault Weapons Importation Ban enacted by Presidential executive order in 1989, and the Federal Assault Weapons Ban of 1994.
Its thesis, as discussed in the “Author’s Note – A Warning and Disclaimer” in the beginning of the book, is that enough bullying, by what is widely perceived as a hostile occupation government, will inevitably end in revolt if the occupied area is large enough and has a culture that is significantly different from the occupying state, and that this revolt will be undefeatable if the rebels use very low-tech “leaderless resistance.”
I have seen claims (somewhat backed up on Mr. Ross’s web site) that Canadian Customs will confiscate copies of Unintended Consequences shipped there. This just makes me think that, if I’m ever diagnosed with a terminal illness, I’ll find someone with a C-130 and we’ll start airdropping AR-pattern rifles and ammo to the Canadian Resistance.
Once I had the gun, I had to have the book to go with it. Which was slightly difficult. Unintended Consequences is out of print, and highly sought after. I ended up finding a copy on the Half-Price Books website for $120 plus tax and shipping, during one of their 20% off sales around the holidays.
This is a massive book, 863 pages long and at least one full ox-stunning unit.
Have I read it yet? No, I’m trying to work my way through, among other things, the new Taffin book (which is over 600 pages, though it also has a lot lot lot of color photos, which throws off the page count some).
Have I shot the gun yet? No, haven’t been able to make it out to the range still. Hoping to soon. And to be honest, I’m a little scared to shoot it. But I have my old bicycle helmet somewhere…and I’ve got ammo…and I’d really like to get some chronograph readings…
John Ross passed away in 2022. Archive of his personal website. His comments about “Favorite Novelists” are worth reading, but you should mentally translate that statement as “many, but not all, of his opinions match up with mine. Also, they are a little dated.”
Vaguely related to passing commentary.