Hi all, Just curious about others experience with buying a gun you thought you'd love and having it turn out to be a loser ??? Mine was a Llama .22 that looked like a mini 1911. Somehow upon looking at it I stupidly failed to see it didn't have an extractor. The gun dealer insisted that I didn't need one, that I should just shake the gun if a round failed to extract ! He even loaded a spent casing in the gun and showed me how to open the slide and shake the gun until the casing fell out !!! Unreal. Got in a real nice shouting match with the idiot. Then he wouldn't take it back unless I got store credit, and of course he charged me a restocking fee ! I guess it's not the guns fault, but that turned out to be my biggest loser deal. The gun I couldn't hit the broadside of a barn with however was my H&K USP 40. I can't understand that one.....just didn't work for me. Anyway, would like to hear from you guys and your biggest disappointment in a firearm....Shoo

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"Get Hammered By a Shooboy!!"

Ruger Mini14.

Heck, the A team had them. I now know why in all the episodes I watched, I never actually saw them hit anyone with a shot. I can shoot tighter patterns with a cylinder bore shotgun.

I want to like it. It's pretty, handles well, and looks like a teeny M14. It also feeds and fires without fail.

Actually this little beauty. A Colt 1991 A1. It was a police confiscated weapon and sold to the LGS where, with my dumb luck bought it. I had it refinished, new springs, new grips and checked out and it would not run a full magazine of six rounds without jamming. Myself and two gunsmiths couldn't figure it out.

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Isaiah 41:10

Did you ever try a different mag ? Shoo

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"Get Hammered By a Shooboy!!"

Many, new and old... I wanted it to work because I loved the look and feel of it. Just not meant to be.

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Isaiah 41:10

That stinks, it is a nice looking piece...Shoo

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"Get Hammered By a Shooboy!!"

Hate to say it but my worst was a s&w 12 gauge shotgun. That was one beautiful shotgun, but kicked like one of mule packers mules and I couldn't hit the broadside of a barn with it. All my hunting buddies tried it, none could hit anything and there were some of pretty good shooters among them. I think I traded it to a pawn shop for a cheap rototiller.

Jennings 22 auto , been in the safe for 31 years,can't even give it away

You and me both. That was a jam-o-matic grossly inaccurate, and nuisance to disassemble *** I ever had the misfortune to own. Made a better paperweight that pistol. I paid $49.95 at a gun show and wound up giving it to a friend just for plinking. I told him about it but he liked it and didn't mind having to clear jams and stove-pipes 2 or 3 time in every magazine full.

A close runner up would be Chiappa 22-45 .22 auto. It looked okay but had the worst sights ever (floating wedge rear sight that would not stay "adjusted". And jammed with what ever ammo or magazines or combination there of I used. I did manage to sell it for about 200 bux which was about half of what I paid for it.

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Real men love cats!

Sig Sauer Mosquito.....an absolute piece of ****. I get mad now just thinking about it.

Tossup between a Taurus .22 revolver (from which the casings were impossible to extract) and a Rossi .38 revolver (which broke, locked up, or both, every time you took it out and shot it).

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But then, what do I know?

I beat ya, I paid $34.95 its still in the box with the tag on it

I second kenv1950 on the Jennings 22 auto. The one I had fell apart after about the third shot, traded it for a 1930's S&W catalog.

B. Mower

The first handgun I ever owned was a Smith & Wesson Model 915. I’m not sure what the deal was with this particular gun but I couldn’t hit a horse in the butt with it while sitting in the saddle. No one else that ever tried to shoot it had any luck either. As a result I was very skeptical of third gen S&Ws for many years.

The worst luck I’ve ever had is with Llama hand guns I’ve owned 4 a .32ACP a .380 Micro Max, an unnamed 9MM and a .45ACP (all 1911 style) the .45 literally fell apart on me one day while I was firing it and the 9MM wouldn’t accept factory magazines. I never had a problem with the .32 or the .380 but I will never purchase another Llama again

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Retired Career Security Guard

Ha! But the sad part is that neither one of us got our money's worth. I just got screwed a little worse than you that's all.

But I feel all better now because I have two of the best .22 autos out there: The Ruger Mark II w/6 1/2" bull barrel and the Sig Sauer 1911-22

I have put the Jennings and the Chiappa in the long ago and far away past and moved on. But I still shiver when I recall those two examples of wasted steel.

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Real men love cats!

Did the Phoenix .22 come from the previous Jennings .22 family tree ? I bought a Phoenix .22 about 3 years ago with the short barrel and the long target barrel with two mags for I think less than $100. I shot a few hundred rounds through it at one time and my buddy and I had a blast with it, fun little gun and we had zero failures. I pulled it out to use it after it sat for a year and the mags would no longer lock in place. Sent it in for service even though I wasn't the original owner, got it back in a few weeks working good as ever and they threw in two free mags too ! Great experience with an inexpensive gun. Anyone else have one ???

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"Get Hammered By a Shooboy!!"

The absolute worst was a new Colt Combat Commander 1911 in .45ACP an $1100 nightmare. I spent a year and $300 getting it right and I was so disgusted with it I sold it rather than keep it. It was pretty, but should never have left the factory with all the defects it had.

I won’t buy anything with the Colt name on it ever again.

The second worst was an RG-10 in .22 a 19 dollar Saturday night Special that worked OK for a decade or so before going bad. I use it as a paper weight today and hope if anyone breaks in that they will steal it. LOL At the time I was a private making 91 dollars a month so 19 dollars was about all I could afford. I saw a guy advertise one of these for $999 as a joke back when the gun buying frenzy was going on. It was his way of protesting the high prices on that site. LOL

The third worst was a Browning BDA .380, 14 shot double stack that was a jam-o-matic.

The other guns I have owned have all been pretty much what they were supposed to be and many were better than I expected. I have had fantastic luck buying used guns, but not as much with new ones.

I think wasted steel might be stretching it, weren't they pot metal ???

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"Get Hammered By a Shooboy!!"

SIG Sauer 1911-22. Finish is terrible and the gun is not accurate whatsoever. I love Sigs so I thought it must be great. I found out later they are made by GSG.

Lorcin 9mm = piece o' ****
Taurus 22 (flip up barrel) = piece o' ****
Wow my twenties were a waste of money.

Found a picture of my Phoenix .22. I like it !!! Too many freakin' safeties though....

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"Get Hammered By a Shooboy!!"

I had the same experience with a Taurus 17c. 8 shot 17HMR with a 4 inch barrel. Rounds would stick in the cylinder and ends would split. Bought it at auction and with shipping and FFL I buried myself in it. Sent back to Taurus and was told the splitting cases were designed into it. Yea right someone got happy with the reamer IMO. Worst part is the bullets would not stabilize and were all over the paper target at 30 feet. Traded it at a show for good down towards a Henry Golden Boy in 22MAG. I'm a happy camper now.

I don't understand why you guys don't like your Jennings J-22 Jam-O-Matics ! They are pretty guns. I think someone had a conversion kit for them to turn them into cigarette lighters, but they didn't work good for that either.... Shoo

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"Get Hammered By a Shooboy!!"

Many years ago, my father gave me an R-G .22 SA revolver. The thing sprayed lead out of the BC gap on each shot. You could not shoot it in the company of anyone, the side spray was deadly. Someone stole it, served him right.

HP 22
Too many safeties - yes.
A great shooter - yes
Had 2 of them for almost 20 years and their still selling new for under $130.

The absolute worst was a Ruger Mini-14 that I had the misfortune of owning in the early 1990s. It was ridiculously inaccurate regardless of what ammo I fed it. I sold it cheap just to get rid of it. Supposedly the problem has been remedied, but I'll never take another chance on one.

I think it was a toss up between a Rossi .17 HMR and two others. At 25 yards one shot off a rest would be on target, next several inches to the left, and when I mean several inches, it would be almost a foot. It did it with no matter what ammo I used. It was horribly inaccurate.
The other was a newer (10 years old or more by now) Marlin 95 rifle, not the guide gun. At 25 yards it would shoot a 3 inch group of about an inch, but about 3-4 inches left. No matter how far I drifted the sights I could not get it closer, I replaced the rear sight with a receiver sight, no better. It was a shame because I really liked that gun.
I think the next would have been the T/C Renegade in .54 caliber. I have shot and own muzzleloaders up to .58 caliber and none of them recoiled like that beast even with the lighter loads. It left a bruise on the right side of my face that took a week to go away.

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Vaya con Dios

I had a Mini-30.
Notice my use of the past tense.

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Buy American
Vote Responsibly

It was a 22 Jet. It backed up and hung up just like I'd heard.
If you backed the load down to about 22 Mag, no problem!
Ok, it gets worse. About 5 years after selling the first one, I bought another one. I just knew that I was more experienced, talented and skillful.
I wasn't! It still hung up. I sold it.
Later on I met a Texican Good old Boy who has a ranch up near del Norte, CO. He has shot more 22 Jet than anybody I ever met.
He says spray the chambers with electronic cleaner after cleaning and before every shoot. The chambers must be absolutely oil , grease free.
I guess mine never were!

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NRA LIFE MEMBER

I never buy the second rate stuff such as Taurus, Rossi, Charter
Arms, ect. I do end up with them on trade deals, but don't
expect much out of them. The third rate stuff is not worth talking
about. Like another poster above. I was sucked in on the 22 cal
Sig-Sauer Mosquito. It rates with the 3rd rate ****. I bought one
when 1st on market. Paid $400+ for it and $40 for extra mag.
Sold outfit for $400 and was glad to send that pig down the road.

aTaurus Beretta 92 clone. Shot about six inches high and four inches right. At 15 yards. Turned out the barrel wasn't rifled.

1966 PPK....jamomatic....really bothered me too since I loved 007 movies and heard these black forrest guns were supposed to be flawless shooters....

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Thirty characters. Exactly...

Weird on the bad experience with the Mosquito. I have one I bought second hand and have only put a couple of hundred rounds through it - but it's been great so far.

My worst ever was a French MAB 22. Fred reliably and grouped just fine - "only" a foot low and a foot left of POA at 10 yards!

I had three ***'s.. First was a Taurus PT-92..Reliable as all get out.. Accuracy?? I've shot tighter groups with a skeet gun...but not with a Browning 4 bbls skeet set. 8 barrels and no two shot to the same point of aim...not just inches apart..feet... and one of the 410 bbls was so tight it would have made a turkey shoot gun...then there was an Arminius double action 22 with an extra mag cylinder. First shot with the mag cyl and the bbl landed 10 ft in front of me. Held in place by a pin. never kept the bbl on the frame more'n 4 rounds after that. I finally threw it off the Chesapeake Bay bridge one night. Right in the channel. Immediately felt better!

An Accutstrut and a flash hider will generally fix the problem had by pre 580 series Mini 14s of shooting a pattern.

I will gladly adopt any orphan Jennings that anyone wants to send to a good home. They generally just need tinkering and actually can be made into nice plinker or tackle box guns for growing boys.

The Phoenix HP22 can have the magazine safety removed in seconds by ...well ripping it out with pliers and throwing it away. Then just use Gorilla glue to put the hammer block safety forever in the fire position. Now you can run it cocked and locked.

My worst gun was a worn surplus PA63 that fired when decocked and put a bullet into my futon.

On an impulse (read "wild hair") I bought a NIB Kel-Tec P32, thinking it would serve as a backup gun or, if an occasion wouldn't allow for anything heavier or bulkier, a primary.

Ddidn't shoot one first. My hands are medium-large with long fingers.. No matter how I tried I couldn't squeeze the trigger through its arc without pulling the little pistol off target. It never failed to feed and fire, I just couldn't hit with it even at close range. It would have been fine for sticking up an assailant's nose, but much beyond that he'd be pretty safe. Bid it a not-so-fond adieu.

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Oh well, what the hell.

My worst was a Colt Delta Elite 10mm. What a pile. It had at least one malfunction on every magazine. Returned it and got a Dan Wesson .357 and never looked back. Funny, but that Dan Wesson is probably my best gun buy ever.

About the Mini 14...

I have one that is 1.5MOA out of the box. I'm sure it will be sub MOA if I get it bedded and the trigger tuned.

I understand the accuracy complaints. Originally the Mini was intended to be a <50 yard gun. It fits that function well. Alas, mysteriously, Bill would not let them upgrade it.

In 2008 they finally upgraded the barrel to a larger, stiffer one. What a dramatic improvement. I did a bunch of testing for the maker of the Accustrut. We learned that it really didn't help the newer barrels appreciably.

Don't sell it short. The new model is really nice and I will put mine up against any AR, any time.

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Freedom isn't free.

On the cheap end a Bersa 380

On the Very High end, a Rohrbaugh R9s stealth, The finest looking, precision made, piece of useless, non functioning junk.

Went back to the company 3 times and still would not function reliably. That said the owner was very nice a gave me a full refund.

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Still Running Against the Wind

Kahr CW45. Ruger P97. Olympic Arms remake of the Whitney Wolverine. Custom "Green River" Hawken (beautiful "nonfunctional" rifle.)

I like my guns to work. I'm funny that way.

A couple of candidates. My first new rifle in high school I think dad got for me at Sears early 1970's. A Winchester Model 190 tube fed semiauto. The barrel would fall out of the reciever. I taped the barrel shank with scotch tape and pounded it back in. It worked, sorta. The trigger pull was similar to pulling a toilet plunger through a bucket of rocks. As for the free scope that came with it, I would rather listen to a Hillery Clinton speach than mess around with it for even a minute. The revolver, Taurus 85. No explaination needed.

J. P. Saur & Sohn Western Marshall in .357 Magnum. It would fire .38s all day but as soon as you stuck a .357 in it, it would lock up. And if you put a Super Vel 110gr. in it, good luck getting the cylinder out in less than 20 minutes. Had a Remington 770 I took a loss on in less than a year to get rid of it and an Illion Bushmaster I wasn't pleased with. I've also had to send a 10-22 and a 22/45 back to Ruger recently although they were fixed and returned rapidly. I shipped the 22/45 on Friday and got it back the next Friday.

CW

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μολὼν λαβέ

The early Mini-30's had a .308 barrel and did not group well at all. Sometimes in the 90's, Ruger changed it to a .311. I have one of those and I consistently put 20 rounds in under an inch a 50 yds.

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Corripe Cervisiam

I bought a Model 39 just after they came out. I could put everything into less than 3" at 25 yds with my Model 19. I was lucky to hit the target with the 39. I sold it and did not buy another semi-auto for over 20 years.

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Corripe Cervisiam

Sip---I had/have the same PPK and it took a 1000 rounds thru it before it would feed HP's.

The worst of the lot, for me, was a Colt Mustang in .380.
Not only would it not hit the side of a barn--it wouldn't hit the side of a barn from the inside.
Blessings

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TEXAS, by GOD

Back around 35 years ago when I did not know better I bought a .25 acp Bauer (stainless steel copy of a Baby Browning). The damned thing was never reliable and the magazine would literally fall out of the gun while shooting unless it was held in place tightly. After numerous attempts by both Bauer and myself to repair it, I finally gave up and sold it. I replaced it with a Colt .25 acp M1908 Vest Pocket Model and that has worked 100%. I purchased both of these tiny pistols just because I liked them but never intended or have carried them for SD as the .25 acp is probably about the worst round for that.

I've been lucky, but there have been a few: Sig Sauer Model P-220, S&W Model 6946, S&W Model 6906.

I was a die hard Colt 1911 guy in my youth, but had to have one of the new DA/SA .45ACP semiautos when they first came out. At the time, I think me and ol' Sonny Crocket on Miami Vice were the only two guys in the U.S. to own a Sig P-220. I had to pay a premium for mine, which included selling a perfectly good Colt's Government Model to pay for it. While it may have been a great gun, it just did not fit my hand, and I could not hit the broad side of a barn if I had been nailed to it. It was fine for slow fire, target shooting, but I bought it for SD/HD, so it had to go.

I remember back in the early 1980s reading about the new S&W "mini-gun", the Model 469. Wow! I had to have one! Unfortunately, being a poor college student at the time, the best I could do was drool over the magazine photos. Fast forward to around 1988 and I found a nice S&W Model 6946 at a killer price at a gun show. After taking it to the range, I found it consistently shot low for me - like about 8.0 inches low. I tried several different types of ammo without improvement. I contacted the factory, and they sent me the Fed Ex label to return it for warranty repair. They installed a different sized front sight, and returned it to me. I tried again, no real improvement, so back to the factory again. This time, they installed a new barrel, and told me this was the best they could do, and if the piece still shot low, I was out of luck. Well, it didn't work out for me, so I sold it off. Real shame, as I really wanted to like this pistol.

Fast forward about 20 years and I found a nice Model 6906 for sale at a local gun store. I got it at great price, and remembered at the last second to ask if there were any extras. The clerk said he thought it came with a box, and did I really want him to go look for it? About 20 minutes later, he gave me a factory hard box (blue, plastic) that held 2 new, factory magazines. Man, it always pays to ask! I took it to the range, and yep, it shot low for me also. My sad conclusion is that at least the compact 3rd Generation S&W semiautos just don't fit my hand (I had a Model 4006 that shot great for me).

Regards,

Dave

Beretta 84FS Cheetah. Expensive lemon that would never get through a full mag without jamming. Even with ball ammo and several different factory mags.

Runner up was an H&K P30LS. I really wanted to like this and make it my primary off duty carry gun. WORST trigger I ever had on an auto, especially on an expensive gun.

Bought a Mini-14 in 1977 which was probably THE most inaccurate rifle I have ever owned. Considering I can talk myself into anything when I suffer from gun lust, the fact I NEVER owned another Mini 14 is rather telling.

Another grossly disappointing gun was my early Walther P-22 from several years back. I do not believe it EVER got through a full magazine without a FTE/FTF. Sent it back to the Factory. It came back with new mags and from that point on it did function ,but never 100%.

Considering the hundreds of guns that have gone through my hands over the past 50 years My list is pretty short. Then again I do not buy hi-point, Llama, Taurus, etc either.

Charter Arms AR-7 with at least 4 mags. Jammed. Nowadays I would have kept it and found a gunsmith, maybe, but back then I felt that it wasn't worth the trouble, or it never occurred to me.

P.S. I did have a 2" 34 that only liked CCI and Western Mk III Match. Traded it even for a well-used C*** Agent, back when each was worth about $200 retail. My LGS had had the Agent for a long time, and I had had the 34 for long enough a time. We both came out well on that one.

Quote: "I was a die hard Colt 1911 guy in my youth, but had to have one of the new DA/SA .45ACP semiautos when they first came out. At the time, I think me and ol' Sonny Crocket on Miami Vice were the only two guys in the U.S. to own a Sig P-220. I had to pay a premium for mine, which included selling a perfectly good Colt's Government Model to pay for it. While it may have been a great gun, it just did not fit my hand, and I could not hit the broad side of a barn if I had been nailed to it. It was fine for slow fire, target shooting, but I bought it for SD/HD, so it had to go."

Likewise. The Force was definitely not with me on that one.