[jedi391]

Over the years I have seen many opinions from "experts" on forums slamming one gun or another and other sheople running with parroted opinions slamming just about every gun out there. These discussions usually devolve to personal attacks with some people claiming to be super high speed low drag and making fun of anyone who doesn't put 50k rounds of ammo through their gun in a year as being so far beneath them they can't see them.

Take production 1911's as they are the holy grail of pistol opinion wars. Some people say Colt only and everything else is a dog. Others say Springers only only to be heckled for their Brazillian 1911. Then there is Kimber the king of MIM and birth place of Ron Cohen who destroys all things holy to firearms. Of course you have Sig and S&W who use external extractors and we all know that most people who use them will spontaneously combust as a result of their use and the incorrect geometry they produce has been linked to various Ebola outbreaks.

Then there are the thread debates in which person A says (insert brand here) works great for him and person B says its not possibly running well because he doesn't like something about them. Person B also quotes nationally known gunsmith X who says the guns aren't ready for hard use. Person A retorts with a quote from Gunsmith Y who says the gun is fine. Meanwhile most critics have never even shot the gun they're criticizing.


Over the years I have owned many of these brands (as well as un-mentioned semi-customs). The only one I had a real issue with was a Kimber pro-carry that wouldn't feed correctly at the same time I have to point out I have co-workers literally by the dozens who carried and shot their Kimbers at the SWAT level and probably shoot 6-8k a year through Kimbers with no problems. I also know of several similar guys with Smith, Sig, Springer, and Colt. I should also point out that at the 5 year mark it seems like most guys get the itch for change and either swap in a new gun or send it off for a rebuild/upgrade. At this point the guns probably have between 30-40k rounds through them so they haven't yet shot the requisite 58,973 rounds a weekend in order to be a true high speed low drag gun expert gun.

Then there are people like me who put 1k rounds through a gun and if it goes the distance without issue I put it in service and purchase a duplicate to train with. Then again I only shoot somewhere around 3-4k through my primary platform a year as there is only so much training ammo the department will give me and time I have to get to the range. I have yet to wear out a gun or have a lemmon. Of course I also clean and replace springs frequently.

I guess my point is, if you like a gun and it has passed whatever reliability standard you deem sufficient, enjoy it and ignore the Internet blowhards. Odds are your gun is going to be plenty capable for you if you take care of it. As a side note, any time there's an LE involved shooting that we here about, my departments trainers try and get as much information as they can about them so we can try and learn from them. I have yet to see a incident debrief where an officers gun failing played a roll in the incident. Not saying it hasn't happened...the law of averages dictate that it has but for all the ones I've reviewed I haven't seen it.

Just as a side note, I was talking with a department armorer about failures a number of our guys were having with Glocks. Turns out when he looked them over he found that individuals had done their own "reliability" work to them. Makes me wonder how many gun problems are individually induced.

Okay, rant off, sorry......this way I won't wine about this to my wife who nods and says she agrees because she's a sweetie (pretty hot too just for the record) but really could care less about the topic.....