The “Peacemaker”

I had fun inventing the handgun used by Jana in Copernicium-296. The Peacemaker, aka PKR, is the 24^th-century Federation Navy’s working name for a sidearm issued to Federation Marines for personal self-defense. In coming up with the name for the weapon I remembered that a handgun used in America’s wild west had been labeled the Peacemaker. Since my protagonist and her team were going on a peacemaking mission that seemed an appropriate name. That she was an aficionado of earlier Earth history was added enticement to use the name. In this post I will describe the results of my research into the name. In a subsequent post I’ll follow up with a more detailed description of what the gun could really do.

The original Peacemaker was the 19-Century, Colt 45 SAA “Peacemaker” revolver. The handgun was originally developed for and used by the U.S. Army. George Armstrong Custer’s fated Seventh Calvary carried the Peacemaker at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. It certainly didn’t live up to its name in that skirmish. The Peacemaker was a single-action, 45-caliber six-shot revolver that became a favorite of gunfighters in the Wild West of America, whether to inflict pain or bring justice. There was a well-known epithet in that era: “Judge Colt and His Jury of Six.”

I have Jana musing on the irony of the name, which she sees would be lost upon the 24th-century VIPs of her own time. In her world what had begun centuries ago as a peaceful expansion of humanity into the cosmos had come to be dominated by a vast galaxy-wide military-industrial complex. The power-hungry, greed-driven system did not always respect justice and equality. Even five centuries after Judge Colt there were sectors in the galaxy where the peace was sometimes maintained at the end of a gun barrel.