“Good Guns vs. Bad Guns” Guide

According to Wikipedia, ergonomics is “the study of designing equipment and devices that fit the human body, its movements, and its cognitive abilities”. The problem with ergonomics is that what works great and feels great to one person might not feel right to another. We’re all shaped differently. Unlike the glass rod of a trigger, there isn’t a set standard of how a gun should feel. A weapon that feels good in my fists of ham are going to feel completely different in Mrs. Noob’s tiny hands (she’s only 4’11” and 95 pounds).

There are a few things that we can look at, however.

For starters, make a fist. Now extend your index finger and point at something. Do you see the way your hand is angled? That’s your natural point. Without looking at your hand, you could point at something and, because of that natural angle, be spot on target with an incredible amount of accuracy. Now take a look at the angle of the handle on a 1911. That angle is the same as when you point your finger. One of the reasons why they’re so popular is because Mr. Browning got the ergonomics of this pistol almost perfect. It’s not just the handle either. When you hold it in the proper grip, the thumb on your left hand is perfectly aligned with the slide release. The right hand thumb can easily operate the safety and the magazine release. The trigger guard is the right shape and thickness to be comfortable. Everything is right where it needs to be.

On the M-11/9, the handle is straight up and down. There’s a slight curve on one side thanks to a plastic backing. The trigger guard is square shaped with sharp edges that rub your fingers raw after a couple of minutes. The magazine release is awkward and clumsy. The original bolt handle on the gun wasn’t much thicker than 3 quarters stacked on each other which made it difficult and borderline painful to rack. Even with the extension, it’s not much better. With the location of the handle, the main section of the gun rubs your knuckles raw and the back has a tendency to smack your forearm when you shoot if you don’t hold it just right.

This gun isn’t for sissies.

The sights on a gun don’t always make or break it. In most cases, if you don’t like the sights that come with the gun you can just swap them out. That’s provided, of course, that the gun allows for that.

So what makes for good sights? This is another one of those subjective…uh…subjects. Some people like super bright sights with an over-sized front dot. Others like the red dot holographic sights.

Pretty much all “good” sights are going to have these characteristics:

• Easy to find: On the little pocket pistols that are popular now, the sights are pretty much just a couple of nubs that barely stick out from the top of the slide. There’s no coloring on them or anything. you have to stop to find the sights before you even think of lining them up. Speaking of coloring, most good sights are colored in a way that really makes them pop compared to the rest of the gun. You’ll find them in bright white, neon, or glowing fiber-optic styles. When you bring that gun up to your eye, they’ll be distinct enough that your vision will snap right to them.
• Logical: Three dots, line up the dots. Lolly pop, put the front sight on top of the line. Gap and Peg, put the peg in the middle of the gap. They make sense. You look at them and you don’t have to figure out how they work. The brain says “oh yeah, no worries” and moves on. Lining up a shot is not the time to be working out a logic puzzle (I’m looking at you, Glock).
• Easy to see: This is kind of a combination of the previous two features but I shouldn’t need a magnifying glass to see the sights. Nor should I need a protractor, compass and survey equipment in order to be able to line them up effectively.

The 1911 pistols have a variety of sights available to them. My 1911 has the gap and peg sights and the Kimber had 3 dots. Nice, logical, easy.

The M-11/9 has a plate on either side with a tiny hole in each. The idea is that you line up the holes with each other and put your target in the middle of the holes. Did I mention the holes are tiny? Did I mention that the charging knob pretty much blocks the path between the holes? Did you know that because of perspective, even if you could see through the sights, you’re left with what would be a 5 foot field of vision through the sights? You’re not so much aiming this gun as you are hoping (assuming? praying?) that it hits somewhere close to the target. If you look at the fully automatic roots of this pistol, this gun’s shooting style was referred to as “spray and pray”. The sights on it reflect that mentality.

If you aren’t sure a gun is going to work 100% of the time, you shouldn’t put your life in its hands…if it had hands. A person could write volumes of very thick books on all the factors that affect the reliability of guns.

Sometimes a gun just has a bad design. No way around it, the company just skimped in their engineering department. You can look through the history of guns and find many examples of guns that should have just been left on the drawing board. The 1911, however, has been popular for over 100 years. The guns that you see today is barely, if at all changed from the original. They are famous for their reliability because of their incredible design.

If they didn’t skimp in the engineering, they might have skimped on the materials. I seem to see it most in the magazines. For some reason, it’s like companies will say “whelp, we’ve blown our budget on the gun itself. Grab one of those crappy mags off the shelf and ship it with those”. This is perfectly evident in the M-11/9. They use a 100% plastic magazine. This isn’t some projection moulded, precision plastic either. There’s all kinds of scaling and fraying on all the edges. There’s no reinforcement at the top and there’s a bunch of burrs where the bullets feed from. More often than not, the M-11/9 has had trouble pulling the next round out. Everyone I’ve talked to that owned one of these have been in agreement that whomever made the decision to use plastic mags was an idiot. There are after market companies out there make steel mags for these and, from what I’ve heard, they solve a lot of problems.

I’ve had magazines with other guns that were warped to the point where bullets weren’t able to feed properly through them. Regardless of where they skimp on the materials, it will always cause a problem.

Beyond the magazines, a large portion of the parts on the M-11/9 are stamped. Let me back up for a moment, gun components are made from alloy metals (steel, aluminum, etc) and alloy metals in general have a crystalline structure. Depending on how those crystals are aligned determines the strength of that alloy. When you hear about “tempered” steel and whatnot, they’re referring to a process that aligns the crystals in such a way that the metal becomes harder and less prone to bending and/or warping. You’ll often hear marketing people wax poetic for hours on the advantages of forged vs. billet milled vs. stamped. The three methods all have to do with precision, crystals and the preservation of the tempering.

It breaks down like this:

With forged, they start off with a chunk of hot metal then they beat the crap out of it until it vaguely resembles the part they want. From there, they grind it down with to create the final part. The advantages of this are that, in the “weak part” of the design (tight corners and such), the crystalline structure follows the shape and makes those points much stronger.

With billet milled, they start with a block of metal. From there a computer controlled milling machine (called a Computer numerical control or “CNC Machine”) cuts away everything that doesn’t look like a gun part. There is the chance of some weak points in the final design but the engineers tend to account for that. The advantage is that a CNC machined billet is going to have the most precise final product, with accuracy up to one thousandth of a millimeter!

Finally, we have stamped. Here, they take a sheet of metal and then drop a very heavy weight on it. This pushes the metal against a die that shapes and bend it into roughly the final shape. The machine then spits it into a pile and moves to the next. Way down the assembly line, someone has to drop the parts in and wrestle the stamped pieces together. Sometimes they use a hammer to do it. The advantage is that stamped pieces can be churned out at an absurdly high rate. The down side is that they spit them out at an absurdly high rate, sacrificing precision, strength, complexity and most other things.

Many of the guns during WWII used stamped parts because of the need for large amounts of weapons. The famous AK-47 is mostly stamped parts as well. When a gun is made from stamped parts, the tolerances have to be quite large to make up for the lack of precision in the components. We’ll get into tolerances in another guide but for now, just think of it as “how well everything fits together”.

As I said, a large number of the M-11/9 parts are stamped while the Kimber’s frame and slide are forged. You can feel it when you shoot. The Kimber is just inherently more accurate and, unlike the M-11/9, if you shake the Kimber you don’t hear parts rattling inside of it.

It’s difficult to tell a good gun from a bad one until you’ve used both. With today’s techniques and manufacturing processes, most guns are pretty decent. Most complaints about guns these days seem to be subjective. Some people hate striker fired triggers, some hate double action. When it is a matter of a problem with the gun, it almost always seems to be the same complaints.

So if a gun has bad components, what does that truly mean? If you shoot a bad gun, will the world slip out of its orbit and crash into the sun? I can say, with a great degree of certainty, that the world will be fine. Depending on what you’re using the gun for, a bad gun might not be a big deal. If you want a daily carry gun that your life might depend on, well, you might not want a bad gun for that. If you want something to plink at the range with? By all means.

I know I’ve ripped on the M-11/9 but this is one of my favorite guns in my collection. It is just a trip to throw lead downrange with. At the same time, the moment I take it out of its case, everyone nearby wants to see it and shoot it The fact that its not as good as a Kimber makes no difference. The only thing it means is that this isn’t the gun I’m going to reach for in a pinch. Beyond that, I wouldn’t trade my M-11/9 for the world.