The original "Wondernine"

S&W M59: Most of these jammed so often you'd wonder if you'd get through the magazine without a malfunction.

S&W M39: Many would question whether this was any improvement on the Walther P-38.

Anyway, it seems that with the BHP in the background, all the DA/SA Decocker pistols are a step backwards - or sideways? - to an inferior mode of operation, a solution in search of a problem.
 
The S&W 39 took an 8 shot magazine, why would that be called a wondernine? If thats the case, than a P-38 is also a wondernine. I think the 59 fits the term a little better.
 
If you look at Glock's latest pamphlet, they claim that the Glock 17 is "the original wondernine".

I'm not saying it was, I'm just saying that Glock claims that.
 
If we consider the definition to be

high capacity magazine, double/single action trigger, decocking safety, then it would have to be:

The S&W M59. Owing its design lineage to the S&W M39, the M59 prototype was actually developed years earlier. However, many of the features of the M39/59 may be traced to an earlier gun: Walther P38. The hammer decocking safety, slide mounted hammer block safety and double/single action trigger were all found originally in the Walther. S&W engineers discarded the locking block feature (of the Walther) for the more conventional modified Browning cam lock-up. The M59's magazine is a slightly reengineered Browning P-35 mag. So, S&W borrowed the best features of other makers and incorporated them into their design.

As mentioned earlier, the early M59s were not without teething problems. The slide stop had a nasty habit of popping out, causing the gun to self disassemble. They modified the slide stop by making it shorter and by counterboring the hole in the frame for it.
 
Wild Romanian
Wrong! The first pistol chambered for the 9mm parabellum round was the Luger, which became the world's first high capacity when it was issued as the Langpistole to NCO's of machine gun units with an Erma drum magazine holding 32 rounds. The BHP was a pisly second at ony 13 rounds. And, later so called "high capacity" pistols did not begin to catch up. Ergo, the DWM Luger was the first wondernine. A decocker and double action do not enter the equasion. Pure raw firepower makes the long barreled Luger a wonder pistol.

The Wild Armenian
 
The orignal "Wondernine"

John Lawson:
Please be attentive: The Luger pistol has nothing to do with the term wondernine. If you had taken the time to read my thread and understand it you would have known that the Luger has nothing to do with the term wondernine. Let me repeat one more time. Wondernine was a term that refered to the high capacity 9mm's of the 1980's that were flooding the market at that time. The luger is not high capacity and the luger was not first manufactured in the 1980's as you yourself have already stated. How do you equate this pistol with a wondernine? W.R.

The High Power predated the term wondernine by many, many years but it was the first high capacity 9mm and it still considered by most experts to be the standard by which all other 9mm's are compared

John If your re-read my statement it did not say that the High Power pre-dated the luger in the 9mm chambering.
 
Before we reduce ourselves to fisticuffs, let's

go back to semantics and agree on the following features as distinguishing the Wondernine from its predecessors:

double and single action trigger;
double stack magazine, and;
decocking safety (on some models).

Under this definition, virtually all guns before the S&W M59 do not fit into this category. Granted that there was a 32 round snail drum for the P-08, but the P-08 had a single action trigger. The Browning P-35 had a double stack magazine, but like the P-08 it too has only a single action trigger. As for the Walther P-38, while it features two out of the three things mentioned above, its magazine was only single stack.
 
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