Smith & Wesson Holding Corp., fresh from winning military contracts in Afghanistan, now wants a bigger prize back home: an Army deal worth as much as $500 million that would be its biggest defense order ever.

The largest U.S. handgun company, maker of the .44 Magnum popularized in Clint Eastwood’s ‘Dirty Harry’ movies, will bid on a contract to make about 645,000 of its .45-caliber pistols over the next 10 years, Chief Executive Officer Michael Golden said in an interview. Italy’s Beretta Holding has the current Army contract, which expires next year.

Mr. Golden has been pushing the 154-year-old Springfield, Massachusetts, company into the government market since he took the top job two years ago. He has hired a lobbyist and a manager in Washington and says he has made 24 trips to the nation’s capital himself in the past year to drum up business. The prospect of more government sales has helped Smith & Wesson shares more than triple in value in the last 18 months.

“The company kind of got stale years ago,” said Eric Wold, an analyst at Merriman Curhan Ford & Co. in New York who doesn’t own the shares. Smith & Wesson had a recognized brand name “but hadn’t done anything to expand beyond that.”

Helped by four deals in Afghanistan since April 2005,including a $15 million sale of 50,500 pistols to the Afghan National Police, Smith & Wesson’s revenue jumped 27% to $160 million in the fiscal year ended in April, after growth had slowed to 5.2% in fiscal 2005.

Three-fourths of the company’s sales are still to American consumers; just 14% is to the federal government and law enforcement agencies, and 11% is overseas, mostly to police forces.

“We firmly believe that the U.S. military should use a high-quality, well-designed product, manufactured in the U.S. by a U.S. company,” Mr. Golden, 52, said. The company, founded in 1852 by Horace Smith and Daniel Wesson, makes all its guns in Springfield and Houlton, Maine.

To change the sales mix, Mr. Golden last year hired Washington lobbying firm Greenberg Traurig and Ernest Langdon, a military consultant who had worked at Beretta, to be Smith & Wesson’s director of government sales.

“We’re a gun company, the country is at war, and nobody was looking out for our legislative needs,” Mr. Golden said. He declined to elaborate or to say whom he has met with during his Washington visits. Smith & Wesson shares fell 36 cents to $8.58 yesterday. They reached $9.12 on August 4, the highest since Saf-T-Hammer Corp., a maker of trigger locks and other gun safety devices, bought Smith & Wesson and took on its name in 2001.

Beretta, based in Gardone Val Trompia, Italy, may have given Mr. Golden a boost in his quest for military business. The 9- millimeter guns it provides under the Army contract have a reputation for jamming, said Cai Von Rumohr, a Cowen & Co. analyst in Boston.

Mr. Golden, who was an executive at bathroom-fixture maker Kohler Co. and tool companies Black & Decker Corp. and Stanley Works before joining Smith & Wesson, also has tried to revive the company’s law-enforcement business.

Smith & Wesson’s share of the police market, once as high as 98%, plummeted to 10% in the 1980s after competitor Glock GmbH developed a polymer gun that was lighter and quicker to load, Mr. Wold said. Glock, based in Deutsch-Wagram, Austria, now has 65% of the law-enforcement market.

“Smith & Wesson said: ‘Cops will never buy a plastic gun,'” Mr. Golden said. “Smith & Wesson lost that business because we didn’t have a product to compete.”

The company has developed a pistol line, called M&P, for military and police series, that can be disassembled without pulling the trigger, a safety feature not available on the Glock, Mr. Wold said. The gun went into production in December, and almost 60 departments have committed to buying them, he said.

Smith & Wesson has become more responsive, said Sergeant Randy Rengering, range master for Cincinnati’s police department. When department officers suggested the M&P use an easy-to-manipulate slide release for loading, Smith & Wesson added it, he said.

Smith & Wesson now wants to take on Glock in Iraq, where the Austrian company supplies pistols to the American military.