When Ruger had introduced their Security-Six 15 years earlier, they made great inroads into a service revolver market dominated by S&W and Colt. (There are reasons why Kalashnikov and Bill Ruger got along so well in person.) It was a rugged beast, very accurate, built the way Mikhail Kalashnikov would have built a revolver. Ruger brought out the GP100-essentially, a “.41-frame” revolver, similar to the Colt Python and S&W L-Frame series-in 1986. “Why?” Ruger’s Brandon Trevino gave the best possible answer: “Because we had customers who wanted it.” One of them was the GP100 rendered as a short-barreled, 5-shot. 22 pistol (see Holt’s Rimfire column) with quick and easy takedown/reassembly, the soft-shooting Compact version of their American 9mm (review coming soon!) and a couple of new revolvers definitely out of the mainstream today. At a September writers’ conference at the Texas’ FTW Ranch, Ruger showed us the way cool Mark IV.
