The $60 Revolver Every Major Gunmaker Ignored — Until It Became America's Most Notorious Handgun

A revolver cheap enough that America's big gunmakers didn't bother chasing it was rare enough that a police ballistics tech could pick it out of a city full of guns — and famous enough to outlive the name of the man who designed it. His name was Douglas McClenahan. He built a drop-safety into a pocket revolver years before the household name got the credit. Two of the most infamous killings in American history ran through his little five-shot. He was gone before either one happened. That's how a man comes to lose his own gun twice.In this video: What Charter Arms' Undercover actually offered the working man that Smith & Wesson and the cheap German imports didn't — real safety at a real price The safety bar mechanism McClenahan built into the gun, and why the man who invented drop-safety in 1896 never got credit either What the Gun Control Act of 1968 actually banned, and why McClenahan's all-American revolver survived a law aimed squarely at guns like his Why Sturm, Ruger got the credit, the retrofit program, and the reputation for the exact safety mechanism McClenahan built nine years earlier What happened in the summer of 1976 when a rare gun became the one clue detectives could actually work with What was in David Berkowitz's hands the night he was caught near a parking ticket What Mark David Chapman carried out of a Honolulu gun shop, and what happened outside the Dakota on December 8th, 1980 Why the designer of both guns left almost nothing in his own words, while the two men who used them gave interviews for decades Two guns. Two headlines. One name that appeared in neither. Who owns a gun's meaning — the hands that build it, or the hands that fire it?If you've got a side in that argument, tell me in the comments.Subscribe, and I'll keep pulling these old fights back out of the file.