Alternatives
While the Einhand was the most elegant approach to safe carry with an empty chamber and one-handed operation, it wasn’t the only game in town at the time. In Spain, the JO-LO-AR autoloaders accomplished this by the addition of a simple, fold-down, metal finger lever attached to the slide. The index and middle fingers of the shooting hand extended forward and drew back the slide by the vertical lever while the remaining three fingers anchored the pistol in the hand. One model was adopted by the Peruvian mounted policemen who wanted an autoloader they could operate with one hand while the other held the reins.
The Czech Praga Model 1921 was also capable of one-handed operation but depended far too much on manual dexterity. The slide of this vest-pocket .25 ACP had a carve-out above the muzzle to allow the shooter to draw it back to cock and chamber a round by reaching over the top of the pistol with the index finger.
Fritz Walther’s perfection of the single action/double action (SA/DA) firing mechanism in the Walther PP created a whole new class of autoloader in 1929, which was just as safe as the Einhand but faster to operate since it required only one finger movement to fire instead of two. Curiously, Hecker & Koch revisited parts of the Einhand concept in their squeeze-cocker H&K P7 pistols made from 1979 to 2008. These were single-action pistols designed to be carried uncocked with a round in the chamber. Depressing the front of the grip frame, which took place naturally when grasping the pistol, cocked the pistol. Unlike SA/DA autoloaders, which have a long, heavy initial trigger pull for the first double-action shot, every shot fired from the P7 benefited from the same short, light, single-action trigger pull.
The largest application of the Einhand concept is the P-77 pistol introduced in the People’s Republic of China around 1981 for military and police use and very likely still in use today. Essentially a pocket .32 autoloader (7.62x17mm), it has the automatic slide release function of Chylewski’s second patent as built by SIG, but without the dangerous keep-pulling-to-fire feature. The P77B is the most unlikely application of the Einhand concept. It is a full-size, 9x19mm pistol, which was briefly imported into the United States, with a cocking piece triggerguard feature similar to the Lignose patent. The finger strength to draw back the slide is reduced by the pistol’s gas retarded blowback system of operation that doesn’t require heavy recoil springs.
The lesson here … never say never.
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