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Old 01-06-2017, 07:43 PM
rburg rburg is offline
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Join Date: Jun 2001
Location: Kentucky, USA
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The advantage of buying a quality gun is that you often can get your money back, sometimes more. The problem with buying junk is that no one else wants it either. When you go to trade one in, the shop doesn't want it. You want nearly what you paid, but they can buy another at wholesale. Their profit margin is pretty good, but they don't sell many to gun owners. Their market is to people without a lot of experience, who say "they must be as good". So you expect to get maybe $100 less than you paid. He won't offer it because his wholesale price is even lower. What he does is offer you $100 less than his price. Then he knows it will sit till the cows come home.

They don't all consist of dependable home defense guns. Now that you own it, take it out and test it. Once, long ago, we went shooting nearly every weekend. One guy we knew heckled us for months to take him along. He had a Taurus to protect his family auto shop. And he brought along some ammo, like a box. So we commenced to shooting up our targets. He was there for a while, and I wasn't paying a lot of attention until one of my close friends was laughing. His shooting combined with his substandard equipment resulted in him often having at least one misfire per cylinder and sometimes multiple. He couldn't hit the target with any regularity, either. It didn't take him long to throw away the remains of his ammo. Out of the kindness of my heart I gave him a box of my reloads. He was reluctant to even try them, afraid it might damage his gun. In just a few minutes he tossed that ammo out and said he was going home.

The friend waited till the guy left, then went dumpster diving in the trash can. He was particularly interested in my reloads, identical to what he'd been shooting without incident. Then he fired all the factory ammo the guy tossed out, too. Pride prevented the guy from admitting it was his junk gun, not the ammo that he felt easy to blame. And he owned a gun that wasn't much of a threat to anyone.

You and everyone else has an obligation to function test any gun you're betting your life on.
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Dick Burg
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