Still working on grokking how into the ''80s, the typical handgun was "6 shots, all of which are pretty loose by design"
Still working on grokking how into the “80s, the typical handgun was "6 shots, all of which are pretty loose by design”
Until the post-Vietnam era, the Army was filled out with draftees, and they all needed guns, so arms manufacturers had a pretty good deal selling automatic pistols to the government. And they charged government-customer prices, which were out of reach of local police forces and private buyers (and the guns being meant for the government made it a lot less common for boxes of them to fall off the back of a shipping truck.) And since the civilian market wasn’t willing or able to pay government prices, they got cheap shit.
The transition to the all-volunteer Germany/Korea/Stateside-RDD paradigm and the subsequent draw-down meant that those manufacturers had to find new markets, and to figure out how to make money selling to those markets. Some genuinely went downscale, others just chopped back profit margins. Either way it started to be more common for a low-budget buyer to have a more sophisticated firearm.