Not a Jimenez Arms-type Saturday night speciall, but rather something designed to function well for a few uses. Maintain the high standards and quality control, with lower manufacturing costs and a lower price.
Sure, there is a market for high performance quality instruments. Hunters, competitors, daily grinders. But most guns are the equivalent of having a fully rack of of heart surgery equipment for trimming a hangnail.
Guns are designed to be heirlooms. Massive quantities of firearms sit in drawers, on shelves, under pillows, for untold years. I speculate the majority of hand guns in the US were bought for home defense and haven't been shot 1,000 times. A home defense gun has to be 100% reliable when needed, but they don't all need to be 100% reliable for thousands and thousands of rounds.
For context: a pistol channels an explosion once a second or so; a lawn mower handles 3000 explosions per minute, ~ one day a week for years. An ipod is vastly more complicated than a pump shotgun. The consequences of catastrophic failure of a fire alarm, seat belt, or canning food are comparable to a gun failing when it is needed to defend life.
Baby car seat manufacturers and bicycle helmet makers recommend trashing their product if it has been used once, because it might possibly not be safe. Why is the idea of carrying a gun that broke and needed to be repaired, still socially acceptable?
It seems to me that there is an untapped market for a gun - with the same high standards of safety for the operator, accuracy and ergonomics - that could be trashed after a hunting trip/range trip rather than being cleaned.
Or if not a fully disposable gun, one with disposable parts to spread out the costs. Maybe a barrel that needs replacement every 500 rounds (send the used one back by mail, netflix style). Or trigger assemblies that pop in and out with no more difficulty than a printer cartridge. Put a color-change indicator in the plastic parts, for when they begin to overstress.
Along the same lines, I predict that society will eventually expect bullets to be sold already loaded into reliable, plastic-wrapped, fully-loaded magazines. Thumbing bullets into reusable magazines will seem outdated and dubious, something only hand-loaders and the military still does.
Sure, there is a market for high performance quality instruments. Hunters, competitors, daily grinders. But most guns are the equivalent of having a fully rack of of heart surgery equipment for trimming a hangnail.
Guns are designed to be heirlooms. Massive quantities of firearms sit in drawers, on shelves, under pillows, for untold years. I speculate the majority of hand guns in the US were bought for home defense and haven't been shot 1,000 times. A home defense gun has to be 100% reliable when needed, but they don't all need to be 100% reliable for thousands and thousands of rounds.
For context: a pistol channels an explosion once a second or so; a lawn mower handles 3000 explosions per minute, ~ one day a week for years. An ipod is vastly more complicated than a pump shotgun. The consequences of catastrophic failure of a fire alarm, seat belt, or canning food are comparable to a gun failing when it is needed to defend life.
Baby car seat manufacturers and bicycle helmet makers recommend trashing their product if it has been used once, because it might possibly not be safe. Why is the idea of carrying a gun that broke and needed to be repaired, still socially acceptable?
It seems to me that there is an untapped market for a gun - with the same high standards of safety for the operator, accuracy and ergonomics - that could be trashed after a hunting trip/range trip rather than being cleaned.
Or if not a fully disposable gun, one with disposable parts to spread out the costs. Maybe a barrel that needs replacement every 500 rounds (send the used one back by mail, netflix style). Or trigger assemblies that pop in and out with no more difficulty than a printer cartridge. Put a color-change indicator in the plastic parts, for when they begin to overstress.
Along the same lines, I predict that society will eventually expect bullets to be sold already loaded into reliable, plastic-wrapped, fully-loaded magazines. Thumbing bullets into reusable magazines will seem outdated and dubious, something only hand-loaders and the military still does.
It seems pretty simple to me.
