There is a growing trend in firearms that is on display in almost any firearms or prepping magazine on the newsstands and that what I refer to as “colored guns syndrome. More and more people are using products like Cerakote or Duracote to essentially paint their guns, sometimes to use it as camouflage for hunting either bad guys or animals but more and more they are using it to bling out their guns. I can completely see the need to recondition old firearms or change their appearance in some way shape or form, but what happens when people paint guns to look essentially like toys ? It’s a fine line to walk and one that will no doubt raise some people’s hackles.
I’m not some sort of buzz kill anti customization zealot who will tell you it’s a waste of money and just shoot your rusty old shotgun. In fact I love customizing my guns and yes sometimes getting them cerakoted because after 30+ year of use some guns need to be touched up. The vast majority of people I know and shoot with, if they choose to change the appearance of their firearms it’s for a good reason, not because they want to make their Glock look like the gun from the Nintendo game Duck Hunt. I first saw the new customization craze at SHOT Show 2016, and I will admit it had a bizarre fascination to me, not because of the designs but more because of the amount of creativity and work that went into making the guns look the way they did. It then dawned on me how much the firearms all loosely resembled children’s toys, minus the orange cap at the end of the muzzle.
by Rick Dembroski
