Posts
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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Does it work straight out of the box?
ReplyDeleteCan a simple-minded, or half-asleep person work it?
Does it fall apart or break?
Does it need obscure solvent/ammo/pieces-parts?
Can the user do basic maintenance? (Pre Mk IV Rugers fail at this...)
Is it reasonably accurate without futzing?
Will it work with cheapo Walmart or way off-brand ammo (like the stuff you have to buy at certain ranges) or other stuff?
These are the answers you are looking for. Not "Will it hold up after being run over by a tank while firing 5k rounds and yada yada yada.
I tried to like gun mags, any of them, including the NRA's mags. They were between fairly useless to mostly useless in answering the above questions.
You can't do maintenance on a Pre-Mk.IV Ruger? I'll bet you don't know what the seashells are for either. ;)
DeleteI've a total tear down of a Ruger Standard (pre-MkI). That's fun.
Oh, I can. But I know of people who can do basic swab out the barrel and then just give up and take it to someone who can.
DeleteIt's not the easiest gun to tear down and do a major clean on. Which is why the MkIV is a good thing. Finally, after how many years, Ruger finally pulled their heads out?
I find that they come right apart, they just don't like going back together.
DeleteEven so, I get good at it if I do it a few times... which doesn't happen often because I don't shoot it much now that the Colt Challenger joined the collection.
I do want a reliability measure. I want to know that my weapon goes bang each and every time I want it to. It took around 400 rounds through my Remington 1911 before it was no longer mine. It wasn't reliable. The first 50 rounds were iffy and then it got better but never good enough.
ReplyDeleteIt's replacement took about a 100 rounds before it started working flawlessly. With over 2000 rounds through it I do trust it with my life.
I'm not looking for "does it break after 10,000 rounds" though.
What you just articulated was a reason for firing more rounds through a gun than you will be carrying regularly.
DeleteYou've done more than several gunwriters did.
I dislike guns that have a break-in period to be reliable. But it's provided good training clearing stoppages.