The Book of Numbers

Mike W. has a post up on the decline of QC at SIG and immediately in comments, Bob S. steps up and (rightly) offers the data point that his SIGPro has been 100% since he bought it.

This is my bugbear, my bête noire, my personal cross to bear on the internets. It's how I got my reputation as a mean-hearted gun snob:

Reader 1: "Hey, what do you think of the Blastomatic, Tam?"

Me: "I wouldn't buy one. They're wretched pulsating balls of suck and fail."

Reader 2: "You're just a (gun snob/Brand Z fangirl)! I've owned two Blastomatics and both have been flawless!"

There could be two reasons for the difference between Reader 2's experiences and mine. The first one is a simple matter of statistics. Say that, in my long, bitter years of exile behind the gun store counters, I sold 500 Blastomatics.

Say that one in four of them had some issue or another: The customer field-stripped the pistol when he got home and found it was all rusty inside. It wouldn't light primers reliably in double-action. The framinator wouldn't wollygaggle right and so the gun didn't run worth a damn until we had the gunsmith look at it. The Super Blasto X model had a reputation for not feeding anything other than round-nosed FMJ that had been carefully lubricated with Vaseline. The rifling looked like it had been chewed by angry beavers and the gun patterned like a cylinder bore at fifteen yards.

This means that Reader 2 has had two happy ownership experiences, which the odds state should be the case. If one in four is defective and bad, you have a three in four chance of getting a gun that at least functions properly and isn't messed up out of the box. Meanwhile, every time I hear "Blastomatic", all I remember is 125 pissed-off customers and the defective crappy guns I couldn't prevent them from buying because I was just a lowly clerk and couldn't keep the boss from stocking that garbage.

The other option is that Reader 2 is the typical American gun owner who gets to the range every three or six months, pops off a box or two of ammo from five yards into a ragged, two-foot pattern stringing low and left from the center of a B-27 target, and goes home. His Blastomatic Match Master might have been engineered to crumble into dust after 500 rounds, but he'll never find out, because by the time he's owned it for a year, it's been superseded in his affections by his new Blastomatic Match Master Plus in the likewise new .401Blasto caliber. (His dealer threw in a Blastomatic hat with that purchase.)

Anyhow, odds are that if you buy a current production SIG, you will have a happy and satisfying ownership exeperience. But once upon a time, it was nearly guaranteed, since before they left the factory, they test fired them to make sure they, you know, worked. But that costs money. You can't charge extra for test-firing a gun, but you can for a rainbow titanium finish.