This thread is one of the reasons I may look on the Internet for certain advice and even opinions but I never base much of my buying decision based on forum reports and even more so not on magazine recommendations from gun rags like Guns & Ammo (Gun test carries a little weight but still not much).
Magazines general always look for the best in something and lets face it they aren't going to rate a big companies latest whiz bang gun badly because they will lose their ad money.
On the Internet you will always find people that don't like this brand or that brand. Maybe they think they are over-priced, maybe they had a real problem with a gun, maybe when they did the company wasn't responsive enough to fixing it in their opinion, sometimes whether we like to admit it or not as customers our expectations are off and the cause of the guns problems may be us (accuracy, limp-writing a 1911 etc) but we blame the gun, maybe we expect MOA accuracy out of a 2" snubbie, who knows? The point being every company has lemons that get out the door from time to time... EVERY SINGLE ONE, sometimes they do or don't handle it well. Sometimes companies go through spurts of poor QC, or machines not holding tolerances right. Almost every one has gone through this from Colt, to S&W, to Kimber. The thing is I currently own a whopping total of 4 handguns. A Kimber 1911 which has failed all of 0 times in the 3 years I have had it, a Ruger KP89 which has failed the same amount - none, A Ruger Mark II - same, and an S&W 60 snubbie in .357. They all work fine. Some people don't like the grips on the Ruger and I must say I prefer the 1911 grip myself but to me the Ruger grips aren't any worse than a Beretta 92 or a Glock or any other double stacked 9mm. I much prefer the longer thinner grip style of the 1911 but that's my personal choice.
Overall if you pick a larger name brand your chances are better than not that you will get what you pay for. You pay $600 for a Kimber you have better odds at getting a decent 1911 than if you spend $300 on a lesser brand. However there are times when that lesser brand is all you want or need. In the 1911 world if you’re going to shoo 230gr ball ammo then almost anything will feed it. So if you aren’t target shooting for competition you might want to gamble on a cheaper model. The point being, while I read these threads in this forum and others I try to keep it in perspective and take much of it with a grain of salt.
Some things to keep in mind about negative internet chatter:
-If a manufacturer comes out with new whizbang X model and the majority of people who post about it all have a similar problem – it probably IS a problem and you may want to avoid it for the time being until it is fixed.
-When someone buys a product and it functions flawlessly and they receive great service all ‘round they aren’t going to go out of their way to tell the world about it more than likely. On the other hand if someone has a really bad experience they are very likely to tell anyone they know or who will listen and will actively seek out places to tell people and to seek help they didn’t get where they felt they should have. This being the case forums will almost always have an overly negative tone compared to the actual population of product produced. Heck over at the 1911 forums sometimes you would think Kimber never produces a gun that worked at all some times by reading that. It’s just not true.
-whether gun X feels good, shoots good, is comfortable for… person X in a forum doesn’t mean it will be good for you and vice versa. Something may feel great to you that others just hate. Make your own judgments of such things.
