The 39 Steps to Choosing a Weapon for 1930s Characters

1. 

2. As we all know, the most important thing about any fictional character is their taste in firearms.  Such trivialities as personality or psychological depth are... well, just that.  With a mere thirty-nine questions, then, I shall endeavour, using logic, historical data, a willingness to shamelessly assign stereotypes and a peculiar sort of statistical Zen archery, to select the appropriate handgun for any period character you care to create.

   This test was conceived as an aid to those creating period characters, but there is no reason why it should not be taken as oneself; merely disregard questions pertaining to chronology, such as birth dates and military service, or, alternatively, answer them with manful honesty, accepting the massive understatements thus implied, and, no doubt, deriving therefrom the usual frisson of fashionably jaded, post-Postmodern irony.

What are the Thirty-Nine Steps?