Ordinary Firearm Reviews: The Remington R1 1911
Remington R1. The modernized GI style 1911. A comfortable but perplexing piece of engineering occupying the metaphorical space in between. Modern machining and materials for a design old enough that your great grandparents recognize it. A sense of early 1900’s Americana without any of the prestige. This basically makes a modern GI 1911 the equivalent of wanting a classic car and buying a Pinto or a vinyl collection of post-2000’s classic rock LPs. (I’m looking at you Chinese Democracy).
The 1911 pattern and its direct descendants are popular and for a number good reason. The design is not just time honored. It’s iconic. Many aspects of the original such as the grip angle, control layout, and even the manual of arms of for SA only autos remain in the contemporary firearm world. The impact is viewable at any pistol or 3-gun event of your choosing. Like it or not the centennial pistol remains and so do those slowly graying baby boomers who like to hang out in the range club house next to the old cigarette vending machine extolling the merits of .45 AARP. They exist in a realm right next to the table at your local gun show who’s inventory of WWI and II pistols never changes, a kind of living museum of barrel aged firearms development. Hands off the glass please and no low ball offers, I know what I’ve got.
Which brings us to the current day and an overbundance of middle of the road 1911 pistols from <INSERT LARGE FIREARM BRAND HERE>. Anyone with a name recognizable without the assistance of web search produces a series of 1911s. S&W, Ruger, Sig, the list goes on and on. Remington enters the fray with their R1 offerings let’s take a look and get the basics out of the way.
The R1 is your classic “Browning’s gift to humankind” GI style 1911. .45ACP, 5 inches of barrel, 7 rounds in the mag. Blued finish to the slide and frame where an idiot scratch during assembly will inevitably appear. Spurred hammer, short beavertail, and wooden grips complete the bulk picture. That picture, if you’re looking for a perfect copy, will be wrong. The stainless barrel, bushing, and trigger combined with modern 3-dot irons among some other minor changes certainly make the gun more functional but you’re not getting away with this at the re-enactment weekend. The gun goes bang when you need it and it’s otherwise perfectly a perfectly acceptable shooter. I’ve no gripes about this particular slug thrower as a gun.
Where I’m confused is the origin. I do not grok the impetus for its existence.
There no blame to be put on any manufacturer the onus of building and selling 1911s. The parts are everywhere, most fanboys have more than one, and the production process doesn’t have to be state of the art. If people buy it, it’s money in the bank. Where the confusion comes is the quasi GI reproduction found in guns like the R1. When Dan Wesson or Ruger or Springfield release a mid-grade 1911, it has things like ring hammers, extended beavertails, yadda yadda yadda. Improvements to the design are something you’d expect in order to stay competitive in a world of modern platforms and materials, the the tenants of war pedigree and arguments for or against war “fighting guns” made out of tupperware notwithstanding). On the flip side you also have GI reproductions which are strictly not improved for the reasons of historical accuracy with varying degrees of success.
And then you have the R1. A slight improvement with all of the GI impediments. Which begs the question; who was asking for this? This one foot in the door approach just doesn’t make any sense to me when there’s basically no drawback to going one way or the other. The gun isn’t that offensive but it looks and feels a little half assed. And they did it well enough you can’t help but wonder why they offer it when they still have full ass modern 1911s. Whoever is buying this clearly doesn’t care about the anachronistic nature of a stainless match barrel but was willing to settle on possible hammer bite for reasons unknown to me and that compromise without reason is what bugs me even as it punches out bulleyes with boring regularity.
The real main takeaway for this specific make and model though goes right back to that first paragraph. “An old design without any of the prestige.” But in this case it should be obvious what the attempt was given the company and their other recent attempts. Remington, like a lot big firearms manufacturing firms, has been around forever and therefore has a lot of History™. And for the 1911 community, History™ is a big deal. It’s not limited to 1911’s. Name recognition is a big deal for gun companies the same way it is for car companies. Old models get facelifts and re-runs to capitalize on this.The market is there for the old legends and it’s reason people still go online and beg for Colt to bring back the snake guns. The R1 though is interesting to me though because in a lot of ways, it’s disingenuous. Remington Arms did make 1911’s at one point and the production numbers during WWI were under 22,000. Big Green didn’t make any during WWII. But the splinter company Remington Rand did. In fact they made a lot of them, nearly 900,000. In most every case, someone discussing a Remington pistol marked US Army is talking about a gun made by a typewriter company, not the brand we know today. A betting man might say that the present day Remington is hoping you’d forget that the majority of WWII pistols were built by a company they split from in 1886. It’s not really the same ancestry at that point, but it’s a big slab of steel with “Remington” on the side. Unless you care to look deeper, that name mis-recognition means it’s a “reboot” (hard quotation marks) of a classic. Which again, doesn’t make it a bad gun in any sense of the term. It does however make it the pistol equivalent of a digital 8-track player.
That marketing process is relatively widespread in the current day. A sense of nostalgia, often for things we weren’t around for originally is something that has transcended the bounds of history buffs and hipsters to enter the mainstream consciousness. There’s no reason that a gun company wouldn’t reach back the same way and give you a slightly reimagined 1911 when people are out there getting excited for the PG13 version of after school cartoons, Crystal Pepsi, and Radiohead’s OK Computer for the second time.
In that lense it starts to make a bit more sense as regardless of personal concerns about WWI ergonomics the R1 is what it is, a marginally improved pistol still in the GI form. When it’s boiled down maybe there really is a stronger market for a retro-futuristic guns then the preceding rant suggests. There are new Colt Mustangs, new P210s, the list goes on. The gun market could support this need much like the growing interest in classic console emulators. There are people who are going to want 16bit old school that’s plug and play in 1080p 60fps to go along with their 100 year old pistol design featuring a match barrel. Widescreen Super Marios Bros. and the R1 are much alike in that aspect, far from cutting edge but not the original experience either. The metaphorical space in between. Something to think about while drenching a McRib in szechuan sauce.
