No longer content to let pistols made in Smyrna, Georgia and Springfield, Massachusetts dominate negligent discharge reports in poorly-trained law enforcement agencies around the country, Prescott’s own Sturm, Ruger and Company have just released their own polymer-framed handgun with a “short take-up trigger” the Ruger American Pistol.

Emergency room doctors and ambulance-chasing lawyers around the country are already shopping for second and third vacation homes with the announcement of yet another plastic fantastic…

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All kidding aside, Ruger’s pistol has a number of features out of the gate that are a marked improvement over the aged Austrian design that has been resting on its laurels for longer than most of its shooters have been alive.

These include quality factory sights from Novak, as opposed to the plastic “dovetail protectors” (thank you, Tam) of Glocks, and a take-down procedure that doesn’t require the trigger to be pulled, much to the dismay of hand surgeons everywhere.

I’ll shoot Ruger’s “me too” at SHOT Show, and I’ll give you my opinion on how it compares to the Glock & Wesson VP9 at that time.

One thing Ruger should do if they want to aim this at the future law enforcement market is come up with a trigger system less like the PPQ (which it sounds like they were aiming at), and more like Sig’s DAK (Double Action Kellerman)  or Heckler & Koch’s L.E.M. (Law Enforcement Modification) triggers. I suspect the LEO-focused industry is going to be forced to move towards more “deliberate” triggers after civic attorneys and insurance companies get tired of paying out negligent discharge-related lawsuits like Paradise, CA is going to be paying for Patrick Feaster’s recent killing of Andrew Thomas, the LASD’s skyrocketing ND-fest after switching to M&Ps, and the NYPD’s continued tendency to shoot anything and everything with Glocks, including Akai Gurley, who’s ND-ing killer, Officer Peter Liang, goes on trial in January.

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We’ve learned a lot about combat human factors in the past four decades since an Austrian curtain-rod maker started the polymer gun craze. Sadly, most gun companies don’t seem to care. They will keep churning out near-copies of each other’s designs, staying one half-step ahead of competitor’s copyright attorneys, which not daring to actually turn out something that is truly innovative, or which works better with the way the human mind and body operate under high levels of stress, which is what we really, desperately need.

We’ve got another “designed for punching paper at the range” plastic gun.

Yippie.