Empirical Firearm Statistics.

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Buy from one of these companies...

Glock
Beretta
Springfield
Smith & Wesson
HK
Colt
Ruger

... and enjoy top quality.

You buy high end guns and you get high end performance.

Clean your gun and maintain your gun and never worry.

HOWEVER!

I'm not a fan of revolvers but yes, buy a revolver and enjoy some comfort.

In the end though, we fire hundreds of rounds from our Glock with -.01 percent failures.

Usually even then it's operator error.

Last trip to the range resulted in no failures.


Oh yea, buy top quality ammunition.

Period.

 

[BIGIRON]

Good thread. ('cept for all them numbers, of course).

 

[RyanA]

Aw, I was going to add new numbers and revise some of the old ones...:candle:

 

[RyanA]

I figured out some new ways to compute the numbers. I think some of my prior numbers may be wrong. But I haven't found a way that seems to work correctly. I'm not sure I have time to mess with them right now. The semester is winding down, and I've got other things that need doing. But if anyone's interested I can try picking up again later. Although I think it's safe to say that the odds of failure even with a capacity as high as 20 rounds is fairly remote, especially with quality ammo.

If you guys don't mind me asking what firearms forums are good. I've seen a lot of poo-flinging on certain sites, particularly in conversations about ballistics. I'd like to go with something mostly civil, and scientific, just like here on cpf.

 

[greenLED]

If you guys don't mind me asking what firearms forums are good. I've seen a lot of poo-flinging on certain sites, particularly in conversations about ballistics. I'd like to go with something mostly civil, and scientific, just like here on cpf.

I've yet to find the CPF equivalent of gun forums (except maybe The High Road forums).

In the mean time, and since you mention ballistics:
http://www.theboxotruth.com/index.htm

 

[Lee1959]

Ok, here I am knocking on wood very hard!! But, I have been shooting handguns for 20 years, give or take a month or two. I have shot revolver for all 20, and pistol for 10 of those 20. I have never had a failure to fire in a centerfire revolver or pistol round including those I have reloaded which are the majority. I have had a few failure to fires in .22 rimfire rounds in both.

Out of all the thousands of rounds I have had a handful of malfunctions in a centerfire pistol, a few stovepipes over the years, less than a dozen in memory, and a few failure to feeds. The feed failures have all been attributable to new pistols which needed either breaking in or a simple feed ramp polishing, which took perhaps 15 minutes to accomplish.

Now I am going to go rub my rabbits foot, and horse shoe because I certainly do not want to hae any now in an important situation.

I have found MOST, QUALITY, modern pistols to be extremely reliable, as long as proper shooting form, and proper pistol maintenance is used. One important thing to do before risking ones neck on a firearm is proper breakin, 500 rounds will usually break ina firearm and find any possible problems so they can be fixed before it occurs in a bad situation.

One note I will make is with .22 lr rimfire firearms. The waxy feeling type sealants some use can sometimes gum up semi-automatics, so they need to be kept clean.

 

[RyanA]

Oh, yeah. Box O' Truth is one of my new favorite sites.:twothumbs

Thanks Lee, I was a bit curious about the higher rate of failure with 22rimfire. Lot's of great infolovecpf

 

[Diesel_Bomber]

Good thread! Glad I stumbled upon it.

Up until a few months ago when ammo became hard to find and buy in quantity, my wife and I went shooting every other weekend(tried for every week, but didn't always work). We'd make a full day of it and go through around 2k rounds. We've done this for 5+ years. .22 rimfire, 9mm, and .45 mostly. You can do the math on how many rounds that is.

Our experience:

.22 rimfire usually fails by not being powerful enough to cycle the weapon. In a case(5k rounds) there'll be ~10 rounds that require a second tap to go boom, and one or two that'll be complete duds. I prefer CCI.

Centerfire ammo is so reliable it's boring. In the years my wife and I have been shooting we've had two rounds that required a second tap and five complete duds. Blazer, Independence, Winchester, Remington, S&B, all of it ran just fine. We had one case of WWII surplus ammo that had obviously gotten wet that gave us some problems, but I'm not going to count that for obvious reasons.

All that said : Get a gun and holster setup comfy enough that you'll actually carry it all the time, instead of worrying about whether the ammo will give you a problem. If you have to step from a .50 Desert Eagle, that requires a backpack frame to haul around, down to a .380 P3AT, that'll disappear into a good pocket holster, so that you'll actually CARRY it, then that's fine. That .50 cal will do you no good sitting on the nightstand when two gangsta-wannabe thugs give you problems when you're loading groceries into your car at night.

Good luck, and let us know what you come up with.

:buddies:

 

[sloopy70]

Oh, yeah. Box O' Truth is one of my new favorite sites.:twothumbs

Thanks Lee, I was a bit curious about the higher rate of failure with 22rimfire. Lot's of great infolovecpf

The box o truth guys do their thing about 40 minutes from my house, we also have regular USPSA matches on the same range where they do their tests...

 

[Radiophile]

The box o truth guys do their thing about 40 minutes from my house, we also have regular USPSA matches on the same range where they do their tests...

I burst out in laughter when I saw the Buick O' Truth! They are my kind of people!

 

[Lightraven]

I like Box O' Truth though Ol Painless and Buick O' Truth tend to over-simplify some of the lessons--especially relating to combat tactics.

For the average person, it is probably neither here nor there, but LEOs and soldiers might want to dig a little deeper into the tactics of shooting into and out of cars.