(Actually, 11 ounces of silver, but that’s another story.) “They may have been big and ugly, but they sure worked!”Ĭurious to see if they really were that reliable or if the rep was just hazy nostalgia from a misspent youth, we inquired around and wound up getting one, along with a few magazines, from a dealer in exchange for $200. Like many Ruger offerings, it gained a reputation for reliability such that any time the P-series guns get brought up in gun forums to this day, you’ll get people waxing nostalgic about them. Bruce Willis might not have used one in Nakatomi Tower, but it was the everyman handgun of its day. MSRP for a stainless KP89 around the turn of the millennium was $525 and a blued Ruger P89 was $475, but street prices for the latter were often closer to three bills. You could just about buy two P89s for the cost of a Smith & Wesson 5906.

Sometimes they even printed it in the article blurbs on the cover.) These were double-action, double-stack 9mm Para pistols, and you weren’t an ’80s or ’90s action-movie hero without one.īecause its frame and slide are finish-machined from castings, the Ruger P89 enjoyed a big price advantage over its closest domestic competitor. It made a pretty big splash commercially, though, because it gave Ruger an entry into what was then the hottest category of handgun, what the gun magazines of the time dubbed “ Wondernines.” (I’m not making that up. Ruger’s P-series of double-action autos, of which the P89 is the third variant after the P85 and P85 Mk II, was originally intended to compete in the military’s handgun competition in the ’80s, but by the time it was ready, the Italians already won the contract. And that means it was probably a Ruger P89. Being a perpetually broke college student who depended on pulling friends out of ditches for beer in the winter months, it was probably a 9mm, because 9mm Wolf was cheaper than. An alloy-framed Ruger P-series autoloader. Pop quiz: What pistol was in an Uncle Mike’s nylon Sidekick holster and wedged between the driver seat and console of his truck? Yup. You call the one friend in college you know with a 4WD pickup who’ll come rescue your ride in the middle of the night and not tell anybody who’ll tell your parents. and you just put that embarrassing secondhand Dodge Dynasty you got from your parents into a ditch.

It’s sometime in the late ’90s on an icy night at 1 a.m.

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