#345 S&W Regulation Police

 This is the first "open on the books" gun I have owned...The term indicates that there is no indication of the gun ever leaving the factory...The immediate thought in most minds on hearing this is "the gun must have been stolen!"...Although it is possible, there are many more likely reasons than that...It should be remembered that our government, always wanting to hold us closer, had not yet added firearms to its list of our possessions it deemed necessary to tax and tightly control, and our modern day BATFE did not exist...

At the time of this gun's manufacture, a firearm was not even required to have its own serial number, although most manufacturers were diligent enough to use S/N's for control of their own inventory...As an aside, some may wonder how I would know the period in which this gun was made...It was only about the beginning of 1919 that S&W, having regained control of their factories after the US government had assumed control for wartime production, began stamping their logo on the frames of their guns again...That practice was halted by the government as being unnecessary for wartime guns...In addition the address line stamped on the right side of the frame, first introduced as "MADE IN U.S.A.". was not ordered as an engineering change on S&W firearms until 1922...This gun has the small S&W logo rollmarked on the left side of the frame, but no address line on the right side...This tells me the gun was produced in the period of time between the beginning of 1919 and the end of 1921...Mike Helms' estimate in the S&WHF letter of nearby S/N'ed Regulation Police revolvers being shipped from inventory from 1922-24 is accurate...

Now the fun of imagining how the gun vanished from inventory with no record can begin...Although the possibility of theft cannot be conclusively dismissed, other practices in use at the time can also be considered...If the engineering department needed a gun for testing (some of which might be destructive) an employee might have hurriedly brought an incompletely finished gun from the factory floor to a testing engineer, and if the gun was destroyed, it is possible no notation was made in the ledger of the loss...

It was also common practice for field salesmen to put guns in their sample case for showing potential customers on road trips...If a new client turned in a large order and showed a desire to own a new toy himself, the salesman might have gifted the client a gun out of his sample case...This would be easy to imagine if the road trip was close to its end, and the salesman knew he could replenish his samples on his return to the factory...DB Wesson himself was known to present guns to certain people who could provide good publicity by having a S&W in hand during a photo opportunity...It is easy to imagine an employee being ordered to bring a certain gun to the big corner office because the boss asked for it "now"...At such times it might not have been noted in the ledger...And remember there was no such requirement for a background check before a gun transfer in that period...

In some cases of a legitimate sale, it is even possible that a memo was hurriedly written then lost in the daily paper shuffle before an invoice was written...This is all fun for speculation 100 years after the gun was produced, and I'd like to hear your scenarios in the comment section below...

In the meantime I am proud to own this very nice example of an all original 3 1/4" barreled Regulation Police revolver chambered in .32 Long...I will put up photographs after the trip through Dunkin Gunwash, but in the meantime I'll post images of the Letter of Authenticity and a snippet from the factory shipping ledger showing it was never logged out...