>Taurus is a Brazilian company that started out with technical
>assistance (for which read some old machine tools and instructions on
>how to set them up) from Smith & Wesson and Beretta, which is why, for
>the first 20 or so years of the company's life, it produced
>exclusively revolvers that looked uncannily like Smith & Wessons and
>automatic pistols that looked uncannily like Beretta Model 92s.

It's funny you should mention this, because when I looked at the Judge I immediately thought it looked familiar. And I was right, meet the Thunder 5:

The reason why I said it was funny is because the Thunder 5 is basically everything the Judge is and more, while predating it by over a decade. One of the "more" items is evident just by visual examination, namely an ambidextrous manual hammer block safety located right behind the cylinder. But the T5's party trick is that there are optional (read: sold separately) sleeve inserts that allowed it to fire several of the more popular self-defense rounds of the day: 9x19mm Parabellum, 38/357, and .38 Special.

Now, if you're saying "Where have I seen that gun before?," then you might have seen it years ago watching one of those semi-forgettable cult classics of the late-90s, Three Kings. Unfortunately, the screen time given to the T5 came too late, as the makers (MIL) had folded by then and taken their one product with them. You can still find these guns floating around, but most are being snapped up by collectors and becoming increasingly harder to service as MIL's implosion took the only maker of spare parts with it.

It's one of the sadly recurring stories of the firearms world: Small-time company comes up with unique firearm, goes bust trying to find a market for it, then a bigger company comes along years later with a similar gun and manages to hit it big.