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Guilty as charged on this. I was told by local LEO's I was crazy NOT to carry a gun with me a long time before the CCW laws became popular. I bought my Raven .25 in the mid to late 1970's. It fits in your back pocket and prints like it's a billfold. That was a big reason they were popular along with the ridicuously low price. I was a college student at the time with zero spending money but I had just sat through my first armed robbery (as a victim of course) and I decided it was better to be in jail than dead. I rarely carried it but in certain situations I would. I never had reason to use it at least not when I had it. I learned after my second armed robbery experience that guns don't do you much good if you don't have them with you.
The Raven and some others like it WAS the Saturday night special. The term was invented to describe that class of guns. Cheap and available were the things that scared politicians to death. I guess they cared more about their rears than they did ours. They certainly had protection but people without money - no protection for you. A lot of it was no doubt racial (and I'm not one to cry "racism" at the drop of a hat). Those were the guns poor people had so naturally they were unfit for use by anyone especially black people who were using them too often even back then.
CeeZee is definitely right about the Raven .25ACP being “the” Saturday Night Special back in the 1970s. The thing about the Raven is it was renowned for cycling reliably; unlike the Targa, Sterling, Baur, RG, and FIE, .22LR and .25ACP Saturday Night Specials. The Raven’s greatest fame probably occurred when Phil Engeldrum featured it in an article in his 1979 magazine “Handgun Tests- No Manufactures Ads” The article was titled “Why the $49 Raven .25 is better than a $220 S-W 9mm Model 59”. Both pistols were purchased, not provide by the manufacture, and the text and photos praised the Raven’s reliability and damned the M59s failures to cycle.