Recently, I had the good fortune of winning a raffle, and the bad fortune of the prize being a Taurus TCP 738. Still, a free gun is a free gun, so I endeavored to give it an honest try.Unique FeaturesI will give Taurus credit for coming up with new and interesting ideas, even if the execution of their guns isn't always there. This gun has retractable "wings" that help with racking the slide. This is especially useful for people with small hands and without good hand strength. Despite a pocket .380 being among the worst picks for someone with poor hand strength, that's the demographic that is often buying guns like this, shooting them once, hitting nothing, and carrying it anyway. Sometimes. Maybe. For a while. So I get it.Why the fuck they didn't call a Taurus "with wings" the "Red Bull" I will never understand. Missed opportunity for some trademark infringement, but I guess Taurus doesn't just copy good things anymore.The wing idea would actually be useful on larger pistols better suited for weaker shooters, but I think it is kind of irrelevant with the Shield .380 EZ being an option, large enough for a good grip and easy handling with an extremely easy slide. But I digress. On to the shooting.TriggerThe trigger was surprisingly good. It feels a lot like the other tiny pistols in this category - it breaks further back than you'd expect it to, but I think this is more the tiny grip than the trigger. I've shot LCPs and I have a Kel-Tec P32 that feel the same way. I have not tried an LCPII for comparison, though.SightsTiny sights of course, but ultimately usable. I was hitting a bit low from point of aim (About 2" down at 5yds) which I attribute to the sight picture more than anything, but my groups were pretty good. No worse than any other tiny guns I've shot.RecoilRecoil is, of course, pretty whippy in a gun this small, but manageable. The worst thing about the recoil isn't the impulse itself (ultralight .38spl revolvers "hit" harder IMO), but the very angular shape of the beavertail area. It dug into my hand pretty badly, leaving my thumb webbing quite red. Did not make for a very pleasant shooting experience, but it didn't have an effect on my accuracy, just my comfort.ReliabilityAnd here is where it will no longer sound like a pretty good review. I shot 50 rounds of FMJ RN ammo, and had five malfunctions of two different varieties. The first was just a regular old failure to feed on the first magazine. I had lubed the gun up prior to hitting the range, but even so I chalked this up to "newness" and wasn't ready to count the gun out just yet. It happens.The next few magazines shot ok, and I was beginning to think I'd gotten lucky twice - winning a gun and a Taurus that works. But then the gun gods punished me for my hubris and sent down a curse upon the rest of my shooting. In the last 20 or so rounds I got four more malfunctions. Two more of them were the same failure to feed that I experienced in the first mag. But two of them were positively gun-bricking double feeds. As you can see in the image below, the extractor slipped off of the fired case after pulling it out about 1/3 of the way, but the slide still went all the way back and grabbed the next round in the magazine. This was a difficult double feed to clear with such a small gun, having to lock the slide back and wrench the magazine free without much to grab on to. This happened twice in exactly the same way, mixed in with the ordinary failures to feed.Whoa Black Blatty, Jammed my Blam.So in sum, the gun would be an ok little gun if it worked, but a 10% failure rate is not inspiring. This is especially true since two of those failures were very bad, difficult to clear malfunctions. So the Red Bull lived up to the name that I bestowed upon it, as it had me seeing red over this bullshit.My Kel Tec P32 cost me $136 of r/gundeals and is much more reliable (and shootable being in .32) than this gun, and I don't really even consider it all that reliable.So I'm back on my original plan of selling this gun I got for free and putting the money toward a gun worth having. via /r/CCW https://ift.tt/2M9Al68
No comments:
Post a Comment