Wednesday, January 12, 2011

He's a real gunwriter now.

Robb Allen takes a Taurus 709 Slim to the range, has two failures to feed (out of an unspecified number of rounds,) and the slide refuses to lock back on an empty magazine. Conclusion?
"Overall, I was impressed with the Taurus 709 Slim, especially given its price point."
Dude, get the phone; that's probably Combat Handguns on line one!

(I kid, I kid! ;) )

18 comments:

Jeff the Baptist said...

Except that I couldn't find the actual price point anywhere in his writeup. Did I miss it?

Tam said...

Click on the "Taurua 709" link at the top of the column.

Grant Cunningham said...

Yes, you kid - you really meant G&A, didn't you?

(Hey, shouldn't you be shoveling a sidewalk??)

Ancient Woodsman said...

"Overall" twice to start a paragraph? Is that the new "all in all"? If so, he's a shoe-in for any of the hard-copy gun rags. The only thing he missed was telling us about "acceptable combat accuracy", although "accurate as I can be" is a clever do on the overused "if I do my part".

Gads. May someday there be an original gun writer...like the excellent one here at VFTP. The reason discerning readers don't buy 'mainstream' gun rags anymore: the premium writing is on certain blogs, like this one.

Tam said...

I liked the review, actually. And you'll note that the required facts are there between the lines if you know where to look, but not in a way that would piss off an advertiser.

Robb's a funny guy, and it's good to see some new faces doing gunwriting.

Besides, you wouldn't want to see what my columns look like before the editor gets to them.

Jay G said...

Heh. Poor Robb...

1894C said...

Tam brings the grade A snark...

LOL!

NotClauswitz said...

He didn't even find time to make fun of its toot-sweet folded Oragami looks?? Incroyable! ;-)

Jumpthestack said...

Oldie but goodie
"How gun magazines write articles"

http://theoxrant.blogspot.com/2006/05/how-gun-magazines-write-articles.html

Douglas Hester said...

Well, the site the review is on is Guns for Sale. Kind of hard to sell something you yourself don't like. ;)

staghounds said...

True, there was a word misuse and a grammatical error. But the lack of spell check word substitutions and buzzwords concerns me.

We need to see some"venerable 1911"s and so forth before this youngster is ready.

Tam said...

staghounds,

"We need to see some"venerable 1911"s..."

It is my understanding that all versions of MS Word after Word 2001 will automatically insert "venerable" before "1911".

Ancient Woodsman said...

Advertisers. You have explained an important component of which I was unaware. Thank you.

In the new light, yes it is a well done piece. Thanks for sharing.

I apologize for any offense.

GuardDuck said...

There's always more than one advertiser. I didn't read anything about using the preferred advertisers cartridges, holsters, tactical lights.

Perhaps an addition - The Taurus failed to fire twice, but after switching to MaxBooms 124.357 grain double hollowpoint rounds the pistol functioned acceptably.

What I at first took to be unfinished tooling marks on the frame turned out to be light indexing points for properly orienting a LightningBug 600 lumen tactical light in the style taught at ThunderSight Academy.

The Taurus fit well in my Sparky McBean deep cover pancake viper slide polymer kydex level 3 holster. The Slim line pistol hardly printed at all under my winter weight bomber jacket commonly used during New Hampshire summers.

Robb Allen said...

Thanks for the kind snark ;)

I'm new to the realm of gun-reviews (i.e. that's my first one ever). English isn't my first language. I'm not sure what my first language is as I'm from the South and say things like "I'm fixin' to go to the store. Y'unto?"

Overall, I honestly did like the Taurus. Truthfully, I was expecting a lot less out of it. As for the FTF's / Slidelock issue, I believe they both stem from the mag followers not moving easily enough. That could be spring issues or possibly the metal being too tight and not allowing the follower the freedom to move forward.

But even for its slim size, it was more comfortable to shoot than I expected. I was thinking P3AT 'oh God please let a stray round find my think-box before I have to shoot this thing again' kind of discomfort, but it was non-tiring.

I was not fond of the trigger break being somewhere behind my elbow, however when I shoot guns, I don't judge them based on what I personally want because I tend to be picky and unreasonable. Instead, I look more for consistency as if you shoot something long enough, you get used to how it functions.

I should have mentioned that those two FTF's came within the first 50 shots. Total was about 180 shots for the day.

Tam said...

Robb,

You know I'm teasing; like I said in comments, I thought it was well-done.

Besides, you're a lot more experienced a gun reviewer than I am now. :D

Robb Allen said...

Oh, I know you're teasing. Even if you weren't I don't think it'd matter since you can't hurt feelings I don't possess.

I was worried about the pistol being a, to borrow a Tam-phrase, pulsating ball of suck because I pride myself on at least being honest. I had issues with the pistol, and I wrote them up. The last thing I want to do is end up being untrustworthy where people think I'm a paid shill. Lord knows I didn't have a lot of nice things to say about my Para at first (3 trips to the shop in as many weeks was a little excessive).

I *DO* ask however that people give me honest appraisals about what they think of the articles, what information they would like to see, etc. Because a better writer = more writing gigs = more toys to play with.

I admit, I do it for ME!

Captcha - reada - as in, I love all my readas!

Gewehr98 said...

So with this particular gun review, would it be damning with faint praise, or praising with faint damnation? ;-)

I guess it depends on whether you aspire to write someday for G&A, Gun Reports, American Handgunner, American Rifleman, etc.

WV: "auffu" - Salutation offered to gun review critics!