Hardly! The primary handgun carried by my uncle during his tenure as a Secret Service Agent was a full-size Colt's Government Model in .38 Super- he considered his 2½-inch barrelled S&W M19 as his last-ditch backup gun, and was a lot more comfortable with it only after Lee Jurras introduced his line of 110-grain jacketed hollowpoint ammunition in the early 1970s.
A lot of the older feds preferred the .38 Super Colt to the .45, though many of the photos of those fellers misidentified their weapons as *Army .45 pistols*. The .38 Super was thought to be just the ticket for dealing with armed felons wearing first-generation body armor, particularly those in the bank business. That included S/A Melvin Purvis, the agent of the Justice Department's Division of Investigation [not yet then named the FBI] who ambushed a suspect later identified as *Public Enemy Number One* robber John Dillinger outside Chicago's Biograph Theatre on North Lincoln Avenue in 1934.
One other old *fed trick:* For those not wealthy enough to buy a GM or Gold Cup .38 Super or for whom department regs prohibited semiauto handguns, using .38 Super ammo in a S&W or Colt revolver chambered foir .38 S&W [NOT .38 special!] was a possibility, though pretty hard on the service life of the weapon. That may have not been much of a consideration for those being shot at, and carrying 6 rounds of the *hot stuff* for reloads if the first six didn't get the job done was not unknown among either feds or uniformed street cops in the l950s and '60s when the glut of surplus S&W Victory models in the .38 S&W chambering preferred by our WWII British allies made them a not-uncommon choice for many small-town cops looking for inexpensive belt guns or chopped-down belly guns. And, of course, for at least one pretty high-profile shooting suspect, never convicted of any crime....
