sighting in on: Semi-Auto Pistols: Testing for Reliability I
recently had a friend from a medium-size agency show me his new semiauto pistol, which he had purchased as a combination backup/ off-duty weapon. He was very proud of the new pistol and spent some time talking about all the features that he liked about it. He told me how comfortable it was to carry due to its compact size and low weight. In fact, he had been carrying the pistol for several months now and sometimes “forgot it was even there,” because it was so comfortable to carry. I thought it was a nice pistol and was impressed with the trigger pull in dry fi re. “How does it shoot?” I asked. “I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t got it to the range yet.”
Houston, we have a problem. Oddball?
I’d like to think this guy is an anomaly, but sadly I’ve known several people through the years who have taken a new pistol from the box, loaded it, and started to carry it for duty or self defense before they ever fi red a single round through it to prove that it actu- ally worked. I’ve also seen several who shot a single magazine through a new gun, and declared it “Good” on the spot, without fur- ther testing.
Similarly, I’ve seen even more people switch to a new type of ammunition and carry it for duty or self defense without ever shooting some of it through their pistol to see if it actually worked reliably in the gun. My own agency forced its offi cers to do that just a few years ago, when the ammunition contract changed from one brand to an- other—we shot our semi-annual qualifi ca- tion with the old stuff , and were handed a box of the new stuff to load up for duty as we went out the door at the end of the day. T e new stuff was a diff erent brand, with a diff erent powder, bullet weight, velocity and bullet ogive, and we had no way of knowing if it would run or choke in our issued pistols. Fortunately, I had several boxes of the old load at home that I could continue to use for
Mark your magazines and keep careful notes about which magazine is in use when you encounter a malfunction during testing. A string of malfunctions with the same magazine may point to the magazine as the culprit, not the ammo.
duty until I was able to test the new fodder suffi ciently in my own pistol.
I don’t think the readers of this magazine need to be told why it’s a bad idea to rely on an unproven gun and ammunition com- bination. I think we can all agree that this is not a wise move, and it could have tragic consequences, especially for someone in this profession.
Yet, we see people do it, including people who should know better. I think the ammo “crises” of the past handful of years have made it even more common, actually. Cost and availability issues have made it harder to get a suitable quantity of ammunition, with the result that more and more of our friends are relying upon untested gun/ammo com- binations. As such, it’s probably a good time to revisit the idea of how and why we should test a semi-auto pistol for reliability.
Advice From the Old Sages T e traditional advice for semi-autos has al- ways been something to the eff ect that you should be able to run 200 rounds of your chosen “duty” ammunition through your gun without any malfunctions before you consider the combination trustworthy. I used to swear by this advice and still think it’s good, but the truth is that it dates back to another era. Back in the day when most autoloaders were designed to run on FMJ only, and the traditional modes of manufacturing lead to wide variations in tolerances, the 200-round standard was an excellent rule of thumb. However, with the rise of modern production techniques and quality control procedures (CNC machin- ing, ISO 9001, etc.), today’s guns have bet- ter, more consistent, tolerances and there’s less variation in performance across a wide
59 The Police Marksman Summer 2015
www.policemarksman.com
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76