Thursday, June 9, 2011

Crappy Guns

Every gun owner should fire a crappy gun extensively for a year.  Something that jams a lot.  Something that breaks.  Something picky about it's ammo and then don't use that ammo.

Why?  To familiarize him or herself with a crappy gun.  To get that experience.  To do the failure drills.

It's frustrating, but valuable.

It will familiarize a person with how a gun works.  It's a mechanical device.  It operates a certain way.  When it doesn't operate correctly you can figure out the way it was supposed to go, and internalize the corrective measure.  Like learning the sweet spot on a clutch, and learning the optimal feel on when the engine says it's time to shift. 

A reliable, works every time, pistol is a joy, but even these will have a breakage once in a blue moon.  Second nature correctives are a nice thing to have in your wet ware, and if they don't fix the problem the long experience will give you a good idea on the true nature for further addressing on a gunsmith bench.  Knowing at an instant "oh, I limp wristed it" "oh that was a light strike" "oh the magazine spring is going bad" or "oh an internal pin broke" is a useful thing.

4 comments:

Bubblehead Les. said...

Ah, the joys of owning a Crappy Gun! Thanks Taurus for the lesson!

Old NFO said...

That it is, and yes even the good ones break (though not nearly as often)!!!

KPete said...

Yep... and that crappy gun is called a Remmington Viper .22!
Still, I did teach me quite a bit about the mechanisims of semi autos. I still have the awful thing... catching rust in th darkest recesses of the gun cabinet. I couldn't live with myself burdening someone else with it.

Tam said...

I've owned a Jennings 9mm. A Grendel 380. An FIE Targa GT-25. A handful of Hi Point/Stallards. A Charco Bulldog Pug. A TEC-9. A closed-bolt semiauto Cobray M-11. Probably dozens of other buck-wretched guns that I'm blocking from my memory at the moment...