Dirty Harry & Mack Bolan’s Big Thunder: The Auto Mag Pistol in .44 AMP

By Chris Eger

The “aristocrat of big-bore semi-auto pistols,” the .44 Auto Mag was ahead of its time, and squarely behind the 8-ball when it came to luck.
Designed by unsung firearms genius Harry Sanford, the .44 AMP cartridge was born in the late 1950s. Devised with hunting in mind, the round has almost the exact performance envelope of a .44 Rem Magnum except that the Auto Mag is rimless so that it could be fed and extracted through a very specially designed semi-auto pistol.
Speaking of which, Sanford and Max Gera worked on the semi-auto pistol built around the cartridge for a decade, and the forward-thinking gun was perfected enough by 1969 to move into low-rate production.
The gun was a large-framed semi-auto that operated on a long-bolt short recoil system. To keep the beast of a round safely locked down, it used an eight-lug rotating bolt that resembles the kind found on M16/AR15 rifles. A single-stack detachable magazine about the size of a pack of cigarettes gave the pistol a 7+1 capability.
The grip and ergonomics were based on the High Standard HD target pistol while the takedown method and control surfaces were similar to those of the Walther P38.
Over-engineered and complex, the Auto Mag

Source: Guns.com