I've been debating adding a .38 Super to my gun safe for quite some time, and I have been looking hard at the Rock Islands.
If I could find myself an affordable Colt Commander Lightweight I might be very tempted to make it my CCW gun.
A little history of the .38 Super...
In the 1920s there was a spike in violent crime caused largely by prohibition. Police found that the typical sidearm of the time, chambering the .38 Special with a 158-gr. LRN bullet wasn't really up to the task of defeating the heavy sheet metal in car bodies, so they began to call for more powerful cartridge.
Colt responded by introducing the Colt Super .38, a 1911 chambered for an uploaded .38 ACP cartridge that became know as the .38 Super.
I'm not sure when the higher velocity loading became known as the .38 Super, but Peters was using that description by 1935 or 1936.
Remington was using the term .38 Super by 1933, but with this caveat -- Adapted to all .38 caliber Colt Automatic Pistols.
That makes me think that these were not high velocity rounds because even back then those rounds loaded to .38 Super levels would play hell on the Colt 1900.
AND, BONUS! I just found a wonderful typo in the 1930 Remington Catalog...
They're offering the .41 Russian cartridge... Yep, .41 instead of .44.
But, back to the story...
As it turns out, and despite a lot of the hype, adoption of the .38 Super and Smith & Wesson's .38-44 Heavy Duty, also designed to give a more powerful cartridge to defeat cars being used by the "auto bandits," as they were called, wasn't that widespread.
In part, that was due to the Great Depression making budgets for rearming police evaporate overnight and also because the ammo companies started offering cartridges like the .38 Special, .45 ACP, and others with specially hardened bullets that would also defeat the sheet metal in cars. Some versions were also offered with lighter bullets at higher velocities.
Remington's line was called the Highway Master, Peters offered the Highway Patrol, and off the top of my head I can't remember what Western called theirs,