After yet another handgun parts breakage, I wanted to share some tips about how to avoid running into reliability issues with your defensive firearms when it matters most. Details in the video below, or scroll down for the full transcript.
A few weeks ago, I shared a video about my Ruger GP100 Match Champion that had stopped working. I used that as an opportunity to talk about the importance of testing the reliability of your self-defense guns and how you can’t take anything for granted — that any gun can break no matter what the brand or what type of gun it is. Well, since then, I’ve had another gun give me some serious problems. I’m not going to rehash all the things I went over last time, but I do have a few other thoughts relating to the reliability of these guns that we depend on as life-saving equipment.
In this case, the gun I had a problem with is my Beretta PX4 Compact. This gun has been extremely reliable. I don’t have an exact round count, I lost track of that, but I’m pretty close to about 9000 rounds through this gun with only two issues. I had two ejection failures within about 100 rounds of each other when the gun was under-lubed. Other than that it, has run flawlessly… until a couple of weeks ago. I was in a two-day handgun class and after the first day, I took the gun back to the hotel room and I was doing a little dry practice and the trigger started to feel kind of weird, like it wasn’t resetting properly. So I dry fired it a couple more times and it just went “snap.” this little leg on the trigger that connects the trigger to the rest of the action had just kind of snapped, giving me a dead trigger and, basically, a useless gun.
by Chris Baker