I am surely not alone in how I approach firearms related topics, which is to say with a voracious appetite and a willful lack of self control. All I had to do was enjoy the culinary delights of вЂњflavor packetsвЂќ for a few days and I can enjoy the sensation of scratching my thumbs on the slide mounted safety guilt free. Otherwise the gun remains mechanically almost unchanged and retains all the joy of a single stack, heel mag release, skinny barreled Walther with the additions of snappier recoil and a marginally better trigger.

The steel frame has been swapped for aluminium, the barrel is lighter and features a steel liner, and the grips are now all black plastic instead of the sexually attractive wood pulp based comeliness of bakelite. The P1 is, for anyone familiar with the P38, relatively unremarkable. Enter the Walther P1, the Get the Led Out version of the original classic. Several gun shops and shows scouring tables later I had my solution. After multiple range trips where the P38 was avoided to save it from wear I decided once again that eating Cup-A-Noodles between paychecks was acceptable if it got me a shootable Walther pistol with none of the guilt associated with beating up a geriatric gun. Being familiar with the mechanical longevity of many other C&R firearms in my personal collection as well as in the open world, I was less worried about the pistol equivalent of a hip replacement than I was about scratches, dings, cracks, and rust from normal use and cleaning. Combined with itвЂ™s history making it the belle of the ball each range trip it began to beg the question Am I really going to beat the heck out of a WWII collectible? A steel frame, decent hammer fired SA trigger pull, and a perfectly usable 25m zero made the P38 an absolute joy on the range. So you can imagine my mental conflict as I discovered something else P38вЂ™s are really fun to shoot. Once вЂњre-appropriatedвЂќ by his opponent, they kept track of their own in a grim contest.ДЄlthough my own thoughts on war fall much closer in line with General ShermanвЂ™s perspectives, my morbid curiosity and desire to preserve history made me recognize that there might be something quite special about this P38.

It is merely conjecture, but if they are all original there is a possibility that the first five can be attributed to the holsters previous owner. Even more intriguing is that they were clearly added at two separate occasions, one group scratched in large and crude strokes, and the ten above it in the same fashion as the gun itself. On the back, underneath a jagged cut to accommodate a much wider belt then originally intended, are not ten scratch marks, but fifteen. This leather first belonged to a Tokarev and was crudely modified to fit the Walther, as evidenced by the missing magazine pouch and torn material. The first indication is simply that it is not a P38 holster. The presence of two different styles of marks on an opposing holster suggests multiple owners.

Walther p1 c&r