The Problem With Cheap Guns

Currently the market is filled with a menagerie of firearms at all different price and quality levels. There are pros and cons to pretty much any gun you may be looking to buy, but when you’re looking at an expensive gun, the problem is usually pretty singular; it’s expensive or possibly overpriced hmmm? High priced guns are almost always built with pride and have an extremely high build quality with attention being given to every detail from the trigger polish to consistency in the blueing or cerakote finish. It’s rare that you see somebody with an expensive gun who is unhappy with their purchase, at the most they may be mad at themselves because the gun was not built with the features they prefer, and that sounds like it’s the consumer’s fault for not doing their research.

While any problems found with high priced firearms are almost exclusively highly subjective, the problems with cheap guns are abundant. Don’t get me wrong, we own plenty of cheap guns. If you dig through our catalog of guns we own or have owned, you will in fact find Taurus’s, Keltechs, and even a singular Hi Point. #neveragain #OKmaybeonemoreifitsonsale

Problem the first: It should be obvious that a gun purchased for a low price point will have a much lower build quality with a more liberal threshold for acceptable defects by the manufacture. Often times products are built to a price instead of being built for a purpose; this is a common practice for manufacturing in nearly any industry. Case and point, I have an MBA. Well guess what…this usually causes the gun to suck. Anybody who has even held a Hi Point C9, and then held a Sig Legion Series could immediately tell which gun they would rather have without even shooting either of them. When the only gun you’ve ever shot or even held retails for less than 2 bills, this might not be a huge problem for you but, this will only lead to more concerns from your friends and family that are concerned about your decision making skills .

No matter how happy you are with your bargain basement gun, other shooters will constantly talk shit to you. With your only viable comebacks being Hey, screw you for judging me bro. You don’t even know me, but you want to tell me that my new pistol is a boat anchor? For those of us who have shot nice guns, expensive guns, cool guns, or even own a few of the above mentioned, trash talkers will make you embarrassed to buy a cheap gun. Last time I held C9 at the outdoors mega lo mart that will remain nameless, the dude behind the counter was talking trash about it the whole time. Frig off dude, you don’t know me. Maybe I’m looking for a boat anchor, or maybe it’s literally the only gun I can afford to protect my family. If the guys who is supposed to be selling guns will ridicule you for buying it, wait till you get to the range and the Glock fan boys get a hold of you. For as much as we want to grow the number of firearms enthusiasts, we sure can be good at eating our own sometimes.

Another problem is that cheap guns are a gateway drug. Generally speaking, the Tundra crew doesn’t really like to half-ass anything, and going balls to the wall happens a little too regularly. When you only own cheap guns and you see dudes with the latest CZ or HK at the range, you get jealous and start selling your wife’s family heirlooms and pawning that DVD collection you built during college to be part of the cool kids club. Maybe that’s a little too specific. Anyways, the bottom line is that buying a cheap gun, means that in the end you will end up spending more money because you will end up buying a cheap gun and a better gun, instead of just starting with the better gun.

Now, I’m not saying that all cheap guns are inherently bad because there are multiple cases where they are absolutely not bad at all. Canik makes really good pistols with high quality finishes, excellent factory triggers, and outstanding reliability; you can often find them on sale for around $300. Another example would be in shotguns. New England Firearms makes the Pardner Pump, a shotgun that is so similar to the Remington 870 that when H&R originally started selling the Pardner Pump, Remington was able to sue for patent theft. The main differences between these two shotguns lies in fit and finish, but reliability and function remain the same; for a gun originally designed for hunting, this may actually be desirable because a hunting gun is going to get see some wear and tear so a parkerized barrel and action might be more desirable than bluing due to cost/benefit analysis. But this is still a problem because while I said that last sentence, you were thinking in your head that bluing is always better than parkerized and I must be an idiot.and youre not wrong… Somebody will always have something to say about your budget gun, and it will often be meant to make you feel inferior because Glock must be better than Canik since you paid $200 more for your used Gen 3 Glock 17.

Now, if you think that we are condoning the purchase of a cheap gun please direct your attention to this anecdote. About three years ago I thought it would be a good idea to use a bonus I got from work to try out muzzleloading to extend his deer season. Since I wasn’t sure if I like it because there are very few mil spec muzzle loaders available on the market, I bought one of the cheapest models I could find but still had some average reviews online. The CVA Wolf I bought shot straight and performed exactly as advertised, but there was one glaring problem; the sights were made out of the cheapest aluminum conceivable and could not be adjusted without totally stripping out the screw, and on top of that the sights couldn’t even be adjusted enough to zero the gun anyways. With that said, a Facebook message to CVA resulted in an extremely prompt shipment of replacement sights with a different front sight post to alleviate the zeroing issue and there is nothing but respect for the folks at CVA. I bought probably the cheapest gun that company made, and go figure, it didn’t come with the highest end accouterments available. Had I purchased a gun from them at a higher price point he likely wouldn’t have had the same issue. In the end I put a scope on it and none of the issues with the sights ended up mattering anyways.

There is one more point we would like to make against buying cheap guns. Many of us have nostalgia and we hope to keep our prized firearms for decades before passing them on to our children and grandchildren as heirlooms. The thing about passing down a beautiful Ithica shotgun, or a lever action Winchester with perfect checkering in the stock is that they will  be considered something prized and your descendants will feel truly loved when they receive them. Now if you pass down a rusty break action shotgun from some unknown manufacture in Brazil, your descendants will assume you were a cheap drunk asshole who couldn’t afford anything nice and probably decide to bury you out back of the local 7/11.

Now, before you hate on us too much in the comments, keep in mind that we are huge hypocrites and own our fair share of cheap pieces of trash.