Thursday, June 21, 2018

Reading Gun Reviews is Like Kremlinology

You have to read carefully in order to find the stuff that matters.

Case in point: Let's take a look at the July, 2018 issue of Shooting Illustrated.

This is the cover:


This is the two-page center:


These are the money paragraphs:


That, to my mind, damns the gun, regardless of all of the paragraphs about how cool it looks or all of the different choices of colors for the gun. This thing is a self-defense gun and the very last thing it should be is "very difficult to shoot well". It's a gun that, for the most part, will be bought by people who are neither gun professionals, hobbyists, nor competitive shooters. Because, to be frank, nobody who is well versed in firearms will likely care that the gun comes in a range of pretty colors. It's a gun that's supposedly made for concealed carry, for the love of Dog.

The Spectrum is being marketed to people who are not gunnies. The gun's being marketed to people who may, at the very best, put a box of ammo through it every three years. For those folks, a gun with a horrible trigger and piss-poor sights will be more of a woobie than a serious tool. For unless they are shooting at contact range, with such a lousy gun, they're just as likely to miss.

All other things being equal, a sweet trigger is the berries when it comes to accurate shooting. I'd rather have sub-optimal sights and a sweet trigger than the other way around. A horrible trigger leads to spraying-and-praying.

In short, this is Taurus's latest derp gun.

Some shit doesn't ever seem to change.

10 comments:

  1. it's actually being marketed at woman, the huge as yet untapped gun products consumer. this market move is aided and abetted by the NRA who are really politicizing the women with hate filled reactionary agit prop.

    ReplyDelete
  2. It's like car magazines do with cars. They will do anything they can to make items made by people who advertise for lots of big dollars in their magazine look as good as they can.

    If they say something (a gun) is less than perfect, that means it is less useful than a brick.

    "The trigger was terrible" means that it is a useless gun. "Difficult to shoot well" means that you are better off throwing the pistol at your attacker, or pistolwhipping them with it.

    I'd like to find one (to borrow or rent) just to see how bad it actually is

    ReplyDelete
  3. Apparently it's double-action only, which pretty much guarantees lousy trigger action. It's a bar-fight gun.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I didn't see a Taurus ad in the issue. Not that they might not be advertising in the other member magazines.

    It's like a Kimber review I read awhile back. Buried in the laudatory text was a mention that they had to send the gun back to the factory a few times to get them to fix it so it would run.

    Almost all of them make clunkers. Ruger had to rework the initial GP-100.44s. S&W is known for sending out revolvers with clocked barrels. None of them have the QC/QA that they once had. But S&W and Ruger aren't sending out guns, for the most part, that are designed from the ground up to be pieces of shit. Taurus, on the other hand,......

    ReplyDelete
  5. you can tell when a company is spending a little extra to get a better write-up for a product that sucks.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Actually, with the magazines, it seems more a matter of not offending any potential advertiser. With print in decline, the company ads are thinning out a bit. Maybe a full page now and then for a new product, so don’t offend them. As for the meaning of terrible trigger, thats from a regular shooter, not Nancy from Cincinnati. I take difficult to shot well differently too. It seems more of an admission that, as Deadstick notes, it’s a closet fight gun.

    A DA only trigger is the giveaway that this is a gun for people who need a relatively inexpensive (Taurus, check), simple, point and squeeze bullet tosser. Add colors and the marketing department is convinced the ladies will buy several...black goes with everything, but how about a nice red and maybe a yellow?

    ReplyDelete
  7. If anybody needed an expensive double action only bullet-tosser, they should’ve jumped on the sale of Model 64s a few months back. Those guns had great triggers and were incredibly easy to shoot well.

    Friend don’t let friends by Taurus guns. Not since about ‘04.

    ReplyDelete
  8. A good friend wouldn’t let you by (near one) either. So you were kinda right the first time.

    Dale

    ReplyDelete

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