Marketing and the firearms industry
I had to laugh and share reader mikee comment on marketing over the years:
I lived through years of hype over many things, some old, some new. I have read:
Of the inherent perfection of 38 Special duty revolvers.
Of 357 Magnum revolvers’ superiority over 38SPL.
Of how grizzly bears only respect 44 Magnum, no that’s 454 Casull, no that’s a .460, or a .500, or a Howdaw black powder handcannon meant for lions shot from offside elephant.
Of magnum revolvers minimized in size to wear on your ankle for either weight training or as a New York reload of a different caliber from your service pistol, mostly useful for deafening and blinding an opponent at close range, and perhaps setting them on fire. Also useful for 200 yard gong shooting for gun magazine writers.
Of Wonder Nine pistols holding a gazillion, +1, rounds.
Of 10mm POWER rivaling that of a Saturn V rocket!
Of 40mm CONTROLLABLE! POWER! with (almost) as many bullets as a Wonder Nine! But better, despite having less power, than the 10mm they were bred from.
Of concealable, ultra-concealable and barely even there yet still puissant .22LR micro single action revolvers by North American Arms and Beretta Bobcat pistols that you could hide in the cuff of your shirt sleeve or behind your ear lobes. For that last ditch use because nobody in their right mind would use one on purpose if a shovel or hammer were available instead.
Of unobtainable .32ACP Seecamps, and Beretta Tomcats that cost as much as a Wonder Nine but were BETTER because you could hide them in your pocket with your wallet and keys and spare change and pens and that interesting pebble you found on the walk, yet still access in an emergency!
Of plastic pistols from some foreign country that could not be detected (the gun, not the country) by X-rays, or even Superman’s vision, in airport security!
Of 357SIG & 45GAP Niche Marketing for proprietary rounds never seen on the shelves of Walmart!
Of shrinking autopistols using inexpensive polymer frames that you could shoot up to a dozen times before the springs failed. But you could carry them even betterer than a 38SPL snubby cuz they were 1/8 inch thinner.
Of .32ACP minipistols evolving through selective breeding or engineering prowess or marketing genius into POCKET POWER .380 autos, then Pocket NINES!!!11! and even .40s that you hold with a two finger grip.
Of pistols coming in blue or steel or black plastic, then suddenly in any anodized aluminum color under the rainbow, with PINK grips if I wanted them, or YELLOW grips for the revolver in the emergency kit.
Of countries previously known only for internecine strife suddenly becoming successful exporters of supposedly reliable, well designed, quality controlled handguns that were neat because 20 years ago you could only get one by killing a commie in Southeast Asia and taking it off his belt.
Of Wonder Nines going from Gazillion +1 capacity to 10+1 by law, then back after a decade, as if by magic!
Of modern pistol round carbines becoming available, allowing one to shoot more money, err, rounds, even more accurately downrange than with your pistol, while using the same magazines. Because having a rifle and a pistol is too complex for some folk.
Of John Moses Browing’s highest achievement, other than his mere existence PBUH, the .45ACP 1911, going from a badly made relic of history from Colt to a cheap Norinco Chinese import that (in either form) with only $1000 of work (in 1980’s dollars) by a competent, hence nonexistent, gunsmith, could be depended on to usually shoot all 7+1 of its rounds without stopping for a break.
Of 45ACP being the only round, other than all the rest, to use in personal defense. Because Jeff said so!
Of bullets going from “round copper shiny end points to front” (except for HK’s) to “flying ashtrays” to “exploding” to “cop killer” to “really really really fast, so fast your old gun might explode, no really!”
Of the realization that with an extended cylinder, a 45 Colt revolver could also shoot .410 shotshells, poorly. Yet sell like pancakes to the starved masses.
So now when a new product comes along, I realize it may be marketing, it may be technological innovation, it may be unsold parts that drove the maker to put the new gun on the shelf at the store.
I’d like to say it is all good, but it isn’t.
Heh.
April 13th, 2012 at 10:21 am
As someone who’s into guns and marketing, he’s right.
Of course, what he said is pretty much true of any consumer product as well. It’s not planned obsolescence per se, it’s just about making today’s model a little bit better than last year’s model.
After all the hype is over and all the copy has been put to bed, the favourite guns in my collection are a 20 year CZ75, a 50 year of S+W K22, and a plain-jane Mossberg 500.
Bad for business, good for me.
April 13th, 2012 at 10:35 am
I envy you the K22.
What I want more than any other firearm these days is a 4″ to 6″ 22LR revolver with a good trigger.
April 13th, 2012 at 10:37 am
And thank you, Unc, for upgrading the comment. I’ve been reading a lot of posts on gunblogs about going to St. Louis for the NRA convention and this comment percolated up due to jealousy that I ain’t there.
April 13th, 2012 at 10:59 am
And how many of these marketing ploys did we fall for?
(Well, I don’t have the .500 yet, as grizzly are pretty rare in West Tennessee.)
April 13th, 2012 at 11:05 am
Don’t forget all those other Super Rounds that we were all going to be carrying by now: the .41 AE, the .357 Maximum, the .32 H+R Magnum, the 9mm Federal, the .327 Federal Magnum, the…..
April 13th, 2012 at 11:10 am
I completely forgot to include the .44SPL as a good round to shoot through your barely-used .44Magnum Dirty Harry Special that cost 2x the price of any other revolver because it was in a movie! Not because the 44 Magnum is uncontrollable or overpenetrative or hurts to shoot, but because using milder training rounds somehow prepare one to shoot the full power rounds betterer. And you should keep telling yourself that as you massage your wrist.
And about how the .41 Magnum is a perfect fit between the .357 and the .44! And that it will live forever, supported by its rabid adherents.
And Elmer Keith! Because he was Elmer Keith!
April 13th, 2012 at 11:15 am
Heh. He said “puissant.”
April 13th, 2012 at 11:34 am
Browning vest pocket .25 auto – making people who notice they’ve been shot with one angry for about 100 years now.
April 13th, 2012 at 11:35 am
I want a semi-auto 17-shot revolver with an unfluted cylinder in .359 Super Hypersonic aluminum teflon tungsten-tip caliber.
April 13th, 2012 at 11:41 am
hey, Elmer Keith was a badass. i even read his book!
April 13th, 2012 at 11:42 am
Meh. .401 Super Hypersonic titanium Expand-O-Shock gold-tips are better, because, of course, it begins with a “4”.
😀
April 13th, 2012 at 12:13 pm
Very funny, but I don’t understand the slur against Croatia.
April 13th, 2012 at 12:59 pm
He forgot that the wonder nines are back to low capacity, but it’s OK because it’s by choice this time.
April 13th, 2012 at 1:26 pm
anon (13), low-capacity is certainly a welcome choice if it gets you a 9 that’s also .9″ wide or less!
April 13th, 2012 at 1:35 pm
On a serious note, I like skinny-butt Berettas just like James Bond in the first movie. I don’t know more than eight people that I want to shoot and up here, in Chicago, when I carry one I carry it … well, you know. I want a small profile.
April 13th, 2012 at 1:37 pm
Can you imagine the utter awesome of a love child of his and Tam’s?
April 13th, 2012 at 1:40 pm
NO slur intended against Croatia – or Turkey, or Brazil or any other firearm manufacturing country. Just amazement at how exporting their stuff to the US makes their stuff the newest and best whether it is or not because it just arrived and it used to be verboten here.
April 13th, 2012 at 1:40 pm
On the other side, experience (not mine, the gun designers’) has shown that double stacks feed a lot more trouble-free than single stacks.
April 13th, 2012 at 1:44 pm
A (slight) regret, mikee, is that I could have bought an SKS for $89.00, which would have been a keeper, but instead bought an AK for $169.00 that I threw away because it gave me 30-inch patterns at fifty yards.
April 13th, 2012 at 1:44 pm
Mariner, are you trying to get me killed?
April 13th, 2012 at 1:54 pm
I’ve got dibs on Tam, now that I’m divorced and not all that far away from her. If she’s going to shoot some dirty old man, it’ll be me.
April 13th, 2012 at 6:08 pm
The author of this is a genious and an astute observer of the modern history of hand gun sales.
April 13th, 2012 at 6:25 pm
mikee,
No.
Not even laid.
April 13th, 2012 at 6:54 pm
When are they going to market that pistol that blows up trucks with one round. I know they are real because I saw it in a movie. After this gets established they can move on to trains.
April 13th, 2012 at 11:07 pm
AWESOME!!!
April 14th, 2012 at 10:59 am
The best antidote is to not read so much and go shoot what you enjoy shooting. These days most of the time, it’s a Browning Buckmark and an old 4″ model 13 loaded with .38 specials.
I still love my 1911 and have sent it to the spa for a makeover. I bought a Glock 19 to fill the void.
We don’t have Grizzlies in California though.