A verbatim copy and paste from a conversation I had last night with a buddy of mine who is a firearms instructor and USPSA GM.
Me: You have a [Smith & Wesson] 3913?
Him: Yep.
Me: Want to trade it for a Shield?
Him: It’s a Ladysmith.
Me: I’m pretty sure if shoot a crackhead with it, he’s not going to notice that.
You’d have to be blind to notice the proliferation of pink guns on the market these days, but this isn’t a new thing. It’s just a lot more obvious. Back in the day, S&W used to make the S&W 3913 Ladysmith, which was part of their 3rd Generation of semi-automatic pistols. The 3913LS was slightly different from the already awesome 3913 – the base model featured an ambi-safety and was slightly chunkier forward of the trigger guard than the 3913LS. The Ladysmith kept all the good stuff from the 3913 such as the excellent trigger, slim lines, but added a single side safety and a bit of a slimming packing on the gun. Basically, it was the forerunner of the current crop of single stack 9mm pistols on the market, and it was (to my mind anyway) still the best.
Which brings me around to the point, which is that Smith eventually introduced a gun that looked exactly like the Ladysmith, but didn’t say “Ladysmith” on the slide. Why’d they do that? Because there were apparently enough male buyers that wanted a truly excellent carry gun, but were self-conscious about it saying “Ladysmith”. I guess I don’t get that. I mean, if I’m buying a gun to show it to my buddies, then I guess I’d care what it said on the slide. But if I’m buying a gun to carry in case I have to shoot a crackhead in the face, I don’t really care what it says on the slide, or for that matter what it looks like or what color it is. If I woke up tomorrow morning and the Ruger LCR was suddenly available as a moonclip gun in 9mm…but I could only have it in pink, I’d still buy one. I don’t really care what my bullet launcher looks like, so much as I care whether or not it will launch bullets when and where I want them launched.
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