I just saw the trailer for Highway Men, which appears to be the story of the two Texas Rangers who chased down and led the posse that killed Bonnie and Clyde.

This looks like a great gun movie.

Another great gun movie (albeit sort of long and boring at parts) was Public Enemies, starting Johnny Depp and Christian Bale.  The Internet Movie Firearms Database as great coverage of the guns of Public Enemies.

I love the guns of that period, roughly 1900-1934, it was in many ways the golden age of gun design.

Wikipedia defines the golden age of flight this way:

Sometimes dubbed the Golden Age of Aviation,[1] the period in the history of aviation between the end of World War I (1918) and the beginning of World War II (1939) was characterised by a progressive change from the slow wood-and-fabric biplanes of World War I to fast, streamlined metal monoplanes, creating a revolution in both commercial and military aviation. By the outbreak of World War II in 1939 the biplane was all but obsolete. This revolution was made possible by the continuing development of lightweight aero engines of increasing power.

The same thing could be said about gun design of first few decades of the 20th century.

That was when the first truly reliable and successful semi-autos hit the market, guns like the Remington Model 8, Remington Model 11/Browning Auto 5, Winchester 1907 and 1910, the 1911, and Thompson all came out.  Revolver design also improved from the single action and break-top to the guns like the Colt New Service and S&W Hand Eject.

Advances in metallurgy and heat treat, along with better machining improved the availability of high pressure center fire cartridges and ushered in the development of magnum handgun cartridges.

The old black powder and early smokeless powder cartridges that were designed on black powder principles were finally seeing their way out for the consumer arms market.

Early smokeless cartridges like the 30-40 Krag or 30-30 Winchester that were developed in the late 1800’s were still based around black power understandings of internal ballistics.  Shoulders were weak, bullets were heavy and round nosed, pressures were lower.  It was early 20th century cartridges that took cartridge and bullet design to modern style, like the 8×57 Mauser and 30-06 that popular.

One of the aspects of the golden age of flight was that there was little Federal regulation.  the FAA didn’t exist, the Air Commerce Act wasn’t passed until 1926 and the first Federal Pilot’s License wasn’t issued until 1927.  If you wanted to build a plane and fly it, you just needed a barn near a flat spot in southern California and could do what you wanted.

Likewise, there were hardly any gun laws during the golden age of guns.  A Mormon in a blacksmith shop in Utah could design half the world’s guns without the need for a license.  Anybody could order a Thompson sub machine gun from the Sears catalog.

The firearms industry hadn’t decided that Plastic Fantastic and the AR-15 were the only two center fire designs worth a damn.

It was a great time and great guns came from it.

I will be excited as a gun nut to watch this movie.