Edward
Bartender
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- London, UK
Dirty Harry had a 6 shot revolver. I remember him asking that guy on the ground, if he fired 6 shots or 5 shots. You feeling lucky, punk?
No idea if the writers of said film had this in any way in mind, but in the Wild West it was common to load guns with only five bullets, and let the hammer sit on the empty chamber while in the holster, that way they sought to avoid any nasty accidents in the absence of a safety. I'm told the design of a 357 Magnum renders this concern an irrelevance despite the absence of a manual safety switch, but I do sometimes wonder if that put the idea into their heads to think about number of bullets - although of course Harry's point is about losing count of shots, not how many he had in the gun to begin with (impliedly a full six).