I Like Old Guns

And I cannot lie...

Because of my gaming predilections, and the quest to find a historical anachronisms and have a character with a more modern than expected gun; I've paid attention to a lot of older guns.

Games decidedly ignore the warts on many older guns in this category.

The FG.42 in the real world is oddly balanced and fragile.

The ZH.29 is bent and awkward to handle.

But there's a few before their time pistols which hold up well against their modern counterparts.

They are, of course, dismissed by the instructorati.

I ask, again, what do we need our defensive gun to do?

I says go bang until I run out of ammo and put the bullets where I'm aiming is all it needs to do.  I don't need it to keep working for five thousand rounds without maintenance because I don't tote five thousand rounds.

1" groups at 50 yards are legally indefensible, not because a small group is illegal, it's shooting someone at that range will be a uphill self defense claim.

If it shoots a fist sized group where I want it at 10 yards, I'm prolly going to be OK.  Hint, hearts and brains are fist sized.

I should confess that I've long known what the gun writers were testing when they take a gun out and put a couple thousand rounds through it without maintenance.

Durability.

Not a single gun writer seemed to be able to articulate that is what they were testing.  Everyone else was doing those torture tests, so they did too.

And they didn't know why.

Because they didn't know why, they were unable to answer the question, "What are you testing for here?"

They got angry.  They got snippy.  They got dismissive.

But they never answered, did they?

It's one of the reasons that the only gun-rag I still get is the one that came with my lifetime NRA membership.

PS: You most certainly can get better at something without measuring anything.  But you can't compare your results without them.  For a lot of people the measurement has become the goal rather than the improvement. 

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