new to pistol forums but have some questions

[BN]

I was just reading the thread hoping to see some pictures of bob's Corvair. Unsafe at any speed.

[Jim Watson]

Yes, I know the difference between air-cooled and water cooled machine guns; the 1917 was considered a heavy before the .50 came along.
There is also the story of the ten Vickers that fired off 999,750 rounds at Germans in a day's work.

The thread just reminded me of the video of an extravagant owner feeding an 850-900 round belt into a LMG, probably an M60, and heating the barrel red hot.

[Casual Friday]

I think the members of the forum did an excellent job in trying to help him and in how they responded when the advice was ignored.

[JRB]

First and foremost to your question - get your DD214 and buy a blue label program Glock 17, 19, 19X, or model 45, whichever one you can get in stock at a blue label program dealer. That is by far and away the 'right answer' for the hardware.
I would strongly encourage you to seek out professional handgun training and do your level best to expel everything the Army 'taught' you about shooting a pistol once you arrive at that first class.
Unless you were in the AMU or similar, it's highly unlikely that the Army taught you anything worthwhile about handgun shooting. Also trust and believe that assuming you're already skilled is the only mistake more egregious than seeking out an 80% build as a sole defensive handgun. I say this as an Army SSG with 12 years in, and having been the NCOIC for numerous Battalion-sized range events that always included at least an M4/M16 zero, M4/M16 qual, and M9 Beretta 9mm qual ranges at a bare minimum.

also i'm quite familiar with how to handle weapons. like i said i carried them in the army for 22 years. thanks for the information.

22 years of service is fantastic, I'll tip my hat to you for that. But small arms instruction and especially handgun instruction in the Army is just about as good as Army chow. If anything, Army chow is *better* because at least they have to get good at fucking that up every day, instead of a monthly or quarterly qual range. 'Expert' means fuck-all and most M9 'experts' are right around the level where they could be a competent beginner - if only they don't let their fucking pride or rank confuse them about being a fucking newbie.
Based on your contributions here, pardon me if I strongly doubt that you are as skilled as you claim you are. *I* need more training and it took getting smoked by people who shoot pistols as a hobby during a local informal 'action pistol' event to make me realize that I suck, and I will probably continue to suck for the rest of my life compared to the true experts of handgun shooting - many of whom are active on this forum. So I stow my Army bullshit and shut the fuck up when those grown-ups are speaking.

thanks for that advice. one reason i'm asking about the quality of a gun is so i don't have to take it out and shoot all the time. i can still take out my rifles and go out and hit 100% of the targets i aim at. and i do not take them out often. heck i can still hit things i aim at with my bb gun. now yea that is not the same thing but i do not believe you lose your skills. may get a bit rusty but never lose them. outside of medical issues.

you know in the army they handed me a weapon and told me i had to carry it. all i can tell you is it was an m45. and when i was carrying the m60 the feed tray return spring broke and the armor would not send it in for repair. i live fired that lots of times with a rubber band wrapped around the try to pull the ejector back for the next round. finally it took a 4 star general doing a command inspection and finding that rubber band to get it fixed. in michigan i was the first one to get expert with that gun on live fire. and they to this day still teach the operators how to shoot 3 round bursts. i started that. they yelled at me during the complete drill to fire 10 rounds or more. well you can't hit much with 10 round burst for qualifying.

anyway thanks for the info on the taurus. i watched a youtube that showed 5 guns and that guy said the taurus was #2 on the list. i think i still want the glock just for the reason of not taking it out all the time to fire it. that guy liked the walter creed but for the ability to take any dirt. and he said it was about as heavy as the m45 so i may stay away for that. but all the guns that seem to take high marks all have plastic type lowers even the glock the walter creed if i heard him correctly did not have a plastic lower. thanks for the help

Marksmanship is a perishable skill and it rapidly perishes with handguns - with rifles it is much slower to perish. If anything, I would re-emphasize the need for formal training despite your service history, and also emphasize the need to at least occasionally practice what you learn in that training. I would also strongly recommend a local concealed handgun license class for the reasons other folks have advised it, as to give you instruction on local law and use of force even if you have no need of a carry permit.

Moving on, there was no 'M45' pistol in the Army, ever, and there wasn't anywhere else in the DoD until the mid 80's when the Marines started the 'M45' MEUSOC pistol based on the 1911. The Army Marksmanship Unit did their own custom 1911's with a lot of similar upgrades but never called it the M45, that was strictly a Marine recon thing and I strongly believe that exactly zero of them ended up in Army arms rooms, with the possible exception of some joint task force secret squirrel shit that required a MARSOC unit to store their weapons in an Army facility somewhere.
That 'they handed me a weapon' stuff is absolute horse shit, you signed a fucking hand receipt or turned in a weapons card with the exact SN and nomenclature of that fucking weapon before the arms room would hand you that weapon. The Army's changed a lot in the past 20 years, but THAT hasn't changed a bit for a very, very long time. You could be the kind of Soldier that simply didn't ever read that stuff or care, in which case I further doubt your claimed prowess with a handgun. I've yet to meet a skilled shooter that couldn't even get within the neighborhood of correct nomenclature when IDing a weapon they carried.

There's also an astonishing scarcity of 4 star Generals to begin with, and I've never, ever known of one to do command inspections. That's the kind of shit a Brigade commander should be doing and that's usually a fullbird. I've known GO's to slide along with a Brigade or Bn inspection if they had time/boredom/cared to etc but usually that Brigade or Battalion commander would steer that General away because he/she wants to catch his own unit's deficiencies, not air them out in front of a flag officer.

Having ran M249 and M240 ranges I was about to bust out the FM for you but @HCM beat me to it, and I was even go so far as to provide the instruction material on the 1919A4 which offered similar advice about controlled bursts during sustained accurate fire to reduce ammo consumption and barrel heating - all of which wildly predates the M60's service. So please spare us that kind of chest-thumping.

And this is an improvement from 1917 when Mr Browning held down his trigger for 48 minutes?

Carrying a 29lb (empty w/o optic) M240B when dismounted sucks enough all by itself. Add in ammo, your spare barrel because your A-gunner is always a piece of shit that falls out or disappears, and your M9 they gave you because you have a 240, etc... yeah there's a reason we're not doing the watercooled thing anymore.

M60 barrels are no different than current MG barrels. You say "burn out" but I think you mean overheat. Firing heats up barrels. A hot barrel can cook off rounds, resulting in a runaway gun or a structural failure of the barrel. This is true of the M60, the M249, the M240 etc. This is why air colled MG have interchangeable barrels. It was true and 100 years ago and it's true today.

3 round bursts are a waste of a belt fed..... "It's a machine gun !"

The M60, M249, and M240 all fire from an open bolt and thereby aren't prone to cook-offs, unlike the closed-bolt M2, ANM2, M1919, etc. M60's had runaway problems due to sear wear issues and some sloppy tolerance creep, and thereby the belt-break training to control a runaway M60 came around, mimicking the same training for the closed-bolt M1919 that could be fired to the point of barrel-heat induced runaway fire. The Army being the Army kept the belt-break training into the first parts of GWOT but I haven't really seen it practiced on 249's or 240's.

M60's are honestly giant pieces of shit (well, the M60E6 finally has it mostly figured out) and the only thing genuinely superior about the M60 is they're about 10lbs lighter than an M240B. I haven't had the chance to fire one of the newer FN MK48's yet, but I'd bet a shitload of money that it's a superior weapon in every way to the latest-greatest M60 variants, and basically brings the M240's awesomeness into a SAW-sized and weighted package.

I have loudly suggested 'It's a machine gun, troop, use it like one!' to many, MANY shooters particularly if they're used to an M16 or M4. With an M249 or M240, we generally advise 5-7 round bursts per target during a popup range qual. I prefer this as well because I like to give the firer some feedback on their recoil control, which is particularly important for SAW gunners that may need to shoot from a standing position. Doing the 3-5 round bursts doesn't force them to control the weapon as much.

When permitted by the range OIC's and ammo supply, I prefer to let any M249 or M240 shooter fire all of their remaining ammo in one long burst after they complete their target sequence, specifically to let them get the experience dumping a 25-50 round burst at cyclic rate. Recoil control is paramount for a SAW gunner or 240 gunner and doing short bursts doesn't give them that experience.

[Cypher]

Take this for what it's worth

There are 44 full generals on active duty right now. Generals don't do command inspections. Understanding that my experience isn't everyone's experience, I was in the Army for 15 years and the highest rank I ever ran into was a major general.

I questioned full General is doing command inspections. I question unit armors not remembering to take a rubber band out of an M60 before such an inspection and I really question a rubber band surviving the Heat generated by firing an M60 machine gun.

Have a nice day.

[Glenn E. Meyer]

Obviously, you didn't have a M60 made from an 80% kit.

[JRB]

Take this for what it's worth

There are 44 full generals on active duty right now. Generals don't do command inspections. Understanding that my experience isn't everyone's experience, I was in the Army for 15 years and the highest rank I ever ran into was a major general.

I questioned full General is doing command inspections. I question unit armors not remembering to take a rubber band out of an M60 before such an inspection and I really question a rubber band surviving the Heat generated by firing an M60 machine gun.

Have a nice day.

I've had a fairly atypical career path that includes a recent OCONUS rotation with a 1 star HHC assigned to a 2-star command. Despite being around that much brass, I've only seen one time ever when a General was involved in an inspection, and that's only because a brigade CSM was doing an arms room and physical security inspection at the same time as the General's surprise visit with his own CSM. The General's own CSM steered him away in relatively short order because inspecting weapons in an arms room is just about as NCO business and NCO business gets.

The M60 has a lot of fucking problems but none of them are improved or solved by using a rubber band. Zip ties in one case, bailing wire in another couple cases, sure, but never a rubber band. But yeah. I had to dance around that one in my response because I'd already used my quota of PF-bombs.