The famed Magnum Research Desert Eagle handgun has a lineage that goes back over 35 years with lots of twists and turns, but its future is bright. Large-caliber semi-automatic pistols, up until the mid-1960s, were exceedingly rare. Prior to that, the category consisted largely of the rarely-encountered Mars pistol. Then came Harry Sandford's short-lived Auto-Mag (made in Pasadena of all places!) which was short-recoil operated and featured a rotary bolt, enabling it to shoot a rimless shortened equivalent of the .44 Magnum, the .44 AMP. Following up on that in the 1970s was Wildey Moore's eponymous gas-powered autoloading pistol,...