I saw an article and a introdcution paragraph had the following warning about 1911 and I wanted to know if it was true.
"“Now, I shoot a Glock,” Vickers tells me. “Make sure you tell guys that the 1911 is a pain in the ass. If they don’t like messing around with the pistol and spending a grand to really get it tuned, then they should forget it.”
Modern pistol designs have made the 1911 obsolete in its role as a combat sidearm. It’s finicky and demands constant attention that a warfighter can’t afford to offer. But when it’s tuned and running well, it’s the most accurate pistol out there."
*sigh*
Yet another opinionated article. As far as opinions go...I suppose it's par for the course.
The short answer to your question is "No, it's not true."
First of all, it's not a "pain in the *ss". If it were, it would never have survived more than a century as the most popular and well known semi-automatic ever produced, nor would it have been copied and sold at such a rate that no other handgun has ever come close to matching it.
First of all, most articles such as that fail to mention specifics. They almost always speak in generalities:
"...the 1911 is a pain in the *ss."
HOW is it a pain in the keister? What characteristics lead this person to say that? Are these characteristics objective or subjective?
"...messing around with the pistol and spending a grand to really get it tuned..."
Mess around with it HOW? Why would it need to be messed around with? Why would it need to be "tuned"? Such comments make it sound like a 1911 is some kind of present that comes with a label that says "some assembly required". Do you really believe this is the case?
"Modern pistol designs have made the 1911 obsolete in its role as a combat sidearm. It’s finicky and demands constant attention that a warfighter can’t afford to offer. But when it’s tuned and running well, it’s the most accurate pistol out there."
Really? First of all, this person seems to assume that a sidearm assumes some overriding importance in combat. It does not. It's the least powerful firearm in the world, much less for a soldier in combat. And a combat warrior will not have anywhere near the amount of ammunition for his sidearm that he will for his rifle because of this. And a true 1911 "combat sidearm" is about as reliable a weapon as you'll ever find because it's specifically designed to shoot the ammo that the combat veteran will be feeding it and in the conditions the combat warrior will be operating in. It does not NEED to be "tuned" because the 1911 combat sidearm is going to go "BANG!" every time the combat warrior pulls the trigger with that ammunition loaded in it. And a combat warrior doesn't need extreme accuracy with a sidearm. Anything that's far enough away from him to require any kind of accuracy is going to be on the receiving end of his rifle. And anything closer than that doesn't require competition level accuracies to hit.
The LAST thing a combat warrior would want in the field with him is some kind of highly tuned sidearm with tolerances so tight that the filthy real-world combat conditions will cause it to jam or otherwise be unreliable.
In the end, what this person said illustrates to me a basic level of ignorance and bias that makes me roll my eyes at everything he has posted. And, quite frankly, the opening statement of "Now, I shoot a Glock..." immediately put me on edge.
Don't get me wrong...Glock has a well established, and well deserved, reputation. In fact, I wouldn't mind owning one if it weren't for the fact that I think they're uglier than sin. But there are quite a lot of Glock owners out there who just come across as rude, crude, and socially unacceptable on this matter.
And for the record...I'd take him on in a contest of reliability and accuracy with stock, straight-out-of-the-box unmodified low budget comparison between his Glock and my Colt 1991A1. In nearly a quarter century, I can't recall having any issues at all with reliability or accuracy.