There are some good firearms deals out there these days. “Good guns cheap.” America’s 800,000 some-odd cops trade in their old guns every few years and, except for agencies who are afraid of their guns ending up in criminal hands so they destroy them instead of trading them in, they end up on the law-abiding civilian market.
Back in the late ‘80s when the sea-change switch from six-shot service revolvers to higher capacity semi-automatic service pistols was in full swing, I bought several excellent-condition .38 Special and .357 Magnum revolvers for a hundred bucks apiece. In the 1990s my then-wife and I were in South Dakota at the famous Jack First Gun Shop when I spotted a rough-looking Smith & Wesson Model 15 .38 Special Combat Masterpiece for $95. I examined it. The outside looked as if it had been rubbed down with a Brillo pad but the barrel and chambers were pristine, and the action was so smooth and lock-up so perfect it could have just come out of the Smith & Wesson Performance Center. The mother of my children whipped out her Federal Firearms dealer’s license about as fast as I quick-drew my credit card. When I got it home I found it would group five shots in one inch at 25 yards with Federal Match target loads, and in 2010 it won me First Master in Stock Service Revolver class at the East Coast IDPA National Championships.
Fast forward to now. FBI, who law enforcement listens to the way Fortune 500 companies listen to Harvard Business School, declared a decade or so ago that the .40 Smith & Wesson caliber was equal in their testing to the best 9mm ammunition. The .40 S&W, introduced in 1990, had become the nation’s most popular police pistol caliber by the year 2000, but another sea change occurred: the snappy-kicking .40 got replaced by the milder 9mm pistol. All of a sudden, .40s were traded in so heavily that they became dirt cheap.
The height of that bargain era is passed, but by no means is it gone. The last advertisement I saw from AimSurplus, they were offering 13-shot .40 caliber Glock 23 compact pistols for a piddling $279.95, and relatively recent production 16-shot .40 caliber full size Gen4 Glock 22s for $299.95. For perspective, back in the day (early 2000s) I carried a privately-owned department-approved Glock 22 for three or four years, on and off duty, taught classes with it, and won three law enforcement state champion titles in a row with it. I loaded it with 165 grain hollow points at 1140 foot-seconds, which departments using the same load found put bad guys down as fast as the 125 grain .357 Magnum rounds they had been using in their previous service revolvers.
Suffice to say you can get damn good deals today on traded in police handguns, most of which have been “carried much and shot seldom” in the words of the late, great gun expert Jeff Cooper. I’d never buy a traded-in police car – I know what happens to those vehicles all day, every day – but traded-in cop guns are still a helluva good deal. Remember “Aim Surplus.”