Hello 2012, am I glad to see you! The 1911 Centennial was about to drive me insane!Posted by: Grant CunninghamWARNING: if you are humor impaired, or can’t stand the Ugly, Ugly Truth (UUT), stop reading now! You won’t be happy, which means I won’t be happy. Well, that’s not exactly true, but one of us will not be happy. And it probably won’t be me. Which kinda narrows it down. And now, today’s blog:9 years ago was a pretty good one for me. I built some wonderful guns, met a lot of interesting people, got a clean bill of health, and saw my first book get published. All in all (and except for the political situation) I didn’t find all that much to complain about.Except for one thing.This one thing makes me deliriously happy that 2011 is gone, because it made the year nearly unbearable at times. And the next year will be too! There was something I prevented myself from doing that often drove me mad with temptation.You probably didn’t notice, but I made a vow last New Year’s to not mention the 1911, or its designer, in this blog for all of 2011. I knew that everyone would be making a Big Freaking Deal (BFD) about the centennial of The Thing, and that there would be special editions and articles and books and videos and special editions and more articles and more special editions and videos and still more special editions and plenty of 1911-only shooting classes for people who didn’t take Inspector Girard’s advice to lose their nickel-plated sissy pistols.I didn’t want to show up in any Google searches for ‘1911’, lest it seem that I actually approved of (let alone participated in) such nonsense.I thus endured an entire year of people expounding on the virtues of the inefficient and unreliable design, while I forced myself (sometimes with pliers and a staple gun) to keep my tongue still. It was actually painful at times (besides the pliers and staple gun, I mean.) The True Browning Believers (TBB) uttered nonsensical hyperbole and illogical statements all through the year, which actually led me to enlightenment as I began to understand Lloyd Bridges’ character from “Airplane!”:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v46plhmxXU4&feature=emb_titleThus, on this first working day of glorious 2012, I finally do something I’ve waited to do for an entire year: talk about the 1911 pistol in the way that only I can. (Well, maybe me and one or two others. OK, basically everyone with a computer and time between commercials.)Where to start? How about with one of my favorite inanities, one which surfaced time and again during the last year: “it must be the best pistol ever because so many companies make them.” Good thing I never heard that in person, as I’d be forced to say “Hah! I spit in your mag pouch, you forty-five-caliber loon! Now go away, or I shall taunt you even more!”You know why so many people have jumped into the 1911 building frenzy, Skippy? Because the engineering was long ago paid for by the American taxpayer, and is available FOR FREE from our government! That’s right – the reason so many people make them is because it’s the cheapest pistol they could possibly produce! The 1911 has a lower barrier to entry than a freakin’ Hi-Point!Don’t believe me? If you want to build a gun that’s never been made before, regardless of the quality (or lack thereof), you need an engineer to design the thing. You want to make a 1911? All you need is a microfiche reader and someone with his name embroidered on his shirt who knows how to push the power switch on an Okuma machining center. Reality bites, huh?The makers of the Hi-Point did their work from scratch, which means they actually spent more money on designing their piece of dung than your favorite 1911 assembler ever will. Imagine that!Reliable? It’s rare to see Browning’s baby make it through a two-day shooting course without failing. “It’s never done this before!”, the hapless owner inevitably exclaims to anyone within earshot. “It must be the ammunition…” Yes, because 230 grain round nosed ball ammunition is ever so difficult to feed from a magazine. Sure it is. Keep telling yourself that.I suppose one could say that the malfunctions are due to over zealous accurizing, and that an unmolested example works best. The original design (did I mention you can get it FOR FREE?), they say, is the most reliable gun ever made. Not according to my Father, who was issued one as a B-29 crew member during WWII: he always told me that it “couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn from inside”, but that it really didn’t matter since it “jammed so often we went looking for Smith & Wessons to carry with us while we looked for Jerry. Or a pub.”When my wife proudly showed him her new fully customized Government Model, he sniffed and allowed that it was very pretty, but that she shouldn’t count on it to save her life or find a pub. That’s experience for you!I’m sure to get nasty emails (“Dear Mouth-Breathing Troglodyte:”) from people telling me how reliable their little pride and joy is, and how I’m a Bitter Old Man (BOM) who just hates John Moses Browning. That may be true, but I notice these guys are never around when it’s betting time because they know in their hearts that The West Wasn’t Won With A Jammed Up Gun (TWWWWAJUG).Speaking of Browning, what about him? As I’ve said before: it’s pretty hard to get excited about a guy who wasn’t talented enough to build a revolver! He’s lucky that Colt (and Winchester and FN and Ithaca and everyone else who got suckered into buying his latest back-of-the-napkin doodle) had real engineers to clean up his designs and actually make them work. Unfortunately, like poor Dieudonné Joseph Saive (Browning wasn’t the only gun guy with a biblical middle name, which makes me wonder if there’s a union somewhere who insists on it in their contract), they never got the credit they deserved for making the hack look good in public.I could go on, but I’m tired and the lady in the white coat says it’s time for my lithium pill. I will say, however, that it’s good to be back in the saddle! Thank you, Father Time, for ending the 1911 Centennial and giving us this year, which I doubt anyone will celebrate until the elections are over. Or they find a pub.Which they can’t do with a 1911.An opportunity for a discussion: the short-barreled 1911 pistol sucks.Posted by: Grant Cunninghamhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMbQYkMoJGo&feature=emb_titleOver the weekend Rob Pincus – never one to shy away from a firestorm (I was going to say another kind of storm, but this is a family-friendly blog) – posted a video on YouTube. In it, he details the failure of yet another compact 1911-pattern pistol and expresses his disdain for the breed in general.The online response was immediate and predictable. Many people agreed with Rob, but a very vocal portion of the shooting public disagreed vehemently. I don’t have a problem with the disagreement, mind you (Rob and I discovered some time ago that we share the same feelings about the 1911 pistol, which is probably why we get along), but I do have a problem with the nonsensical responses given by those who disagree. Here are a couple of the most annoying, and they apply not just to the present discussion but all discussions about guns, cars, or darned near anything else on the planet.More to the point, they apply to the kinds of responses I receive when I talk about the virtues of the revolver versus an autoloader as a defensive tool; I’ve heard these same arguments to my opinions, gotten them in emails, and seen them plastered over the ‘net. That’s probably why they’re annoying.“My is perfectly reliable, so your opinion is baseless/stupid/meaningless.” Aside from the issues with making claims about an entire population based on a single data point, there are a couple of problems with this statement. First, the two sides may not agree on the definition of “reliable”. I’ve proposed one such definition, but not everyone agrees.I had a fellow once who told me his particular AR-15, a brand for which I don’t care, was “completely reliable”. I picked it up, inserted a magazine of fresh factory 55gn ball ammunition, and it failed to feed the fourth round. “Oh, it doesn’t run with Federal ammo. That stuff is crap, and everyone knows it.” Really? Seriously? If an AR-15 can’t feed SAAMI-spec ball ammo (XM193 in this case), it’s not reliable – period. The owner disagreed, his definition of “reliable” obviously divergent from my own.The more interesting facet of this argument is that partisans frequently have selective memories. This is closely related to the phenomenon of confirmation bias: a person simply forgets those data points which disagree with his/her position. I’ve watched, more than once, a shooter clear a malfunction and promptly forget that he had one. When later he claims that his gun is perfectly reliable, and then is reminded of the incident(s), he can’t/won’t acknowledge that they ever happened. I don’t watch much television, but one of my favorite lines from a TV show comes from “House”: “everyone lies.” Perhaps not intentionally, but they do.I was in a class some years ago with a guy who had a malfunctioning Para-Ordnance. (This is not a shock to me, as I’ve never seen a reliable Para. Please, don’t write and tell me about how Todd Jarrett’s Paras are so reliable that he made a YouTube vid; he’s a sponsored shooter, and both he and his handlers have a vested interest in making sure those “demos” go without a hitch.) A couple of weeks later he was on a forum talking about the class, and mentioned that his Para ran without a hitch. Funny, what I remember was picking up the live rounds that he was ejecting every few minutes!Remember that there is a difference between extrapolation (from one to many) and representation (one of the many.) Picking a single example to illustrate a broader concept that has statistical validity, as this video does, is not the same as using a single example as the basis for a self-referential supposition. The former has data behind it; the latter has no data other than itself.2) “All guns can fail.” This is a particular favorite of mine, because it combines a lack of understanding of both engineering and statistics with a dollop of third-grade playground bravado. This statement attempts to get people to focus not on evidence, but on speculation; sadly, it works – as any political candidate can attest. If all devices can fail, then logically it doesn’t matter which one you own, correct? If all cars break, why bother to look at repair statistics? Of course it matters, except when the partisans and fanboys get to talking – then the logic just flies out the window.Yes, all mechanical devices can potentially fail. That’s not the point. The point is that some devices fail more than others, and we can chart and often predict those failures based on past experience.(I hear a variation of this when I talk about revolvers: “I’ve seen revolvers break too!” So have I – probably an order of magnitude more often than the person writing/talking. The difference is that for every mechanical failure I’ve seen on a revolver, I’ve seen hundreds on autoloaders. There is a difference which cannot be wished away.)What might break is a very different thing that what actually does. When we look at failures, patterns emerge that help us make both buying and engineering decisions. Smith & Wesson, for instance, looked at failures of their Model 29 .44 Magnum and made running engineering changes that dramatically improved the longevity and reliability of that gun. They couldn’t have done so had they not looked at the pattern of failures that field experience had provided.Availing ourselves of field data, from people who have seen more of it than us, is one way we can make good decisions. Striking out at the messenger because the message disagrees with some silly loyalty one has developed makes no sense at all.(Oh, BTW – I do have some experience with short-barreled 1911s in the form of two Detonics CombatMasters, which some day I’ll sell to one of those rabid 1911 fanboys. And laugh all the way to the bank.)-=[ Grant ]=- via /r/CCW https://ift.tt/2Wz1yUP
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