How many of you (that prefer the new guns) started shooting SAs with the new features? And how many shot older ones, and changed over to the newer designs because of the features?
Count me in the second group. Started with older designs than the 1873, for that matter.
Still have both, still shoot both.
The
practical single actions I own are the Ruger New Models.
The old model makes a nice toy for the range and you can cock the hammer in your living room and enjoy the clicks. If that's all you will ever want it for, cool. It does feel great.
For a practical tool, though, I'll take not having to be careful to lower the hammer on the empty chamber when loading it. I'll take a gun that's safe to drop when it's in use, even if the hammer
has been pulled back unintentionally. I'll take not having to load 1, skip 1, load 4. I'll take being able to load 3 bullets and 3 snake loads.
Now the traditional design is a tad easier to load, because of how the cylinder clicks into position under the loading gate. That's my one complaint about the New Model.
Unlike the Marlin safety, though, the Ruger design does not make the gun go "click" instead of "boom." In fact, it can do quite the opposite on that 6th chamber.
I've never met a single action I didn't like. However, the New Model Ruger is a gun that handles and shoots like a classic, but with modern safety. "Modern" and "New" are kind of misnomers, too, since there are now plenty of teenagers whose parents weren't alive when the Old Model was still being made...
Even in its day -- back before trains had air brakes and when getting killed on the job was a normal part of employment -- the original Colt really did reflect a total disregard for safe design.
WRT safe carry, it was a step
backward from the Colt and Remington cap-and-ball revolvers that preceded it. It surprises me, actually, that an engineer like Bill Ruger would
copy that design in the 1950s.