Dirty Harry Used it, Check Out the .44 Automag

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.