Noob Explains: Tiny Gun Syndrome
I’ve reviewed a few “carry guns” so far. In more than one of those reviews, I’ve referred to something I like to call “tiny gun syndrome”. This doesn’t mean that the pistol is going to go out and buy a Corvette or Porsche. It’s a strange phenomena that occurs when you shrink down the components of a gun.
When you think about it, tiny guns are the equivalent of reducing a liquid during cooking. Bear with me here, this will make sense I promise. Let’s say you cooked that steak like they do in most restaurants and seared the steak on a grill first then finished it in a heavy pan under a broiler (one of the best ways to go, mind you). When the steak is finished, there will be little bits left in the pan along with some of the juices. Those little bits are concentrated beef flavor and are wasted by so many. So while your steak is resting for a couple minutes, you take a glass of red wine and use it to deglaze the pan. This is a fancy cooking term for “dump some liquid into the pan and boil it all the while scraping the bottom of the pan gently in order to dissolve those beefy bits”. Yeah, it’s easier to just say “deglaze”.
With those bits dissolved, you now have a wine flavored liquid with a slight hint of beef flavor. Now’s the important part: you leave that mixture to boil for a couple minutes. As it boils, the water in the wine is going to evaporate and the amount of liquid in the pan is going to reduce. Ideally, you want it to reduce to about half of it’s original volume. As that reduces, something magical happens: The once runny liquid thickens and the flavors get much stronger. A little pepper and salt to taste and bam! You have a fancy sauce to take a steak to the next level. No need for A-1 sauce here!
So what the heck does that have to do with a small gun?
Well, when you get right down to it, every pistol has the same exact set of flaws. The main flaw being every pistol will malfunction if you don’t hold it right. The slides need to fly back with a certain degree of force in order to work correctly. If you limp wrist the gun, your hand is going to cushion/transfer a great deal of that force away from the slide. That can lead to stovepipes, failures to feed and other malfunctions. In a perfect world with a perfect grip and iron clad hand strength, the lower frame of a gun wouldn’t move at all and the slide would take 100% of the force of the bullet firing. Physics and physiology, however, monkey wrench that whole concept.
Much like that tasty sauce (can you tell I was hungry when I wrote this?), as you reduce the size of a gun, the features of it become more pronounced. The snap from recoil seems higher. Movements from your hands affect the sight picture more. The likelihood of the limp wristing flaw also increases.
The reason larger guns are more forgiving is that the slide and springs are heavier. The momentum of the slide carries more of the force before it gets dissipated into your hands. With that tiny little gun, there isn’t much there, slide-wise, to carry that momentum. It needs your shooting technique in order to shoot correctly. As a result, any flaw in your technique is going to be concentrated.
This is, again, one of the main reasons why I always tell people that your first gun shouldn’t be your carry gun. It will be frustrating because, more than likely, the gun is going to malfunction a lot and people with little experience are likely to just blame the gun. Actually, I take that back, people of ALL experience levels tend to fall into the “it sure as heck can’t be me so it has to be the gun” mentality when something goes wrong.
Either way, the malfunctions aren’t the only issue. As I mentioned earlier, the recoil also gets snappier. There’s no weight to absorb that snap and the short barrel means there’s still going to be some excess gas when the bullet has left the gun. Combine that with a gun whose ergonomics are more for concealment than comfort and you typically wind up with a gun that just isn’t fun or comfortable to shoot. If you’re just learning to use a gun, you don’t want to be learning on a gun that’s going to leave your hands red and stinging after 2 magazines worth of ammo. You just won’t get the experience or range time that a new shooter needs.
Tiny guns are as finicky as they are convenient for concealed carry. Just make sure you’ve got your fundamentals down pat before you bet your life on that pocket pistol.
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