"I have X number of flawless rounds through Y gun!" But why do we care?

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mcb

mcb

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So you see statement similar to the title a lot in the handgun forum with regards to someone's CCW but you see it other places too. Some one bragging that have Y gun that has gone X number of flawless rounds. Typically the X number of rounds is only in the hundreds but you see claims of higher numbers. They seem to see this as a badge of honor or some indication their gun choice is a good one (arguably a good assertion in that context). Conversely you see threads were someone has there first malfunction after X number of flawless rounds and they immediately loose faith in the gun.

Maybe I have simply shot for too long and too many rounds but I cannot think of any of my guns that has run flawless, NONE. Now I do not tolerate a gun that frequently or even occasionally malfunctions. If competing in sports like USPSA and IDPA and even PRS and NRL22 has taught me anything it's that a malfunctioning gun will destroy your score in short order. But all my guns have malfunctioned at one time or another. Be it bad ammo, damaged magazine, broken parts, user induced malfunctions (don't stick you gun in the port!) or even just some fluke 1 in a million incident. Even my revolvers have malfunctioned a few times. As long as I can determine the cause and understand and remedy it or realize it was a 1 in a millions fluke or user induced I loose no faith in the particular gun.

I personally think if you have a gun that has run flawless you probably have not shot it enough and in enough difficult situations. What do you guys think? Does running flawless mean something to you and does a gun's broken flawless streak also mean something to you?
 
Very good point. A gun is a mechanical device that can fail. There are many variables that can induce failures. I agree that trigger time will eventually expose the weaknesses and we need to train for them.
 
bangswitch said:
And don't forget, Murphy is a firearms enthusiast. The malfunction usually occurs at the worst possible time.
Click to expand...

This is absolutely true. Murphy seemed to show up at the most unexpected times when I was in the Army.

I can say that I do have a few firearms with high round counts and no issues that weren't ammo related. But that is not normal. Most will have issues with something breaking/needing replaced as the round count goes up.
 
I recently posted about a Kahr that had a bad range outing after I reversed one of recoil spings. It is a common cause of failures to feed, and I wondered how many posts about Kahr break-in or reliabilty were because of that user error.

Throw in weak mag springs, riding the slide lock, weak ammo, hard primers, limp wristing, etc and you have a host of issues to cause malfunction that don't reflect the gun's reliabilty.

And whenever you try something new with reloads, you increase the chances.
 
I find those posts useful from an anecdotal perspective. My Glock 26 ran flawlessly for thousands of rounds. I bought it after seeing lots of reviews and gun forum posts about how reliable that gun is. Of course, no particular make/model is perfect, but the amount of good vs. bad about the 26 was one of the reasons why I bought it, and I wasn't disappointed.

OTOH, there was a time when I was very interested in Kimbers. The anecdotal information available online for that brand is much different. You can find plenty of people who swear by them, but the percentage of people who swear AT them is much higher than I would expect for what is supposed to be a good brand. That's a big part of why I've never owned one. Same goes for Taurus.

So I say, keep those posts coming. It's useful information, and if you don't like it, don't read it.
 
Does it mean much? It does and it doesn’t for me. Someone saying their Glock/HK/S&W/whatever has run 500 flawless rounds doesn’t mean much to me, all my plastics do that, and the number means less since I typically do at least 1000 in the first week of a new gun.

Massively huge numbers of flawless rounds are more interesting, but ultimately don’t mean much because I’m not shooting that gun, nor am I running that ammo in mine.

I agree that if you shoot enough, all guns will fail eventually. Some, like my Wilson, might fail a little starting out due to tight tolerances but smooth out quickly, others might fail at high round counts as an indicator springs need changing, but for me most stoppages are squarely an ammunition issue, and therefore have no bearing on a gun.

Edit: practicing malfunction drills is always helpful as well.
 
I look at it in the simplest terms;

A gun that quickly shows flaws is a bad sign.

A gun that rarely ever shows flaws is a good sign.

Choose a known, well designed gun but make your particular gun prove itself in training and practice drills.

Do required maintenance, inspections and as said above, be ready for Murphy.
 
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If a "flaw" rears its head it must be identified. Blame can then be assigned.

If ammo, the gun is still flawless.

Bad grip? Same.

You have ten thousand rounds and something wore out? Self explanatory.

I simply cannot accept an occasional hiccup without finding the root cause.

Having said the above my SR9c, which I have had a very long time and shot thousands of rounds, is flawless.
 
I test for ammo compatibility with gun but not necessarily gun dependability.

shooting and carrying semi autos exclusively since 2009 I can count the number of random malfunctions on one hand, when I experience multiple malfunctions it’s always ammo brand specific.

I question the concept on X amount of ammo proving a gun worthy, if the magic number is 500 does a malfunction on 498 require a start over ?

Maybe I’m just lucky or it’s being selective brand purchasing but I just don’t have many gun malfunctions.
 
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It's a complicated metric.

Some of that is in the same light as how they have "three shot 1/4" groups"--which tend to be from measuring the three closest holes after the fact.

If you have a hammer, you will have missed a nail (or found a finger). We remember the hit finger less than the completed project, eventually, the finished thing eclipses the mashed finger in memory (the "shiners" around the nails oft stand in mocking salute, though).

Does your vehicle start every time? Do you get rid of it if it doesn't?

Firearms can be very subjective. This becomes complicated if we intend to communicate objectively about them.

There's a very personal onus, too. We do not want our peers to think that we are foolish enough to spend the lucre a goo gun wants to get a bad one. Or, similarly, that having dropped the gold, we have (or seem to have) less competency than the firearm requires.
 
If I have a new gun and out of the box it runs flawlessly for a couple hundred rounds that means a lot to me, it says a lot to me about the gun.
Thats all it means and if you try to take the statement out of context then who cares? LOL
 
I am of mixed feelings.
On the one hand, no doubt it means something to the author and is of some value (presumably) in the selection of the 'next' arm for the use.
One the other hand, I am scarcely one to obtain another self defense arm. I have enough to last the rest of my life and I'm happy with them.
I cannot say I read that many such posts.
 
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There are guns who are just crap, others suffer with bad QC and some just need some know how.
When you researching some gun (or anything else actually) you are puzzling some information together.

I can tell you, that after "break-in" i had zero issues with my APX and i shot about 2 500 rounds. You dont know me and you just guess how valid my statment is... but if there is 1000 others users saying same, it will be probably good gun.
If there will be many statments oppositing each other, it indicates QC issues or some need of kno-how
Thats all usefull information, specially if you are somehow limited what or how many guns you can buy

Ofc there are some trolls and some owners who just need defend their purchase, thats why you need larger pool of "statment"/informations
 
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I am of two minds on this. On the one hand, I certainly like to have enough trouble-free rounds through a gun that I can be (relatively) certain that there exist no mechanical defects within it that will cause failure at a most inopportune moment. On the other, I'm aware that the more I shoot, the more wear I put on the gun, and the more likely a failure becomes (even if the wear and likelihood are only increased by tiny amounts per round).
 
Is it any different than saying how flawless a certain reloading press is? How about a Major appliance. A Vehicle??
Folks that start of saying "Ive been reloading for 50 years" Doesn't mean you have been doing it correctly:)

Things work or they don't. Some are more reliable than others.
 
I think a lot of these "my gun has never had a failure" posts are merely chest thumping with fanboy overtones. I recall one somewhat popular firearms trainer, that I won't call out by name, required his students to drop their pistols on the ground and step on them in an attempt to induce failures. Supposedly his message was all guns will eventually fail. While I don't recommend packing a perfectly fine firearm with sand in an attempt to induce failure, I do agree with his general premise. And because of that stance, that all guns will eventually fail, if you train with a "flawless" firearm, I hope you are slipping in dummy rounds, etc. in an attempt to mimic failure and are practicing how to recover from a failure and getting the gun back in operation quickly.
 
One pistol that has surprised me on its reliability is my Glock G44. There were a lot of mixed reviews when they were first released. I bought mine in late February 2020 and have over 20,000 rounds fired through it and haven’t had to replace any parts yet. Yes I definitely keep an eye on the recoil spring with that many rounds fired. The only issues I have had were all ammo related. Even ProMag mags work flawlessly in my G44
 
Take Glocks (if you must, not a fanboy) But they are so popular because they work out of the box and keep on working. Millions of them out there. Sure you will get a few posts on some that have one choked, but the percentage is very small.
 
plainsdrifter said:
If I have a new gun and out of the box it runs flawlessly for a couple hundred rounds that means a lot to me, it says a lot to me about the gun.
Thats all it means and if you try to take the statement out of context then who cares? LOL
Click to expand...

Two antidotal example from my own shooting:

I had a Kahr CW9, I bought new. The gun ran flawless right from the start despite Kahr's "break-in period" I was nearly 1000 rds into my new Kahr with flawless performance both at the range and shooting USPSA matches with it. Then in the middle of a match the trigger bar broke. Dead gun. After a horrible warranty service experience with Kahr I got my "fixed" Cw9 back and the gun was never right again. I could not get through a box of ammo without 2-3 light strikes and usually a few failures to eject. The warranty experience was so horrible and after a fair amount of my own work to fix the issues I traded the gun away (with full disclosure).

On the other hand my XD-40 Tactical again bought new, cracked the locking block very early in it life and had to go back to the factory for replacement and a few thousand rounds later the trigger return spring broke in the middle of a match, at one point I had to replace all my magazine springs to deal with a feed issue and yet I am still running the gun nearly 40,000 rounds later. Despite those failures I have had great spans of reliable operation.

The Kahr was flawless till it wasn't. The XD on the average was significantly more reliable despite the failures because the recover from failures were quickly successful.
 
While it is certainly true the next round can always be a failure. I also believe guns are made to be shot, so a good realistic “torture test” for lack of a better word, is how much it can reliably shoot.

I have a few zero failure guns, one an AK is well over 10k rounds. Another is a carry gun and has much less, maybe a couple thousand. Either could become a jam-o-matic tomorrow. I have others but they have been shot much at all, few hundred rounds at most. But a good record is valuable, as they say “the past is the best predictor of the future” and that is just as true as “past performances does not guarantee future performance”
People share their experiences and other people make decisions based, in part, on anecdotal accounts of a particular firearm.
 
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