I’ve had exactly two accidental discharges with firearms. Both involved Smith and Wesson handguns, and the last one happened more than 35 years ago. It’s an interesting story.

My first firearm was a Winchester Model 250, a .22LR lever action with a tube feed. My first handgun was a Smith and Wesson Model 59. It had one dangerous flaw that I discovered once to my dismay- when you dropped it, it could go off. I dropped it once and shot a hole through my dresser and into my wall. That’s how it came to be that, when the Third Generation Smith and Wessons came out, I bought one. My first Third Gen Smith was a 4506. Without looking it up, it was, I think, the heaviest carry pistol I’ve owned. Made out of solid stainless, it was a giant boat anchor. Over the next few years, I accrued a couple of other Third Gen Smiths: a 5906, and a 4566. I ran into an issue with them.

I would take the pistol to the range, flick off the safety, and squeeze the trigger, and

nothing.

The hammer stayed back, the gun didn’t even go click. Each of my Smith and Wesson Third gens did that. I never did find out why. I just couldn’t trust them, and they stopped being carry pieces. I would have nightmares of drawing my handgun to defend my life, and my gun wouldn’t fire. I’m sure Freudians would have a filed day with it, but I think it was a fear instilled in me by three different non-functioning handguns. It was odd- they did it more often when new, they did it rarely, but it would happen every couple of hundred rounds.

Then came the day in 1991 when the 4506 didn’t fire, I pulled the trigger several times, nothing. I turned the pistol 90 degrees clockwise and attempted to see what was going on, and that is when it fired. Into the ceiling of the indoor range. My second ever AD with any firearm.

I bought a Sig Sauer 226, and eventually sold the Smith and Wessons. I didn’t buy or own another S&W for decades after that. In the interim, I owned Taurus, Beretta, Ruger, Glock, and other brands, but I was mainly a Sig Sauer guy for the next 20 years.

Looking back, the Third Gen Smiths were fun to shoot, but I just couldn’t get over the lack of reliability.

Read this post from Nighthawk Custom, a company that provides customized 1911s at a price tag between $4,000 and $6,000 each:

I tried to use and carry 1911s, I really did. They are gorgeous handguns. They are also finicky out of the box. After spending a kilobuck each on four of them, I got some beautiful handguns that looked great in a holster. They were also unreliable safe queens because they couldn’t reliably digest whatever ammo I put through them.

They told me to break the pistol in for 500 rounds and that would fix it. It didn’t. I was accused of “limp wristing” by people who hadn’t even watched me shoot. I was told to change ammo, because some 1911s are finicky. I was told to lube them more, and was also told to lube them less. Other advice was change the springs, get more gunsmithing done, and tons of other things.

Even after you spend $5000 on a custom from one of these high end gunsmiths, you end up with a pistol that still doesn’t work as well as a modern handgun. I was even looking at an Ed Brown. I finally decided that, if I were going to spend thousands of dollars, I might as well get something fun that won’t be a safe queen. Here is my experience from 14 years ago:

So this past weekend, I thought that it had been awhile since I had taken the Pro Carry for a spin, so I took it to the range. I brought 100 rounds with me, and I stopped after firing only 50 rounds because I had already had about 6 failures of the pistol to go into battery. I had the gunsmith there look at it, and he told me that the recoil spring was in need of replacement. It had been replaced at the factory only about 300 rounds before. I pointed that out, and he told me that Kimber 1911s needed new springs about every 500 rounds.

The design of the 1911 is over 100 years old, and firearm technology, metallurgy, and other technologies have come a long way since then. I just can’t trust my life to a firearm that won’t go bang every time you press the trigger, and the only way to reliably get a 1911 that will do that is to spend multiple thousands of dollars, only to wind up with a handgun that is made to such tight tolerances that dropping the slide on an empty chamber will ruin it and require more money to repair.

I have bought M&Ps for less than $500 that haven’t had a single malfunction in more than 10,000 rounds. Not one of my 1911s went more than 500 rounds between malfs, and a couple of them couldn’t get through an entire 50 round box without some sort of issue. They just aren’t reliable without thousands of dollars of custom work.

Instead of spending that kind of money on a handgun because it’s accurate or because you like the trigger, spend less than $1,000 on a decent factory handgun, then spend the rest of that cash on a class, a couple of cases of ammo, and year of taking weekly trips to the range. You will find it more beneficial than buying an unreliable safe queen.

I fully support the RSO:

Some of the comments were rather stupid:

You can trespass them, but you can’t take their property. Trying to take a gun out of someone’s hand is a great way to get shot. Again this was likely a rental. I’ve been to shooting ranges when people did careless things and they were just kicked out, at no point where their firearms taken.

He can definitely trespass them and tell them to never come back, but if it’s their personal firearm, he has no authority to confiscate it.

So you would shoot the RSO for grabbing your firearm because you were pointing it at your friend’s head so he could get a cool social media picture? What would you rather the RSO do?

Quite a few people in the comments are saying the range is private property, the range has rules, or some other reason for excusing what the RSO did. They are also all wrong.

What the RSO is seeing is what any reasonable person would conclude is a threat to the health and life of the person who is the target of this stupid gun handling. At the very least, this is brandishing a firearm, and more likely an imminent threat of manslaughter. Under the law, that RSO could just as easily shoot the moron waving the gun around to protect everyone in the range. Instead, that RSO took steps that are the least of his options- he took the firearms and escorted them out. If those guns are not rentals, you can have them back when you leave the property.

Owning a firearm carries with it a responsibility to not be an idiot with it. I would hope that the RSO at my local range would intervene with more than a strongly worded trespass warning while standing over my cooling body because some idiot was waving a loaded gun around for Tik Tok fame.

If a lot of companies decide that full 10mm power is too much for their recoil sensitive customers and underpower their 10mm offerings to 40S&W specs, the obvious answer is to buy a 40 instead of finding quality ammo loaded to spec.