Rant Commences

I like guns. I think they are neat-o. Because of this I watch a lot of reviews, and a surprisingly large number of them are, not to mince words, stupid. A badly done review is sometimes worse than no review, and it’s ten to twenty minutes of my life I want back.

“We’re going to review the Tisas Duty 1911 .45. Since we know that 1911s like to be lubricated we’re going to run it dry straight out of the box. Oh, and we’re going to put funky magazine extensions of unknow quality on the stock magazines because a sponsor sent them to us. We’re also going to use extended magazines a different sponsor sent us without commenting ion their quality, whether we know they are reliable or have any experience with them.

Next we’re going to show ten minutes of footage of us shooting the gun not particularly well. We’re not going to tell you how many rounds we fired or what type of ammunition we used. We will comment that out of however many rounds we fired there were several times the gun failed to go into battery, but we didn’t show that in the boring shooting segment and we’re not going to tell you if it was a specific type/brand of ammo or if it happened with every type. We also won’t tell you if it happened with specific magazines or all of them. We’ll mention that other than those failures the gun functioned flawlessly with every type of ammo we fired, but we’re still not going to mention what exactly those were. We will absolutely not speculate as to whether the free magazine stuff we got might have something to do with this, and we will not test it with the unmodified factory magazines.

We will also not take the gun apart to examine the interior finish or quality of construction, comment on the fitting or anything else useful.”

So all I can really glean from this is that the gun did not function 100% with modified and aftermarket magazines and whatever random ammunition they used. Uh, great?

This, sadly, is not an isolated incident, not is it restricted to Youtube. From a print article:

“We’re going to review a specific caliber in two different 1911s. To evaluate this caliber we’re going to throw cheap conversion barrels into two random cheap 1911s. To make sure this is a fair test we’re going to compare these rather dubious assemblies to a purpose-built $3000 custom gun in a different caliber. Because science.”

Imagine my shock when they liked the $3000 gun best despite the fact that it’s in the wrong caliber and has literally nothing to do with the caliber they are supposedly evaluating.

Seriously, WTAF?

If you want to review guns find a good youtuber who does reviews and watch a bunch of their videos to see what they think is important and DO THAT. Also, if you are going to show yourself shooting the gun it will increase your credibility if you are actually good at shooting. Mind you you don’t have to be a great shot to review a gun well, but it helps. Oh, and show us if the gun malfunctions, because that’s useful.

Please, please, if you are going to review guns at least know what you should be looking for, talking about and showing us.

Rant ends. Thank you for your time.

Stay safe and take care.

Michael Tinker Pearce, 1 November 2021