A post I read on the guns people regret selling made me think about the guns I’ve sold and the fact that I sold them because I hated them so much. I also thought about all the guns I’ve borrowed that I quickly gave back because I hated shooting them.
My first pistol was a Ruger SR9c (TTAG review here), an evil beast that was impossible to rack or load unless you had really strong hands. It also had a massive grip that was way too big for me.
That pistol frustrated two consecutive shooting teachers because the magazines couldn’t be hand-loaded without cutting your fingers. I finally figured out that it would be cheaper to get a different pistol than to spend lesson after lesson struggling with a gun that wasn’t ever going to be easy to manage.
After that, trying to be cool, I had a HK VP9 for a while. Have you ever had a gun that you just felt hated you? One that everyone else but you could shoot, but every time you tried, something would go wrong? This was that gun. I also hated the paddle magazine release.
In my first two-day pistol class, I cut my hand on the slide within the first hour and spent the rest of the weekend dealing with a pistol that kept getting covered in blood because no matter what I used to bandage myself, the texture of the grip would rip it off. While it may have been an authentic weekend in terms of cowboy shootout grip skills, it was a lousy one in terms of progress.
Definitely the most hated firearm I’ve tried so far was a vintage Yugo AK-47 with an under folding stock. I borrowed it from a friend who thought it might be helpful in terms of training me for my trip to Africa. He insisted that it was easy to shoot, utterly reliable, and a quick study. He didn’t tell me about how the dust cover would blow off with just about every shot and land behind me in the shooting lane.
For some reason, my range had a whole pallet of some kind of surplus Russian AK ammo that they were eager to unload, and it was cheap, so I grabbed some. I quickly figured out that the reason the ammo was so cheap was that it was incredibly dirty and stunk worse than any ammunition I’ve ever encountered. If Dante’s Inferno had a waiting room and that waiting room had a plug-in air freshener, this would be that smell.
I couldn’t finish shooting out the box. I saved what was left and gave the ammo and gun back to my friend the next time I saw him, having already started saving money to buy a .308 instead. This same friend tried to get me to shoot a .357 magnum revolver with a 3-inch barrel later on, but by that time I had grown wiser.
What’s your most hated gun to shoot, and do you still own it?