Pistols Weaken "Have you," said the note from a friend,
" a spare revolver I could take with me to Kenya ? " Obscurely gratified by the assumption underlying this request, which was that I am the sort of chap who (a) owns several revolvers and (b) needs at least one of them in the conduct of his day-to-day life, I fell to pondering on pistols and on how they have come down in the world. They are still carried by criminals and by army officers, and they are sometimes fired by the former; but they have, I think, ceased to be a gentleman's weapon. It is probable that more people owned a case of duelling pistols than ever used either of the side-arms in it; but nobody ever owns one now. In the personal luggage of Anthony Hope's heroes a pistol was almost as prerequisite as a razor, and as recently as the 'twenties Bulldog Drummond, when ordering his man-servant to pack for a week-end in Surrey, often told him to include a revolver in the contents of the suitcase. On the films pistols are still discharged by cowboys with an abandon partly attributable to the fact that they never have to reload (at least I have never seen one doing this), and in literature they are handled with slick bravado by the Callaghans and the Cautions. But I can- not help feeling that they are on their way out, that Queen's Messengers will less and less frequently stop dead in their tracks at the sight of the tiny jewelled revolver which the Countess has drawn from her muff. Already among the lower age-groups I notice a growing predilection for a weapon called the Space-Gun. This is meant for shooting Martians and, luckily for the purchasers, is not normally jewelled.
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