Pseudoexperts piss me off.

I bought my wife a gun. It's a small .380 auto, nothing huge or especially powerful. Had I bought her something huge and powerful she'd be hard pressed to actually carry it. I'm proud of her. She takes it everywhere. She can't carry it on her person until she receives her permit but she's showing promising discipline. I thought this would be a big hurtle, but she hasn't required much encouragement. Perhaps all of my stories of home invasion robberies and car jackings and kidnappings from work have set the stage.

So anyway, back to this gun. I didn't want to spend a whole lot of money until I knew she would actually carry the gun so I decided to do my homework and search for a reliable yet inexpensive gun. The Bersa Thunder .380 auto won the toss. For some reason .380 ammo is expensive, to the tune of $25 for a box of 20 quality hollow points. At a capacity of 7 + 1, you want every one to count, so I bought the best. One of the selling features of this handgun is that the feed angle from magazine to chamber is virtually zero. It's almost straight in. This is beneficial because it reduces the possibility of a misfeed resulting in a jammed gun that's about as effective at fending off a bad guy as her purse. (Actually I've had to hold that purse while she's in the dressing room and as heavy as that blasted thing is, I'd have to put my money on the purse.)

So I load up and manually cycle the slide to eject and feed each subsequent round into the chamber. Guess what......jam. This pisses me off. I reload the magazine just to ensure there is no problem with it, re-seat it in the pistol and rack the slide. The first one goes in. I rack the slide again and the it fails to eject causing a double feed and another pretty nasty jam. Now I'm really pissed.

Off to the gun shop I go. I walk up to the counter and ask the attendant, who's supposed to be pretty knowledgeable, to look at it. I said, "I'm having trouble getting this gun you sold me to feed hollowpoints. It feeds ball ammo just fine, but the hollowpoints jam everytime I manually rack the slide. Can you take a look at it?" "Sure." he says. He takes the gun which I've loaded with the $25 / box ammo and walks into the back with it. I wondered why. Maybe he was going to put it on the bench and find out why it was jamming. BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM! He walks back in a few seconds later and hands my "now empty" gun back to me, saying "There's nothing wrong with this gun, son."

OK, there are times when it is acceptable, here in the south, to call some young man "son" even though he's not your biological son. THIS WAS NOT ONE OF THEM. He was trying to be a smartass and embarrass me. Well, this old fart picked the wrong dude. I said "Why did you shoot up $10 worth of ammo, dude?" He said "How else was I going to see if it would feed or not, son? 'Less you got some kinda different way?" (There's that "son" again.) "Ya damned right I do. It's called 'manually cycling the slide' !"

By now we have the attention of the 10 or so customers who are in the store. This genius asks me "Well why would you want to manually feed your ammunition?" I turned to the other guy behind the counter who was now chuckling at me and decided to make him look foolish too. "Do you do much shooting?" He says "Yep, every day." BULL! No one shoots every day, but that's OK it just revealed what a dumb redneck he is when I asked my next question. "What do you do if you get a misfire?" He said "Huh?" I said "You pull the trigger and no bang.....what do you do?" He says "Well, keeping the muzzle pointed down range you rack the slide, slap the magazine and try your shot again." I said excuse me could you repeat that first step? Did you say 'rack the slide'?" "Yeah" was the response. "And why do you do that?" I asked. "To eject the round that didn't fire." he said. I turned to the old fart and said "That's why you idiot! The gun misfires...then what am I supposed to do, throw it? And next time you call me 'son' it better be because YOU'RE teaching ME not ME teaching YOU."

The dude had it backwards anyway...you're supposed to slap the magazine, then you rack the slide. That order is important. I would have informed him but that would just be nit picking and my point was made, they're idiots. I just got my gun and walked out. $10 poorer for the experience. What a jackass! They'll never see another dollar from me. Pseudoexperts....they piss me off.