I’ve never been much of a trend-chaser when it comes to firearms. Why should firearms be any different than my other hobbies I guess. Maybe that comes with age, or maybe it’s just how I’m weird/wired. Either way, some of the guns I’ve enjoyed the most over the years are the ones that quietly slipped through the cracks while everyone else was chasing whatever the latest polymer wonder was supposed to be.
The first handgun I ever bought with my own money as an adult was a Ruger P85. Hindsight being 20/20, it wasn’t sleek or as buzzwordy as Glocks and other so called Wonder 9’s. It wasn’t fashionable. Nobody ever described it as good looking. It’s the kind of pistol that makes an 80-year-old Markarov look downright sleek and modern. For sure it totally never made anyone at the range stop what they were doing to take a closer look much less ask me to fire it.
However, it worked. It worked every time I picked it up, every time I loaded a magazine, and every time I pressed the trigger. There’s something to be said for a pistol that just keeps doing its job without asking for attention. That P85 taught me confidence, patience, and what reliability actually feels like in your hands. It also taught me a valuable lesson that looks aren’t as important as the engineering behind a pistol.
Later on, I picked up a Star BM, which might be one of the most underappreciated little 9mm pistols I’ve ever owned. Yes, the magazines were ridiculously expensive even back then, and finding extras always felt like a small victory. But once you got it on the range, none of that seemed to matter. The size, the balance, and the way it pointed just felt right. It was one of those pistols that made you want to shoot a little longer than you planned. It was the joy of shooting a 1911 without the cost of .45 ACP. And before you say “but what about 2011s”, this was way before 2011.
Neither of those guns ever became crowd favorites. The safety selector recall that hit the P85 early on didn’t help matters for that Ruger, but credit to Ruger for fixing the safety issue. The P89 was a vast improvement looks wise, even if functionally it wasn’t that big of a change.
Neither of these pistols really had any marketing momentum behind them. I know that’s odd to say but I’m in marketing and I have a bias about viewing things that way. They are both solid pistols, but people just went with the alternatives. Mind you, both earned a permanent place in my memory as honest, dependable shooters that reminded me you don’t have to follow the crowd to enjoy this hobby.
