Recently seen on a popular firearms board: “I’ve shot 150 rounds through it over the past nine months and its (sic) been 100% reliable.”
Unless you are talking about a precision bolt-action rifle, that’s the equivalent of reviewing a car’s reliability after five hundred miles. Basically, what you know is that all the parts were included in the box and none of them were made of paper mâché. Thanks.
And this will be the same guy who someday posts, “I’ve had this gun for five years and it is still like new.” Right. Because it is! As a rule, guns don’t tend to rot or wear out when lying dormant in a shoebox at the bottom of your closet. If you treat it like a pet rock, it will last as long as a pet rock. And serve as useful a purpose as one, too.
While a gun can prove itself unreliable fairly quickly, if you haven’t fired at least a few thousand rounds through it you don’t really know enough to recommend it as reliable.
Train hard & stay safe! ToddG
Yep. But you know what, almost all of my guns have been reliable–with heavy round counts. Granted, my guns have primarily been Glocks and HKs, not exactly known for their unreliability. The only guns that were hit and miss were my 1911s. And most of them were great. Again, my habit was to buy Colts and have ZERO tune up work performed on them. I would usually get sights, beavertails, flared magwells, dehorning, checkering–but I always avoided “reliability” work. In my mind, reliability work is for guns that are already unreliable. I suspect a lot of guys who I have seen in class running high end 1911s were falling victim to over-tinkering.
Greg — Spot on. I’m always amazed – and a little sickened – by gun owners who buy a pistol and then immediately pay some guy to perform a “reliability job” on it. Why did you buy a gun if you thought it would be unreliable out of the box? If you thought it would be 100% and it’s not, send it back to the manufacturer for repair!
I agree, low round count (flawless) reports rank right there with complaints about FDE not matching between vendors.
Low round counts are one problem. Another problem is that people are emotionally invested in one manufacturer or model or another simply because they plunked down a chunk of change and don’t want to label themselves as a sucker. Those are the ones who blame the mag, lack of cleaning/lubrication, or ammo (really, CCI, Winchester, Federal not good enough?) and then promptly sell the gun.
Have you been hanging out at HKPro again?
I agree. It drives me nuts when people say “this gun was 100% reliable with 500 rounds” or whatever. I almost want to say “talk to me when you hit 5,000” rounds.
Now that’s funny, Jody H. Lots of collectors there, that is for sure!!
I think one should separate the ideas of the reliability of a design and the reliability of a production unit from that design.
When I worked for a mechanical engineering company making precision products, the testing we did to prove a design was very different from the testing to prove the reliability of samples from production. You suggest several thousand rounds as a minimum to assure reliability. As a percentage of “life to failure” based on the testing you publish here, that number of rounds is outside my experience by a significant factor. And 150 rounds is way under.
Most people shoot very little, and want something that will function like it should. There are plenty of examples out there which will not function reliably over any consecutive number of rounds. The mark of a good consumer product is that it will function right out of the box, or after the manufacturer’s specified break-in.
It is fair to assess these kinds of consumer products based on their function in the typical condition of use. So if some people typically shoot 500 rounds in a year, and expect reliability, and get it, they should report it. Maybe it is not a measure of reliability over longer periods, but you have that perspective handled.
like bruno in a bar in san fransisco it could swing both ways, while firing too little may provide an insufficient amount of reliable performance. firing it thousands and thousands of times reliably may also mean the failure or impending breakage probability is now closer than it was before.
no one knows when the gun is going to fail. what if you have a major part breakage at a high round count? if you replace that part do you now have to fire thousands of new rounds in that gun under the new part to assume it will operate reliably?
what about a specific pistol which has been in production long enough to garner a history of reliability based upon a method of design + parts + production?
Every brand fanboy should spend a few years babysitting a rental showcase:
“What have you seen broken?”
“Whaddya got?”
Ariel — That’s an excellent point. The shooting community, in general, is made up of folks who convince themselves that each purchase was an awesome deal on a flawless machine, regardless of the facts.
John — Like I said, if your gun has problems in the first 150 rounds, that’s newsworthy. Even then, though, I’d like to see how the gun works after it’s had a chance to break in a bit. But “flawless after 150 rounds” just isn’t telling anyone anything worthwhile.
David — You’re right, there’s no way to know what will happen with the next round fired. We have to depend on a rational assessment of a product’s historic performance (and a little luck). As far as your last question, “what about a specific pistol which has been in production long enough to garner a history of reliability based upon a method of design + parts + production?”, even that isn’t a sure thing. See this old pistol-training.com article, for example.
Tam — Probably the best advice around. Once you watch dozens (or hundreds, or thousands) of someone else’s guns work and fail and break and get fixed and work again then fail & break again, with no ego attachment, you realize that while some brands are certainly more dependable than others, no company is perfect.
An equally vexing problem is the people who say that a gun has been reliable for x number of years and yet totally omit they’ve only shot it 500 rounds. Or, the guys who give opinions with a completely inadequate foundation. I trust what ToddG says b/c he has built a trust with his readers (I’ve been following since he was at Beretta) over a number of years and a whole lot of rounds. Some of the other “reviewers” – who cares what they say when they’ve shot 500 rounds in 5 years?
Second to ‘my gun is hella reliable’ is the infamous 3 shot ‘bughole’ group
If I had a dollar for….every….
I’ve been threatened with a ban on websites for saying just that.
The one person I love is the mega collector, they own over a dozen examples of a various brand, so they are truthful when they say “I’ve shot 12,000 rounds through X brand…” to imply that they know that brand, yet when you push them you find that they owned a dozen example of that brand and have shot at best a case through each.
Anyways my opinion is if you haven’t broken a gun, you don’t shoot enough.
There’s another component to the whole “reliability” thing – if you shoot a gun enough something will break. So no gun, whether it’s a Glock 19 or your custom built 1911 Tactiblaster is “100% reliable” – in fact my revolvers aren’t even 100% reliable because stuff just breaks sometimes.
Now, if a gun breaks after 50,000 rounds, that’s generally fine. 500 rounds? You’ve got a problem, or a Hi Point.
“I’ve shot 150 rounds through it over the past nine months and its (sic) been 100% reliable.”
It took nine months to fire 150 rds?? Was that all in one range session nine months ago? Since range ammo comes in 50rd boxes, that could be three range sessions, maybe one every other month. Or maybe this person is faithful to shoot 16.7 rds every month. I can’t figure it out.
It sounds to me like the person who originally made that statement just doesn’t shoot very much, so it stands to reason that this level of “reliability” met his or her expectations.
Personally, I don’t collect handguns and I don’t buy handguns that aren’t going to be used, probably abused, and definitely carried through any environment through which I choose to be in on any given day. “Reliability”, as it relates to MY handguns, is the level of consistent performance that I am comfortable betting my life on. There is no “magic” number of rounds where this necessarily happens, but it is certainly a culmination of round count + parts failures + malfunctions, with a heavy emphasis on how efficiently and accurately I personally shoot the gun.
I just took delivery of my new M&P 9 last Friday and will fire 500 rounds Wednesday evening, and 500 rounds Friday evening prior to using it for Judgment Day. I certainly like the M&P series, but if this one happens to be problematic (and I have no reason to believe that this is the case), I’ll have no issue using my tried and trusted Glock 17 for the class.