I think I have figured out why its seems Autos jam more frequently than revolvers. This has been rather a revelation for me. We'll see if other agree. I have been shooting for well over 20 years now. Both autos and revolvers and its eems to me that revolvers are more reliable than auto's.
The odds are that if you pick up a revolver, load it and pull the trigger six times, it will go bang six times. All well and good. Think back on how many times you have been loading a revolver and a case didn't look quite right. Bulged a little, primer was in crooked, whatever. You didn't load that round.
On the last round of a string of fire, you noticed that the trigger was getting a little heavy. Stopped what you were doing, scrubbed the face of the cylinder and went about shooting. Trigger pull got heavy, cleaned out under the extractor star. A round of .357 wouldn't chamber, you scrubbed out the ring of crud from the 300 .38's you had just fired and, you're back in business.
In other words, you were one or two rounds away from a "jam" but, you corrected it and kept shooting.
On an auto, every time there is a prioblem, its right in the middle of a string of fire. It stands out in your mind. You remember going Bang..Bang...Bang..Jam. And THEN you dealt with the problem, but, all you remember is that the gun jammed while you were shooting it. That slightly oversized round went into the magazine without a problem, but wouldn't chamber when you were shooting and you had a stoppage. With the revolver, you loaded that round by hand, felt that it wouldn't seat and discarded it. The revolver, loaded with six perfect rounds, went bang six times. The auto, jammed in the middle of a string.
So, I think perhaps more often, we remember the auto jams because the gun quit working while we were actually shooting it as opposed to the revolver that we corrected the jam just before it actually occured, but, it too would have jammed had we not fixed the problem when we did.
Does that make any sense? I think a quality gun, with proper maintanance and good ammo is about as reliable as anything manufactured by man..