**TCinVa begins speaking into his watch** "I've got one here that can see!"Originally Posted by Tamara
Ideal pistol?
You people have killed pistols for me. I don't have an ideal pistol anymore.
Since first posting here, I have gone from a bespoke personal weapon which cost like a used car and had every component, every jot and tittle, specifically chosen by me, based on consultation, consideration, and years of experience, all the way down to the brand of pins used and the angle and number of the cocking serrations, and now I'm carrying some disposable plastic wheelchock that could be fed into a wood chipper and replaced with any one of a quarter dozen different brands tomorrow without me caring the slightest. I hate you all.
I maintain a bipolar relationship with firearms at this point.
On the one hand I have guns that I really, really, really love. I love my Garand. I love my nickel plated S&W Model 27 with the 6" barrel. I love my 3" model 10. I love my Walther PP. The round count on all those weapons since I purchased them is somewhere in the neighborhood of 150. Not each, total among them all, most through the Garand. The model 27, for instance, I've never even fired...primarily because I don't want to have to clean it.
On the other I have guns that are appliances for launching bullets. My H&K P30. My Glock 17. My S&W 442. As an appliance, I like my H&K. It's easy to shoot well, it is superbly accurate, it tolerates my borderline abusive neglect of maintenance without complaint, and it allows me to safely reholster in a loony carry position. My Glock 17 has been cleaned like 3 times since I've owned it. What time it doesn't spend at the bottom of the range bag or with an AA .22 kit on it is spent being dryfired. These guns have tens of thousands of rounds through them collectively. Some individually have over 10,000 rounds through them.
In practically any objective measure you can dream up, my Glock 17 is a superior sidearm to my S&W model 27. Still, I'd have no problem getting rid of the 17 to get a better appliance where even typing about getting rid of the model 27 in a theoretical almost breaks me out in hives. In a class, Ken Hackathorn told a few of us that when he first opened one of Glock's old tupperware boxes and held what would become the gun that literally changed the firearms world forever, he remarked to the person in the store that it was the first handgun that came from the box with zero pride of ownership. There may be something to that.
When I was a kid, I watched CHiPs because they carried Colt Python revolvers. I watched the A-Team primarily because I liked seeing those Ruger machine guns cycling and I always hoped to see Hannibal pull out his S&W semi-auto...and hopefully cock the hammer. I watched TJ Hooker...OK, I watched TJ Hooker primarily because of Heather Locklear, but you were always guaranteed to see some good S&W revolver glam shots in that show. I couldn't tell you what happened on a single episode of Hunter, but I remember that the dude carried an H&K (exotic!) and the chick packed a girly Walther. I read gun magazines in the convenience store and when I went to the library I managed to find the three books they had about guns and I would pour over the black and white photos from the 1960's showing old guys handling or shooting Pythons and Lugers and Woodsmans.
My dreams are filled with royal blue steel and walnut, but if assaulted my hand is likely to be filled with something disposable and plastic that will obediently spit out reasons for bad men to leave me alone until the magazine runs dry. I've made my peace with it.
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