From the Vault: The Semmerling LM4 Pistol

Steve has wanted to get his hands on a Semmerling LM4 for 40 years, and today his dream becomes reality at Rock Island Auction Co. Designed by Philip Lichtman and introduced around 1979, the Semmerling LM4 is a super-compact, manually cycled, 5-shot pistol chambered in .45 ACP. "Manually cycled" means the double-action, striker-fired LM4 is NOT an autoloader. What looks like a conventional slide is really just the barrel assembly. After you fire a shot, you have to manually push the barrel forward to eject the spent case, and when you pull it backward, it grabs the next round, chambers it, and locks the breech. This operating system presents a problem: As you pull the LM4 from a holster, you could accidentally move the barrel forward and eject the round in the chamber, leading to all sorts of unhappiness in a self-defense emergency. So there's a clever lock to prevent that, which Steve demos for us.