For about 50 years, the gun world agreed on a ranking and almost nobody questioned it. If you wanted the best revolver made, you bought a Colt. If you wanted a fine one, you bought a Smith & Wesson. And if you couldn’t quite swing either, you bought a Ruger. Colt on top for craftsmanship, Smith in the middle for refinement, Ruger at the bottom, the working man’s gun, the one you settled for when the good ones were out of reach.
That ranking is still repeated today. On forums, at gun counters, by men who’ve been shooting since before some of these companies changed hands. And here’s the thing about it. It was true once. It was set in an era that has quietly ended and most of the people still reciting it never noticed the ground move.
Because the gun that used to sit at the bottom of that list may be the one that outlasts all three. And the two names at the top each spent the last couple of decades earning an asterisk. One of them drilled a hole in its own reputation. The other got so expensive that most of the men praising it have never actually owned one.
So, today we settle it. Not by the logo, not by the legend, by the steel, the springs, and what these three guns actually are in 2026 versus the reputation they’re still trading on. And I’m going to do something that’s going to make half of you uncomfortable for the first 10 minutes. I’m going to make the case against Ruger as honestly and as hard as it can be made.
Because if the case falls apart, I want it to fall apart on its own weight, not because I went easy on it. So, here’s the charge. Here’s why for 50 years the serious guys called Ruger the lesser gun. Ruger revolvers are cast. Colt and Smith forge their frames. Forging means taking a billet of steel and hammering it into shape under enormous pressure, and a man at a bench fitting the internals by hand.
Casting means pouring molten steel into a mold. To the traditional eye, that’s the difference between a hand-built engine and one stamped out of a press. And it shows, the critics say, in the details. Pick up a Ruger hammer and look at it. On a lot of them, it looks like it was cut out of a flat plate of steel, because it basically was.
The trigger, out of the box, is heavier and grittier than a Smith’s. It stacks, meaning it gets harder as you pull through it, instead of breaking clean. Set a GP100 next to a Python, and the Colt’s trigger feels like a glass rod snapping, and the Ruger feels like dragging a desk drawer that needs oil. Then there’s the refinement.
The push-button cylinder release on a Ruger, some people love it, but mechanically, it’s a simpler, cheaper-feeling system than the sliding latch on a Smith or a Colt. The polish isn’t as deep. The lines aren’t as graceful. Everywhere you look, the Ruger has chosen function over finish, and a man raised on hand-fit revolvers reads that as the gun telling you what it costs.
That’s the case. And I want to be fair. Every word of it is true. The Ruger is the least refined of these three guns. It has the worst trigger out of the box, and it was built to a price. If your standard for the best revolver is craftsmanship, fit, and finish, the Ruger loses, and it isn’t close. But hold that whole charge in your head because here’s what’s about to happen.
Every single piece of it, the casting, the trigger, the crude hammer, the simple latch, is about to get complicated. Not one of them survives contact with how these guns actually perform once the rounds go down range and the years pile up. And the first one to fall is the biggest one. The casting. Because the entire 50-year case against Ruger >> [music] >> rests on three words, cast is weaker.
And those three words are wrong. Let me explain why and I am going to lean on the metallurgists here, not on my opinion, because this is exactly the kind of claim where opinion gets a channel buried in the comments. When you forge a piece of steel, you work harden it. The hammering aligns the grain of the metal and packs it denser and you get directional grain flow, which genuinely adds strength along that grain.
That part of the old wisdom is real. Forged steel in a given thickness is strong and a forged frame can be made thinner and lighter while holding that strength. The smith guys are right about that and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Here’s what they leave out. That was the comparison decades ago, forged billet against old style sand or die casting, which did have impurities and air pockets and weak spots.
That kind of casting deserved its bad name. But Ruger doesn’t do that kind of casting. Ruger uses investment casting and the modern version is done under vacuum, which pulls the air and the impurities out before the steel sets. The result, in the words of a metallurgist who builds these things for a living and showed up in the comments of a video that got this wrong is a tighter grain structure with no directional weakness because there’s no single direction the grain was forced to flow.
Forged steel is strong along the grain and weaker across it. A good vacuum investment casting is strong in every direction at once. Modern casting [music] can equal forged steel. In some applications, [music] it beats it. Browning learned this the hard way when they moved their high power to a more powerful caliber.
The forged frame wouldn’t hold up and the cast frame did. And here’s the detail that quietly demolishes the whole, it’s a cast gun dismissal. [music] Only the frame is cast. The barrel on a Ruger is cold hammer forged, the same process the premium makers use. The cylinder, the part that actually contains the explosion six times in a row, is machined from solid bar stock, exactly like a Smith cylinder.
So, when a man waves off a Ruger as just [music] a casting, he’s describing one part of the gun and ignoring that the two [music] parts under the most violent stress are made the same way the expensive guns make them. So, why is the Ruger frame thicker if casting isn’t weaker? Two reasons, and neither one is because it has to be to make up for cheap steel, which is the myth.
First, casting lets Ruger pour more steel into the high stress areas, the top strap, the area around the cylinder, without the cost of machining it all away from a forging. They can be generous with metal where it counts. Second, [music] and this is the one almost nobody knows, a Ruger and a Smith of the [music] same size often weigh about the same, even though the Ruger looks beefier.
How? [music] Because the Ruger saves weight somewhere else entirely, and that somewhere else is the single most important structural decision in this entire comparison. It’s the side [music] plate, or rather, the fact that a Ruger doesn’t have one. Look at the side of a Smith & Wesson or a Colt. You’ll see a seam, a removable panel held on by screws.
That’s the side plate, and it’s there because forged revolvers are built by machining the frame, and then dropping the lockwork in through the side and closing it up. It’s how they’ve been made for over a century. It works. But a seam [music] is a seam. It’s a place where the frame is, by definition, not one solid piece of steel.
Now look at a Ruger GP100 or a Redhawk. No seam, no side plate. The frame is a single monolithic block of steel, and the entire trigger group is installed up through the bottom [music] of the grip as one unit. There’s no panel cut into the side of the pressure-bearing part of the frame. And this is the argument that, [music] every time this debate flares up, draws the loudest agreement from the men who actually own these guns, the single point hundreds of them line up behind. A frame with no [music] side
plate, all else equal, is more rigid than a frame with one. There’s simply more uninterrupted steel surrounding the cylinder. Ruger then locks that cylinder into the frame at three points, the [music] front, the rear, and the bottom, where a typical Smith locks it at two. So, under the pressure of a full magnum load, 36,000 lb per square inch trying to push everything apart, the Ruger holds the cylinder in what one writer called a bank vault grip, while a lighter, side-plated frame can flex just slightly.
Do that 10,000 times and slightly becomes out of time. Which brings us to the most loaded phrase in the revolver world and the one I have to handle carefully because [music] it’s half myth and half smoking gun. Ruger only loads. >> [music] >> You’ve seen it. Certain heavy hand loads, certain boxes of factory ammo marked safe in Rugers and nothing else.
And a lot of Ruger guys point at that and say, “See, proof. Ruger is just stronger.” Now, here’s where I’m going to correct the Ruger crowd because the honest version matters. The original Ruger only loads were not a general strength claim. They were specific to the 45 Colt cartridge loaded hot for Ruger’s [music] beefy single-action Blackhawk frames, which were far stronger than the old Colt single actions those loads would have destroyed.
And some of it was simply that Ruger’s cast frames [music] allowed a slightly longer cylinder so you could seat a bullet out farther and fit more powder. And that round [music] would physically turn in a Ruger and bind in a Smith. So, part of the Ruger only legend is geometry, not raw strength. Credit where it’s due, [music] the skeptics have a point there.
But, here’s the part the skeptics don’t want to sit with. Why does the heavy loading industry, the Buffalo Bores and the Underwoods, still [music] print gun specific warnings? Why do the hottest factory loads so often list Ruger frames as approved and others as not? And why is it that Smith & Wesson, at one point in the history of the 357 Magnum, was reported to have pushed for the cartridge’s maximum pressure to be held down because a steady diet of full power loads was hard on their guns? You don’t ask the rule makers to lower
the ceiling on a cartridge if your gun is comfortable at the ceiling. And it lines up with what owners say over and over. Go read them. A Security-Six that handled loads that bent the frame of a Python, a Model 29 that locked up after 24 rounds, a 686 that came back from the range with a stuck cylinder and a bent ejector rod.
The pattern in those stories is almost always the same ending. So, I sold it and bought a Ruger and never looked back. And these aren’t internet tough guy stories. One man described taking an advanced revolver class with Massad Ayoob back when the hot 125-grain .357 [music] was crowned the stopping power king.
Over several days and hundreds of rounds, he watched multiple Smiths in that class malfunction badly enough to be shipped back to the factory. Another fellow has carried the same 5 and 1/2-in .44 Magnum Redhawk for 42 years, thousands of full-power rounds, 20 of those years riding on his hip every day doing cowboy work in every kind of weather, and he says it’s still as tight and accurate [music] as it was the day he bought it.
A retired sheriff’s deputy who started his career on revolvers carried a Ruger Security-Six on duty and trusted his life to it for years. These are working [music] guns in working hands over decades. That’s a different kind of evidence than a spec sheet. And when somebody finally put all three through an identical ringer, the pattern held.
Gat Daily ran 2,000 rounds through a Python, a 686, and a GP100 with no cleaning, just shoot until something quits. The Colt failed zero times. The Ruger failed zero times. The 686, the refined one, the one that sits above the Ruger in the old ranking, failed once and needed a cleaning to keep going. Final scorecard across durability, accuracy, parts, and serviceability, [music] the Ruger came out on top.
39, Smith 38, Colt 37. The working man’s gun won the endurance race. If you’ve made it this far, you already know this isn’t the usual brand loyalty noise. It’s the numbers and the testing run straight. That’s the whole channel. If you want it, the subscribe button’s right there, and we do one of these every day. Now, back to it [music] because we’ve only knocked down the first charge against the Ruger.
The next is the trigger, and that’s the one where the Ruger actually has to give some back. Now, I told you I’d be fair, and fair cuts both ways. So, let me hand the Ruger crowd a dose of reality before [music] they get too comfortable because the comments under that inferior video weren’t all one direction.
>> [music] >> There are men who bought a GP100 that jammed out of the box and had to go back to the factory. There’s a fellow who shot a Super Redhawk loose and out of time in about 1,500 rounds, while his Smiths went twice that [music] and stayed tight. Ruger’s are not magic, and indestructible is a reputation, not a guarantee.
A gun is a machine, and machines made by humans on a Tuesday vary. So, no, the Ruger is not literally unbreakable. The honest claim is narrower, and it’s this. For the money, against a steady diet of the heaviest loads, the Ruger’s design gives it more margin than the others, and the failures are the exception where on some of the competition, they’ve become the pattern.
But, strength was only ever half the case. The trigger. I’m not going to walk away from what I said at the start. Out of the box, the Ruger trigger is the worst of the three. It’s heavier, it stacks, and it doesn’t have the polished break of a Colt or a good Smith. If your hands have to fall in love with a trigger the second you pick the gun up off the counter, the Ruger will not do it, and the Colt will ruin you for everything else.
But two things complicate even this, the last honest Knox standing. First, the reason the Ruger trigger feels the way it does is a coil mainspring, where Colt and Smith use a flat leaf spring. The leaf spring is what lets those guns have that refined, tunable, staged pull. It’s genuinely better to the finger.
But a leaf spring can fatigue over the decades, and on a Smith, if the tension screw backs out, the trigger goes strange on you. A coil spring doesn’t do any of that. You can leave a Ruger cocked for a hundred years, and that spring will have the same tension when your grandson finds it. The survivalists who pick the Ruger aren’t confused about the trigger feel.
They’ve decided a spring that never fails beats a spring that feels nicer, and for a gun you’re betting your life on, that’s not a crazy trade. Second, that bad trigger is the cheapest problem to fix in all of firearms. A Wolff spring kit costs about 12 to 15 dollars. 30 minutes at the kitchen table with a punch set and a YouTube video drops that gritty 11 or 12-lb double-action pull down to 8 or 9, smooth.
No other revolver on this list improves that much for that little. And you can do it yourself because the Ruger’s entire trigger group pops out of the bottom as a single modular unit. To work on the Smith or the Colt, you’re pulling a side plate, and you’d better have a proper revolver bench and a set of hollow-ground screwdrivers, or you’ll mar the finish and round off the screws.
So, the Ruger’s trigger is worse, [music] and it’s also the only one of the three a regular man can perfect himself for the price of lunch. The weakness has a $12 cure. >> [music] >> The strength was free, poured into the frame. And it’s worth being precise about the trigger feel itself, because even here the gap is smaller than the legend says.
Pull weight for pull weight, a stock Ruger double action is often within a pound or two of a stock Smith. >> [music] >> And on single action, the Ruger can actually come in lighter. What people are mostly reacting to [music] isn’t the weight, it’s the texture, the grit, and the stacking. The sense that the Ruger is grinding where the Smith glides.
That’s real, and it’s a finish problem, a polish and fit problem, not a strength problem. Which is the whole story of this gun in miniature. Everywhere the Ruger feels cheaper, it’s because Ruger spent the money on the steel and not on the sensation. They built the part that keeps you alive and left the part that flatters your trigger finger for you to fix with a $12 kit.
So, that’s Ruger. Now, let’s turn the same honesty on the two guns that have been sitting at the top of that ranking, starting with the one that put a hole in its own reputation. We can’t talk about Smith & Wesson in 2026 without talking about the hole. If you’ve handled a Smith made since around 2001, you’ve seen it.
A small keyhole on the left side of the frame, just above the cylinder release. It’s an internal lock. Turn a key and the gun [music] is dead. And the story of how it got there is the story of how the most famous name in American handguns nearly torched its own following. In the year [music] 2000, Smith & Wesson, under foreign ownership at the time, signed an agreement with the Clinton administration.
In exchange for relief from a wave of lawsuits, the company agreed to a list of design and sales conditions. To a huge share of American gun owners, it looked like Smith had cut a deal [music] with the very politicians working to put the industry out of business. The backlash was instant [music] and brutal. There were organized boycotts.
Gun owners walked away in numbers that nearly sank [music] the company. And the lasting physical scar from that deal was the lock. That keyhole, which the shooting world started calling [music] the Hillary hole, and the name has stuck for 25 years. Now, fairness again, because the comments [music] will demand it.
For the overwhelming majority of owners, that lock never does a single thing. It sits there, [music] passive, inert. But, almost never isn’t never. There are documented [music] cases of the lock self-engaging under heavy recoil, the internal flag [music] jarring upward and freezing the action. It shows up almost entirely on the ultra-light [music] scandium frame magnums, the exact guns you’d buy for serious defense [music] or trail carry.
A safety device that can lock your gun up from its own recoil on the gun you most need to work [music] is a thing this audience does not forgive, no matter how rare. And the lock came packaged with another change the purists never made peace with. Smith moved heavily to MIM parts, metal injection molded hammers and triggers, instead of forged hand-fit ones.
Cheaper to produce. >> [music] >> And the quality control complaints got loud. One long-time shooter described a new Smith revolver as a fully [music] assembled parts kit that you still have to fix yourself. And the comment sections are full of specifics. Barrels clocked crooked, triggers cut cockeyed, cylinders that stick.
These aren’t Ruger fanboys inventing stories. A lot of them are lifelong Smith men, heartbroken. Here’s the tell that Smith knows. In 2025 and into 2026, the company finally began re-releasing revolvers without the lock, the classic line, lock deleted. 25 years of insisting it was fine [music] and then quietly taking it out.
That’s not a company defending a design. That’s a company answering, very late, a complaint it pretended for two decades not [music] to hear. And notice, both Ruger and Colt held a firm no-lock line the entire time. In a defensive gun, >> [music] >> the simple absence of that hole became a selling point, and Smith handed its rivals that gift.
So, the middle gun and the bottom gun have traded places on the one thing that matters most when it counts, the confidence that the gun will simply work. Which leaves the king, the Colt. And I’m not going to chip a single flake off its crown >> [music] >> because it earned all of it. The original Colt Python, made from 1955 to 2005, is, by a wide consensus, the finest production double-action revolver ever built.
Hand-fit by master gunsmiths, a deep royal blue finish you could fall into, a ventilated rib, and a trigger that men describe the way they describe their first car. The police carried them. The FBI carried them. It rode on Rick Grimes’ hip and found a whole new generation. When somebody calls a revolver a work of art, the Python is the gun in their mind, and none of that is marketing.
It’s real, >> [music] >> and it’s why a clean original holds most of what it cost new, and a sought-after one can sell for more than the owner paid. You don’t buy a Python, you inherit one, or you become the man somebody else inherits it from. But the legend has a catch it never mentions out loud. >> [music] >> That gorgeous hand-fit action, the very thing that makes the trigger sing, is also the Python’s weakness.
The originals were famous for going out of time if you fed them a steady diet of heavy magnums, and when one did, you needed a genuine Colt revolver gunsmith to set it right. There are very few of those men left on Earth. One owner spent a year and a half hunting for a single small part, a replacement hand, for [music] his Python.
So, the most beautiful revolver ever made is also the one you can least afford to shoot hard, because the parts are scarce and the wizards who can tune it are mostly gone. A lot of Python owners will tell you straight, [music] they bought it to look at, not to run. And here is the irony that ties this [music] entire video into a knot.
Colt brought the Python back in 2020, and the new one is a better working gun than the original. Why? Because Colt stopped trying to hand-fit its way to perfection >> [music] >> and started machining its way there. In other words, Colt fixed the Python by standardizing it, by building it more like a Ruger, the exact manufacturing philosophy the brand spent 50 years looking down on.
The legend was saved by the logic of the working man’s gun. But it still costs you, and here are the real numbers, verified in May of 2026, because this is exactly the kind of thing [music] you’ll fact-check, and you should. A new Python runs you somewhere between about 1,300 for the matte stainless and 1,600 for the blued, with most selling right around 1,500.
The 686 Plus lists [music] at roughly 1,000 and sells new for around 900 to 1,000. And the GP100 carries a manufacturer’s price near 1,000, but sells new on the street for around 800 to 900, and used in good shape >> [music] >> for 500 to 600. So, the Ruger isn’t quite half the price of the Colt, but it’s close.
You’re looking at roughly 850 [music] against 1,500. The gap is real, and it’s most of a second gun. Before the verdict, a few things that decide real-world use, where each gun has an honest edge. Ergonomics. >> [music] >> Smith generally has the lowest bore axis of the three, meaning the barrel sits closer to your hand, so recoil drives straighter back instead of flipping the muzzle up.
The 686 frame is, to a lot of shooters, the most ergonomically perfect revolver ever made. It fits more hand sizes than anything else, and it gives you seven rounds where the Colt and the standard Ruger give you six. Smith also owns the deepest aftermarket in the revolver world, the Glock of wheel guns.
If a part or a holster or a sight exists, it exists for a Smith first. But Ruger answers with the most adaptable grip in the business. Because the Ruger uses a grip peg, a steel post, instead of a full metal grip frame, there’s no metal outline boxing in the shape of the handle. You can hang almost any grip on it, from slim wood panels to a big recoil soaking rubber sleeve, and truly fit the gun to your hand.
Smith and Colt use a traditional grip frame, solid and classic, but it limits how far a grip change can take you. If you’ve got small hands and a square-butt Smith, there’s only so much rubber can do to get your finger to the trigger. And resale, the part nobody says out loud at the counter. These three guns age differently as assets.
The Colt appreciates. It’s the Rolex, fewer made, demand outruns supply, and a Python can be worth more the day you sell it than the day you bought it. The Smith is the most liquid, the industry [music] standard. Every shop in America wants one on the shelf, so it holds a rock-solid baseline you can cash out in minutes.
The Ruger is the workhorse. It won’t become an auction darling, but it never goes to zero, either, because its reputation for surviving anything makes it a safe used buy forever. One holds value as a collectible, one as a commodity, one as a tool. None of them is a bad way to spend the money.
There’s a way somebody put it in a comment that stuck with me because it cuts straight to what this whole argument has always really been about. The Ruger, he said, is the honest American. It’s not elegant. It was never trying to be. A firearm is a tool, and the Ruger is a tool that can feed a family, defend a life, and still show up for 100 range days without complaint.
That’s not a knock. For a lot of men, that’s the entire point of owning a gun in the first place. The elegance is somebody else’s priority. So, is the Ruger inferior? By the standard that wrote the old ranking, >> [music] >> refinement, hand-fitting, the polish, the name on the barrel, yes. It is the least refined of the three.
It has the worst trigger out of the box, and it was built [music] to a price. That much of the legend is just true, and I’m not going to insult your intelligence by pretending a GP100 feels like a Python. It doesn’t. But that standard was set in a world that no longer exists. It was set before anyone ran these guns to 2,000 rounds without cleaning.
Before Smith drilled a hole in its own frame and spent a generation living it down. Before the Python’s part shortage turned from a rumor into a 1 and 1/2 year wait for one small piece, before the metallurgists explained that modern casting isn’t the weak link the word cast used to mean, the ranking didn’t lie. It expired.
Here’s the honest truth about all three, and then you decide which one is yours. The Colt is still the most beautiful, the smoothest trigger money can buy, and an heirloom that pays you back if you can afford the soul tax, and you’re willing to baby it. The Smith is still the most balanced, the best ergonomics, the most variety, the deepest aftermarket, the professional’s gold standard, if you can make peace with the hole and win the modern quality control lottery, or pay up for a pre-lock gun. And the Ruger is
still the least pretty and the least refined, and it is also the one you can buy for not much more than half the price [music] of the Colt, shoot until your wrists give out, fix yourself with a $12 spring and a punch, [music] hand down to your grandson, and watch lock up tight and shoot straight long after the heirlooms are at the gunsmith.
Inferior [music] is the wrong word. The right word is honest. The Ruger never once pretended to be anything but a tool, and when you strip away the polish and the prestige and the marketing, a tool that always works is exactly what you want in your hand when it matters. The Colt [music] is a scalpel.
The Smith is a shield. The Ruger is a sledgehammer. Stop buying the logo. Look at the springs, feel the frame, [music] and ask yourself honestly which one your life actually calls for. >> [music] >> Once you know that, the choice was never really a contest. It was a confession. If you want the rest of the gun [music] world settled this way, the reputations checked against what these machines actually are now instead of what they were 40 years ago.
There’s a new one every day. Subscribe so the next one finds you. And I already know the war that’s about to start in the comments. [music] So, let’s get it going. Of these three, which one’s actually in your safe? And just as important, which one ever let you down?
