The Universal Gun Symbol

When I was a boy, the world was divided into cowboys and Indians. The lines were clear. One side had hats and honour. The other had feathers and an alarming tendency to die theatrically behind the swings.

What nobody had, however, was a double-barrelled Colt .45.

I was slightly worried I’d end up being chased out of the saloon for firearms pedantry, but it needs saying. The archetypal revolver of the Wild West, the Colt Single Action Army, had one barrel. Singular. Unambiguously so. No over-under arrangement. No side-by-side innovation from a bored gunsmith in Dodge City.

Yet give any human being the task of miming a handgun and what happens? Out come two fingers. A sort of pocket-sized over-under that never existed outside the human imagination.

At no point did Wyatt Earp lean across a card table and extend his index and middle finger in rigid formation. No outlaw ever snarled, “Draw,” while brandishing what looked suspiciously like a poorly co-ordinated V-sign. The Old West was violent, but it was not anatomically imaginative.

And yet we all do it.

Children do it. Adults do it. News presenters do it when explaining “armed suspects”. Two fingers together, thumb cocked, slight squint. Bang. The gesture is universal. It has outlived the revolver.

I suspect the reason is structural rather than historical. One finger wobbles. Two fingers together form a convincing flat plane. The human hand, like most British infrastructure, requires reinforcement before it can perform theatrically.

It also reveals something mildly profound. We do not recreate machinery accurately. We reduce it to symbol. The revolver becomes a cartoon. The bang becomes “pew”. Accuracy quietly leaves the saloon through the side door while recognisability takes centre stage.

You could replace cowboys with GIs, Viet Cong, gangsters, spies, or whatever conflict the decade prefers. The gesture survives. Different wars, same two fingers. The hand remains stubbornly double-barrelled.

So next time someone levels a two-fingered pistol in jest, resist the urge to offer a lecture on nineteenth-century firearms design. Accept that civilisation runs not on mechanical precision but on shared shorthand.

Though I still maintain that if anyone had actually invented an over-under Colt, the O.K. Corral would have been considerably shorter.