Your New Gun is Broken. Now What?
So you’ve got that shiny new gun you’ve been wanting for years now. You take it to the range and it stops working after a dozen rounds. It’s not your average bad ammo or bad technique type of thing either. Nope, you saw something important looking fly off. If it was a Nerf gun, you could just take it and the receipt back to Toys R Us and exchange it for a new one. Unfortunately, the store (and the law in some places) isn’t too keen on taking guns on return. At least not according to the huge signs all over the store that says “No returns or exchanges”.
So have you just flushed a few hundred dollars down the toilet? What is a consumer supposed to do?
Well, some people immediately go to every forum they can and rant about how gun ____ is a piece of junk and the manufacturer is staffed by horrible, goblin like creatures who eat puppies for breakfast and the store they bought it from is nothing but a huge scam and they will only ever buy guns from some other manufacturer and store from that day forward and everyone who likes the original gun is just a payed off shill for the company or some mindless sheep. Seriously, I challenge you to find a forum that doesn’t have a post like that. Go ahead. Oh, you found one? Hit that little button that takes you to the next page of the forum. There you go. There’s a post.
If you read through the anger and vitriol, you’ll see some consistencies. In most cases, there wasn’t an attempt to diagnose what happened. Rarely is the manufacturer contacted. Rarely do they do anything other than get rid of the gun and tell the world about it. Also, rarely do they even consider the most vague notion that the problems with the gun might actually be due to something they did.
Now, I don’t blame them for being upset. They just spent a not-insignificant amount of money on an item and they do have a right to expect it to work. There comes a point, however, where they’re doing the equivalent of stomping their cellphone to pieces in anger because the battery was dead. In other words, they’re making the problem bigger than it should be a.k.a. “overreacting”.
So let’s take a deep breath and go over what you should do.
First off, let’s do some amateur gunsmithing and try to figure out exactly what happened. What exactly is messing up on the gun? Is it a bunch of failure to feeds or failure to ejects? In that case, it could be something as simple as bad ammo, bad technique or just “new gun syndrome”. That’s where a gun still isn’t broken in. It usually takes a couple hundred rounds before a gun will start to perform the way it absolutely should. Burrs get worn down and surfaces get smoothed. Also, did you clean it really good before you took it to the range? Many people miss that step and boy is it important.
If an important part flew off the gun, what part was it? Was it the front sight? The ejector or extractor? Did something flat out break or was it something that you might not have installed correctly when you did that initial cleaning? Set your ego aside for a moment and realize that, yes, there is a remote possibility that you might have messed something up initially. I’m not saying that’s exactly what happened but, as Sherlock said, “Once you eliminate all possibilities whatever is left, no matter how absurd, is the answer.” Let’s say, however, that after our amateur diagnoses we determine that the “gun done broke”.
At this point, step one should be to call the place you bought it or bring the gun in to them (unloaded and safe, of course). Calmly and politely explain what happened. Those first three words are important. They’re so important that I’m going to type them again and I’m going to make the font slightly bigger, then make them bold, italic and underlined so as to emphasize their importance: calmly and politely. If you walk in there with a chip on your shoulder, screaming about how they screwed you over and how this gun is terrible and so on, the employee (who doesn’t get paid nearly enough to put up with that kind of attitude) is going to want to just get you out of the store instead of helping you. It seems like a logical thing but spend a little time at NotAlwaysRight.com and you’ll see a snippet of just how bad life is in retail. No matter how calm and polite you’re being, you can probably be more…just try not to get to that creepy point of politeness where they start comparing your face to a list of wanted serial killers.
Don’t expect much from this step, mind you. In most cases they have to follow the law or the store policy of which they have absolutely no control over. They could get fired or lose the store altogether by taking the gun back. You might be a great person but for all they know you could be trying to dispose of a murder weapon. Your inconvenience isn’t worth putting someone out of work. If the employee or the manager can’t help you, thank them for their time and move on to step two. Do not, and I repeat DO NOT throw a tantrum in the store and yes, I’ve been witness to a customer tantrum in a gun store (as well as other retail establishments). Do you really want to be the guy threatening violence to employees in a store where everyone working there has an openly displayed firearm on their hip?
So what is step two? Well, remember that little warranty card that was in the box your gun came in? That’s right, it’s time to call the manufacturer. Let’s take a small side trip here. When you buy a gun, you should either keep the receipt filed away or make a note somewhere of the serial number of the gun as well as the date of purchase. Personally, I have a spreadsheet with all that information that I store on my computer as well as on a thumb drive in an undisclosed location far away from my home. Why? Because most warranties aren’t lifetime so you’ll need to know the date of purchase.
Now, there’s a controversial subject here. That little warranty registration card is a fail-safe in case you lose the receipt or can’t remember the date of purchase. It guarantees that when you call the manufacturer, they’ll have all the information they need to start the process of fixing your gun. Some people prefer not to fill those out. I can understand that. You don’t want any more people than are absolutely necessary to know what guns you have. I can’t say I disagree with that thought process given current events as of late. At the same time, if you ever have to call for warranty repairs, they’re going to have to have that information eventually anyway. Fill it out or don’t. The choice is yours.
Anyway, when calling the manufacturer, calmly and politely explain to them what happened (there’s those words again). Don’t embellish. Don’t throw out a sob story. Just the facts and only the facts. They’ll ask some questions. Some of them might seem a bit condescending but trust me when I say they’re not trying to insult you. When the help desk asks “are you sure your computer is plugged in?” they’re not being jerks. You’d be surprised how often that actually solves someone’s problem. Same here. Essentially, they’re going to go through all the amateur gunsmithing stuff we talked about a couple paragraphs back. They might ask you if you’re sure you were holding it right or if you tried with different kinds of ammo, depending on what the problem was. If a large part of the gun fell off, they’re going to ask you point blank if you’re certain you didn’t disassemble the gun and put it back together wrong. Again, they’re just trying to diagnose over the phone to make sure they’re not going to waste time and money to pay one of their gunsmiths to look at it and then write “limp wristing” on the report.
In most cases, they’ll determine that, yes, something seems to be wrong with the gun. They’ll then set up a transfer to get the gun to them (they cover the fees and such, mind you) and then you send your gun off. A couple weeks later, you’ll have your gun back repaired and working the way it should. An inconvenience, yes, but the end result is a gun you can use. It’ll either be your original gun in a fully repaired state or a complete replacement.
If they determine it was user error, that might either void your warranty or at the very least won’t be covered. Now, back to the original phone call, if it was something that you did to break the gun, be honest. I’ll guarantee that the gunsmith will be able to determine what was done to the gun when he/she gets it so lying to the customer service rep isn’t going to do you any favors. If it is something you did, they might still repair it but they also might charge you for it. Some companies will fix it for free if you broke it. Those are awesome warranties. If it’s technique that’s causing issues, well, that’s on you.
An important thing here is to have reasonable expectations. They’re not going to replace a gun on account of a busted extractor. They certainly aren’t going to upgrade your gun. Don’t call them up saying “yes, I have a broken extractor on my M&P .22 and for my inconvenience I want you to upgrade my gun to your top of the line 9mm competition M&P pistol with the red dot sight option.” Don’t laugh, I’ve personally heard the equivalent requests in other mediums. True story: a customer in a place I once worked demanded a $3,000 Alienware Pro Gaming system for free in exchange his $300 eMachine with a faulty CD-ROM drive he just purchased. Granted, in his insane little world of unicorns and rainbows, that was probably a more than reasonable request. Make sure your request is reasonable here in the real world.
Also keep in mind, most warranties are not transferable. If you buy a used gun, even if the previous owner only had it for a week, nine out of ten times the warranty was void the moment it was traded in. You can find out for sure, however, by checking out the manufacturer’s site. Usually buried on it somewhere is a copy of the warranty. If it’s a used gun and the warranty is no longer valid, if the gun breaks and the store won’t take it back, your only option is to find a gunsmith. Take comfort in knowing that the money you saved on buying the gun used combined with the cost of repair will usually still come in lower than you would have payed buying that gun new. With gunsmiths, much like auto mechanics, make sure you get an estimate ahead of time. Also, it wouldn’t hurt to call the manufacturer even in this case. Again, a lot of them will repair your gun even if it’s out of warranty, they’ll just charge you for it.
Look, even the best made car will occasionally have a lemon. That means that no matter what you do to it, that car is just going to keep breaking and breaking for no discernible reason other than the fact that it’s just a lemon. If you look at the millions of guns manufactured every day, occasionally one is going to slip through quality assurance. It’s numbers. Let’s say a manufacturer makes a million guns a year. Let’s say that this is a great manufacturer and they only ever see a half of a percent of their guns come back for warranty work (which is significantly less than the industry average). That means that 5,000 guns with faults would be floating around each year. There’s no way around it, you could win the lottery and be one of those people.
What you do from that point goes a long way to determining if you wasted your money or not.
Images used under Creative Commons license from trenttsd and GerryT.
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