History ReliablyUnreliableGuns / RealLife

** The AIM-4 Falcon, available at the same time period, was even worse than the early Sidewinders; it had a field of view wide enough that it often couldn't actually maneuver to hit the locked target, no proximity fuse (requiring direct hits to detonate, rather than the Sidewinder being able to blow up when it was close enough that it would still damage the target), and a smaller warhead (thus less damage even if it ''did'' hit) and nitrogen bottle to cool the seeker (giving it a much shorter useful time window; if you didn't acquire a lock on the first attempt, already difficult considering it took seven seconds to do so, the missile was basically a dud) - only five kills ''in total'' were ever recorded with the Falcon.
** The AIM-7 Sparrow fixed issues with heat-seekers by being radar-guided, but lead to its own slew of problems: the pilot had to look down into the cockpit (thus away from his surroundings) to aim the missile properly, he had to keep his plane pointed towards the target for the radar to continue tracking the target, and its significantly longer range was wasted at extremes because it was impossible, in the days before IFF systems, to determine if a target beyond visual range [[FriendOrFoe was actually the enemy]]. The Sparrow lives on, but only in naval use as the surface-to-air RIM-7 Sea Sparrow; for airborne usage it was replaced by the AIM-120 AMRAAM (which utilizes its own internal radar to guide it, rather than relying on the aircraft's radar).

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** An example found in the letters UsefulNotes/GeorgeWashington sent to his brother, John Washington, during the UsefulNotes/SevenYearsWar. The guns' aim was reliably so poor that, rather than fear or nervousness or even tension:

* The infamous North Hollywood Shootout had one example of jamming due to bad or not-applied thinking: Two bank robbers did a job armed to the teeth with modified Type 56 assault rifles and full Kevlar suits to protect them. One of them, Larry Phillips Jr., was cornered into a one on one with an officer when his Type 56 jammed due to a stove-piped cartridge. Ordinarily, this would have taken only a moment to fix, but he had earlier been shot in the wrist, rendering him incapable of clearing the jam [[note]]not that he couldn't have used his wrist or arm to do it, or held the rifle up with that arm to use his good hand for the job; it's likely he was too preoccupied with the pain from having been shot to think clearly[[/note]]. After his attempt to clear the jam failed, he threw the assault rifle to the side and pulled out a Beretta 92 he had as a sidearm to continue shooting; when [[BlastingItOutOfTheirHands he took another round to his good hand]], he picked the pistol back up, placed it to his chin, and shot himself.
* A mildly famous incident with a marked TruthInTelevision of a horrific jam that literally disabled the gun occurred at IPSC Nationals within the past few decades or so. At one stage, a fired case ejected from the pistol, bounced off the edge of a quarter-inch sheet of plywood the shooter was standing next to, and as the next round fired and ejected, the first case fell into the open ejection port – backwards – and was pushed forward into the chamber, while the next round attempted to feed. The weapon was completely locked up and required significant work to be cleared, with no small amount of trepidation as there was still a live round crammed halfway into the action even with the magazine removed.

** An earlier, less famous example is found in the letters UsefulNotes/GeorgeWashington sent to his brother, John Washington, during the UsefulNotes/SevenYearsWar. The guns' aim was reliably so poor that, rather than fear or nervousness:

** The Terminator seems to be a deliberate attempt by Cobray to test whether or not the BATF was unfairly targeting guns made by Cobray, and sure enough some of the anti-gun lobbies and personalities began talking about a "scary looking shotgun that could turn into a machine gun" based entirely on either the word "slam-fire" or that Cobray made it - not even bothering to check if it could actually work properly in the first place.

* As the quote goes, "You ain't a SEAL until you've eaten Italian steel." The early production run of the Beretta 92F pistols for the US Government had an issue where the slide would crack and fly off the frame during shooting, causing injury to at least one SEAL who reportedly [[EyeScream lost an eye]] to a shattered Beretta slide. While the US Army claimed that the open slide and locking block system of the M9 was to blame, it was eventually discovered that it was actually a combination of poor heat-treatment on the slides causing some to break in half and poorly forged locking blocks failing around the five-thousand mark, far below the intended 25,000 rounds. Said components had been built by cheap subcontractors rather than by Beretta itself. Furthermore, the M9's used by the [=SEALs=] had been firing horrifically overcharged ammunition, making the problem even worse. Independent studies conducted on the private sector revealed that the US Army had intended to discredit Beretta and SIG from the very start of the [=XM9=] program, having shifted goalposts so many times that no private sector pistol could ever pass endurance tests. Free replacement parts were sent out and Beretta, in the upgrade to the 92FS, redesigned the frame with a pin to prevent the slide from flying rearward in the event that the locking block fails. The 92FS has gone on to be a fairly satisfactory military and police sidearm, but the Navy [=SEALs=] still switched to the SIG P226, and the other branches and units that didn't resist switching to it in the first place kept trying to replace it with a 1911-based sidearm every couple of years before finally at least getting rid of it in 2017; in official American military surveys about troop experience and opinion regarding weapons, the M9 rated the lowest, with a significant majority of users distrusting it (to the point that some soldiers purposely abused the M9 to death and loudly demanded that the Colt 1911 be reissued instead).

** Ironically, the government standard Colt M1911 was more unreliable than the Beretta M9. When the [=XM9=] trials started, the traditionalists insisted that the M1911 was good enough and that American soldiers had to be armed with American weapons and nothing else. But when the M1911 was put through the endurance tests, it rated the lowest of round counts before wearing out its barrel. Even worse, the M1911 pistols used during the trials were over fifty years old and had barely been cleaned since they had been taken out of storage. Even a more recently manufactured M1911 found itself in a quandary when it was rechambered for 9x19mm and fed the same trial ammunition as the Beretta 92 and the SIG Sauer P226.

* The MG 42 and its post-war progeny, as mentioned above, was primarily an excellent design, but there was one poor variant - the US military briefly experimented with MG 42s converted to .30-06 Springfield late in the war, the T24 machine gun. The problem was that the two prototypes were a mash-up of newly-manufactured parts attached to original German parts, so there was only so much that the design could be modified for the longer .30-06 round - it's frequently rumored that the designers had completely failed to account for the size difference between the 8mm Mauser and .30-06 and made a gun that was physically incapable of cycling its intended cartridge, thanks to one of the prototypes refusing to eject either time it was test-fired, and even the better of the two prototypes performed so badly that a 10,000-round torture test was called off early after it suffered 51 stoppages within only 1,500 rounds.
* The Colt Double Eagle handgun was essentially a multi-caliber modernization of the classic M1911, but overall failed to find a market, and part of the reason very well could have been a lack of proper quality control. Gun writer Dean Speir, while discussing the rumor that writers like him received "cherry-picked" examples of guns to ensure glowing reviews, [[https://web.archive.org/web/20150916024643/http://www.thegunzone.com/gunwriter.html chronicled]] a pair of shoddily-made 10mm Auto Double Eagles he'd tested around December 1990 and January 1991 - in the first, a round ''exploded'' upon firing, showering his face in burned propellant and brass shards, due to a chamber which he described as looking "like it had been assaulted by a Dremel-wielding dope fiend three days into withdrawal"; and then he couldn't even load the second one, since it was marked on the box as 10mm Auto, had 10mm Auto stamped on the receiver, and came with a 10mm Auto magazine and a note on the box that it was personally checked by one of the design's head engineers... but was fitted, from the factory, with a .45 ACP barrel (which has a bore of 11.4mm), so the entire cartridge slid down the barrel and out the muzzle, cartoon-style.[[note]]Other horror stories detailed in the article include .22LR clones of the Walther P38 which either consistently pinch-fired in three- or four-shot bursts, or failed to load in the first place from a weak magazine spring; a Federal Ordnance 1911 he described as "one of the most economical pistols [he'd] ever tried to shoot" [[DamnedByFaintPraise because it wouldn't feed anything properly]]; and a situation regarding another gun writer who called off an attempted 10,000-round torture test of Colt's [=AA2000=] barely a fourth of the way through, because the gun constantly malfunctioned and he didn't want to be responsible for killing Colt through bad word-of-mouth (nevermind that, as Speir put it, Colt seemed to be dedicated to doing just that to themselves, as several other more recent instances noted on this page would indicate).[[/note]]

** Despite the memes, [=AKs=] - even those built to high (or, as the case may be, any sort of) standards - are actually rather prone to jamming while covered in mud. The AK's scheme for preventing jams when dirty is to have large clearances within the receiver so the grime has a place for moving parts to just push it out of the way of the working parts and let the user worry about actually cleaning it out at a more convenient time. While this works phenomenally well against grease and burnt gunpowder residue, it can only be pushed so far with external dirt before it causes a jam. To give an idea, the [=YouTube=] channel [=InRange=] TV, run by WebVideo/ForgottenWeapons' Ian [=McCollum=] and his friend Karl Kasarda, has a regular feature wherein they test how well a weapon handles being covered in mud by dumping it in a wheelbarrow full of mud and then shoveling more mud over it, making sure to get the weapon entirely covered, then picking it up and firing it until it jams - when [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DX73uXs3xGU they did the test with an AK]], even under the best conditions (magazine already in the gun with a round chambered beforehand and the safety on to close up the biggest hole in the receiver), it only managed to fire a ''single'' round before malfunctioning. Some of the AK's children, such as the Israeli Galil, are sealed like more modern military rifles to prevent this and have performed noticeably better in [=InRange's=] mud test when they show up.
** Ian [=McCollum=] has come across the [[https://www.forgottenweapons.com/the-worst-ak-build-i-have-ever-seen-bar-none worst possible AKS-74U knockoff ever made]]. It's so bad, that it's a miracle that ''only'' the gas block was blown off when it actually fired one round. Fortunately, this specific AK has [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2t9VbPwN-IM since been fixed]] by Brandon Herrera, another gun-focused [=YouTube=] personality who is particularly associated with [=AKs=].

** In a rather more minor instance, the more modern AK-12 has a burst-fire mode between full- and semi-auto which is supposed to fire two-shot bursts, but [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ju-gg3LaijA according to Brandon Herrera's video]] it has a tendency to runaway for one extra bullet, making it a two-shot burst which fires three shots. Oh, and it appears that the AK-12 has some problems with its selector switch (which is easily mashed beyond its intended stopping point) and accessory rails (forget using red dot sights or scopes, since the barrel vibrates too much during the firing cycle).

* The bolt of a Mosin-Nagant can be disassembled for cleaning. However, since the rifles were built with looser tolerances than most, the firing pin may protrude a different length than before when it's reassembled. There's a screw in the back to adjust this and a hand-cut notch where the screw should align to. However, if you adjust the protrusion too shallow, the round won't fire. If you adjust the protrusion too deep, the pin will pierce the primer and you may get a face full of combustion. That said, most Mosin-Nagant owners never disassemble their rifle's bolt, and few actually know why that notch on the back exists.

** Walther's attempt, the Gewehr 41 (W), was crafted to answer the call for a new service rifle for the Wehrmacht. The requirements in the order were as follows: the rifle was to handle and operate like a bolt-action rifle for better familiarity with soldiers, there were to be ''no moving action parts'' on the exterior of the weapon, and no gas ports were to be drilled into the barrel for fear of premature wear and tear (as weird as this sounds now, it was a legitimate concern back then, considering how corrosive the residues left from burnt propellant primers were at the time). Walther decided to ignore every requirement save for the issue of drilling holes in the barrel, and drew upon one of the company's earlier designs, the [[https://www.forgottenweapons.com/ria-walther-a115-prototype-rifle/ A115]], for inspiration. There was a gas trap at the muzzle end which would force some of the gas against an annular piston which surrounded the barrel, which would cycle the action like normal. The problem was that carbon buildup was greater at the muzzle, and the piston would quickly be covered with it to the point that the gas could not overcome the friction of the carbon buildup, keeping the piston stuck in place.

* [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khyber_Pass_Copy Kyber Pass Copies]] are of varying quality depending on their maker and on what materials happened to be available.[[note]]Stolen railroad tracks are a favorite source of steel in the Kyber Pass region, but any and all scrap metal on hand will be used to make guns.[[/note]] They come anywhere from as good as factory made to will actually explode on anything but the lightest of loads. Copies of black powder rifles like the Martini-Henry (copied in the region for almost as long as it existed) are generally deemed safer because the ammo produces less pressure to begin with, but even the best ones are fragile enough that, when fed with commercially-available ammunition, there's a good chance they'll ''explode'' (collectors who fire them use handloaded ammo much weaker than commercial one, and even then there's a chance they'll blow up).

* The MG 42 and its post-war progeny, as mentioned above, was primarily an excellent design, but there was one poor variant - the US military briefly experimented with MG 42s converted to .30-06 Springfield late in the war, the T24 machine gun. The problem was that the two prototypes were a mash-up of newly-manufactured parts attached to original German parts, so there was only so much that the design could be modified for the longer .30-06 round - while it wasn't as bad as some rumors indicate (that the receivers were too short and couldn't even cycle after the first bullet), they still performed horribly, with a 10,000 round torture test on one of the prototypes seeing 51 stoppages within only 1,500 rounds.

* [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khyber_Pass_Copy Kyber Pass Copies]] are of varying quality depending on their maker and on what materials happened to be available.[[note]]Stolen railroad tracks are a favorite source of steel in the Kyber Pass region, but any and all scrap metal on hand will be used to make guns.[[/note]] Copies of black powder rifles like the Martini-Henry (copied in the region for almost as long as it existed) are generally deemed safer because the ammo produces less pressure to begin with, but even the best ones are fragile enough that, when fed with commercially-available ammunition, there's a good chance they'll ''explode'' (collectors who fire them use handloaded ammo much weaker than commercial one, and even then there's a chance they'll blow up).

* As the quote goes, "You ain't a SEAL until you've eaten Italian steel." The early production run of the Beretta 92F pistols for the US Government had an issue where the slide would crack and fly off the frame during shooting, causing injury to at least one SEAL who reportedly [[EyeScream lost an eye]] to a shattered Beretta slide. While the US Army claimed that the open slide and locking block system of the M9 was to blame, it was eventually discovered that it was actually a combination of poor heat-treatment on the slides causing some to break in half and poorly forged locking blocks failing around the five-thousand mark, far below the intended 25,000 rounds. Said components had been built by cheap subcontractors rather than by Beretta itself. Furthermore, the M9's used by the [=SEALs=] had been firing horrifically overcharged ammunition, making the problem even worse. Independent studies conducted on the private sector revealed that the US Army had intended to discredit Beretta and SIG from the very start of the XM9 program, having shifted goalposts so many times that no private sector pistol could ever pass endurance tests. Free replacement parts were sent out and Beretta, in the upgrade to the 92FS, redesigned the frame with a pin to prevent the slide from flying rearward in the event that the locking block fails. The 92FS has gone on to be a fairly satisfactory military and police sidearm, but the Navy [=SEALs=] still switched to the SIG P226, and the other branches and units that didn't resist switching to it in the first place kept trying to replace it with a 1911-based sidearm every couple of years before finally at least getting rid of it in 2017; in official American military surveys about troop experience and opinion regarding weapons, the M9 rated the lowest, with a significant majority of users distrusting it (to the point that some soldiers purposely abused the M9 to death and loudly demanded that the Colt 1911 be reissued instead).

** Ironically, the government standard Colt M1911 was more unreliable than the Beretta M9. When the XM9 trials started, the traditionalists insisted that the M1911 was good enough and that American soldiers had to be armed with American weapons and nothing else. But when the M1911 was put through the endurance tests, it rated the lowest of round counts before wearing out its barrel. Even worse, the M1911 pistols used during the trials were over fifty years old and had barely been cleaned since they had been taken out of storage. Even a more recently manufactured M1911 found itself in a quandary when it was rechambered for 9x19mm and fed the same trial ammunition as the Beretta 92 and the SIG Sauer P226.

* As the quote goes, "You ain't a SEAL until you've eaten Italian steel." The early production run of the Beretta 92F pistols for the US Government had an issue where the slide would fly off the frame during shooting, causing injury to at least one SEAL who reportedly [[EyeScream lost an eye]] to a shattered Beretta slide. While several different reasons were claimed (high round counts, overpressure ammunition), it was eventually discovered that it was a combination of poor heat-treatment on the slides causing some to break in half and poorly forged locking blocks failing around the five-thousand mark, far below the intended 25,000 rounds. Free replacement parts were sent out and Beretta, in the upgrade to the 92FS, redesigned the frame with a pin to prevent the slide from flying rearward in the event that the locking block fails. The 92FS has gone on to be a fairly satisfactory military and police sidearm, but the Navy [=SEALs=] still switched to the SIG P226, and the other branches and units that didn't resist switching to it in the first place kept trying to replace it with a 1911-based sidearm every couple of years before finally at least getting rid of it in 2017; in official American military surveys about troop experience and opinion regarding weapons, the M9 rated the lowest, with a significant majority of users distrusting it (to the point that some soldiers purposely abused the M9 to death and loudly demanded that the Colt 1911 be reissued instead).

** Another issue with the [=92FS=] is that most US military-issue magazines for it, not made by Beretta or their most frequent magazine contractor Mec-Gar to save on costs, were given a "sand-resistant" coating for combat in the Middle East - a coating which, for some reason, actually attracted ''more'' sand onto and into the magazines. Genuine Beretta-manufactured magazines do not have the coating or the issues it causes. Suffice to know that the subcontracted magazine production was done without actually testing the magazines with the guns in the first place, which explains all the feeding problems associated with the M9.

*** Both the Mark 13 and 14 were actually quite advanced for the time and were believed to be the greatest ship killer in the USN's arsenal... and that right there is where the problems came from. The torpedoes were developed during the height of the Great Depression, and they cost about $10,000 each (about $171,000 today). The penny-pinchers in Washington were unwilling to let ships take practice shots and thus discover the flaws when they could be easily fixed, because theory stated there was nothing wrong with them. Let's say that again so it will sink in: ''there were no live fire tests run on these weapons.'' Thus, when war broke out and the US Navy actually began using them, mostly the submariners, it was the first time they had ever been fired, and that's when the problems began to be noticed. To make the situation even more of a headache, when the Navy took their complaints to the Bureau of Ordinance, they were met with a less than receptive audience. [=BuOrd=] ''refused'' to accept that something was wrong with their new wonder-weapon and [[NeverMyFault instead blamed the crews for not using them properly]]. They went as far as to threaten disciplinary action for anyone who tampered or tested the weapon, and when one Navy admiral ignored them and ran a test on the dive settings (discovering the above-mentioned depth problems), they threated to have him court-martialed. Luckily for the sailors, and unluckily for [=BuOrd=], Admiral Ernest King also heard about the test. Not only was King Chief of Naval Operations (basically, [[SummonBiggerFish the highest-ranking officer in the Navy]]), but he was also one mean son-of-a-bitch (his own words) with an explosive temper, a bad habit of holding grudges... and he'd crossed with [=BuOrd=] once before. After a few ''colorful'' meetings with King, and much kicking and screaming from [=BuOrd=], the problems were gradually identified and corrected. Finally, almost two years after the war started, the Mark 14 had been reworked enough that it was actually sinking ships it was fired at. WebVideo/{{Drachinifel}} [[https://youtu.be/eQ5Ru7Zu_1I takes an in-depth look]] at the failings and politics (with a focus on the Mark 14). Unfortunately, while the Mark 14 was an extreme case, it wouldn't be the last time the US military ran into this problem - real-world performance nowhere near matching theoretical performance, usually caused by someone in ordnance procurement refusing to accept reality, would plague American weapon design and procurement for the rest of the 20th century, most infamously within just two decades of the war with the brouhaha surrounding the adoption of the M14 and its replacement with the M16.

* The [[https://stateofguns.com/usfa-zip-potential-improvement-2052/ USFA ZiP Gun]] is a unique polymer .22 LR pistol and a contender for what might be the worst gun ''ever''. It is made largely out of polymer parts (even the bolt is plastic) and is compact to the extreme. There are no grips, no slides, and no external bolt parts. To cock the weapon, two external charging rods placed on top of the muzzle, one of which charges the weapon when pressed (this should raise some alarms for any people with basic knowledge on firearm safety). The result of this compact design is that the gun has malfunctions ''constantly''. It has consistent issues with ejection, in some cases resulting in the casing being stuck ''sideways''. It has issues with using 25-round .22 LR magazines because they feed too slowly thus causing feed failures. It has problems with more powerful cartridges, in the worst case causing every fourth shot to jam and ''cracking the gun'' after 26 shots. The trigger force needed is too heavy, the ergonomics are ridiculous, and its small size meant that, [[RightHandedLeftHandedGuns unless you fire it left-handed]], escaping hot gases and a red-hot cartridge case rush right into the shooter's hand and can cause injuries. Finally, how do you clear jams with this gun? You reach over the muzzle (remember that safety thing mentioned earlier?) and press the other charging rod which resets the striker. To top it all off, sometimes it ''doesn't work'' and only works when it is pushed to the point where the next round in the magazine is stripped, causing a double feed. It is so unreliable that almost all users reported that it can barely get through one 10-round magazine without jamming, and cases where all 10 rounds are fired without jamming are considered an ''anomaly'' instead of the norm (due to the terrible feed system, getting the gun to chamber and then fire ''once'' is a cause for celebration). In one particularly egregious example of this, [[WebVideo/ForgottenWeapons Ian McCollum]] [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3fd4goVs-4 took one down the range to get some shots off]] and showed that even at its most consistent, it still jammed on him after the first shot. And then, [[TemptingFate immediately after praising it]] for "remarkably good performance" with that first mag (he managed to get through the rest of it without any jams), the video cuts to text on a black screen explaining that when they came back to do more shooting with the high-speed camera the next day, it jammed after ''every'' shot. You can see him tear into its shoddy design [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9bULArrKs4 here]].

** Walther's attempt at the Gewehr 41, the [=G41=] (W), was crafted to answer the call for a new service rifle for the Wehrmacht. The requirements in the order were as follows: the rifle was to handle and operate like a bolt-action rifle for better familiarity with soldiers, there were to be ''no moving action parts'' on the exterior of the weapon, and no gas ports were to be drilled into the barrel for fear of premature wear and tear (as weird as this sounds now, it was a legitimate concern back then, considering how corrosive the residues left from burnt propellant primers were at the time). Walther decided to ignore every requirement save for the issue of drilling holes in the barrel, and drew upon one of the company's earlier designs, the [[https://www.forgottenweapons.com/ria-walther-a115-prototype-rifle/ A115]], for inspiration. There was a gas trap at the muzzle end which would force some of the gas against an annular piston which surrounded the barrel, which would cycle the action like normal. The problem was that carbon buildup was greater at the muzzle, and the piston would quickly be covered with it to the point that the gas could not overcome the friction of the carbon buildup, keeping the piston stuck in place.

*** Both the Mark 13 and 14 were actually quite advanced for the time and were believed to be the greatest ship killer in the USN's arsenal... and that right there is where the problems came from. The torpedoes were developed during the height of the Great Depression, and they cost about $10,000 each (about $171,000 today). The penny-pinchers in Washington were unwilling to let ships take practice shots and thus discover the flaws when they could be easily fixed, because theory stated there was nothing wrong with them. Let's say that again so it will sink in: ''there were no live fire tests run on these weapons.'' Thus, when war broke out and the US Navy actually began using them, mostly the submariners, it was the first time they had ever been fired, and that's when the problems began to be noticed. To make the situation even more of a headache, when the Navy took their complaints to the Bureau of Ordinance, they were met with a less than receptive audience. [=BuOrd=] ''refused'' to accept that something was wrong with their new wonder-weapon and [[NeverMyFault instead blamed the crews for not using them properly]]. They went as far as to threaten disciplinary action for anyone who tampered or tested the weapon, and when one Navy admiral ignored them and ran a test on the dive settings (discovering the above-mentioned depth problems), they threated to have him court-martialed. Luckily for the sailors, and unluckily for [=BuOrd=], Admiral Ernest King also heard about the test. Not only was King Chief of Naval Operations (basically, [[SummonBiggerFish the highest-ranking officer in the Navy]]), but he was also one mean son-of-a-bitch (his own words) with an explosive temper, a bad habit of holding grudges... and he'd crossed with [=BuOrd=] once before. After a few ''colorful'' meetings with King, and much kicking and screaming from [=BuOrd=], the problems were gradually identified and corrected. Finally, almost two years after the war started, the Mark 14 had been reworked enough that it was actually sinking ships it was fired at. WebVideo//{{Drachinifel}} [[https://youtu.be/eQ5Ru7Zu_1I takes an in-depth look]] at the failings and politics (with a focus on the Mark 14). Unfortunately, while the Mark 14 was an extreme case, it wouldn't be the last time the US military ran into this problem - real-world performance nowhere near matching theoretical performance, usually caused by someone in ordnance procurement refusing to accept reality, would plague American weapon design and procurement for the rest of the 20th century, most infamously within just two decades of the war with the brouhaha surrounding the adoption of the M14 and its replacement with the M16.

*** Both the Mark 13 and 14 were actually quite advanced for the time and were believed to be the greatest ship killer in the USN's arsenal... and that right there is where the problems came from. The torpedoes were developed during the height of the Great Depression, and they cost about $10,000 each (about $171,000 today). The penny-pinchers in Washington were unwilling to let ships take practice shots and thus discover the flaws when they could be easily fixed, because theory stated there was nothing wrong with them. Let's say that again so it will sink in: ''there were no live fire tests run on these weapons.'' Thus, when war broke out and the US Navy actually began using them, mostly the submariners, it was the first time they had ever been fired, and that's when the problems began to be noticed. To make the situation even more of a headache, when the Navy took their complaints to the Bureau of Ordinance, they were met with a less than receptive audience. [=BuOrd=] ''refused'' to accept that something was wrong with their new wonder-weapon and [[NeverMyFault instead blamed the crews for not using them properly]]. They went as far as to threaten disciplinary action for anyone who tampered or tested the weapon, and when one Navy admiral ignored them and ran a test on the dive settings (discovering the above-mentioned depth problems), they threated to have him court-martialed. Luckily for the sailors, and unluckily for [=BuOrd=], Admiral Ernest King also heard about the test. Not only was King Chief of Naval Operations (basically, [[SummonBiggerFish the highest-ranking officer in the Navy]]), but he was also one mean son-of-a-bitch (his own words) with an explosive temper, a bad habit of holding grudges... and he'd crossed with [=BuOrd=] once before. After a few ''colorful'' meetings with King, and much kicking and screaming from [=BuOrd=], the problems were gradually identified and corrected. Finally, almost two years after the war started, the Mark 14 had been reworked enough that it was actually sinking ships it was fired at. Drachinifel [[https://youtu.be/eQ5Ru7Zu_1I takes an in-depth look]] at the failings and politics (with a focus on the Mark 14). Unfortunately, while the Mark 14 was an extreme case, it wouldn't be the last time the US military ran into this problem - real-world performance nowhere near matching theoretical performance, usually caused by someone in ordnance procurement refusing to accept reality, would plague American weapon design and procurement for the rest of the 20th century, most infamously within just two decades of the war with the brouhaha surrounding the adoption of the M14 and its replacement with the M16.

* Any guns made by the infamous [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSzA1OUZ8m8 "Ring of Fire"]] manufacturers. Named such because it consisted of around a dozen companies based in a rough "ring" radius around Los Angeles County, these guns are the absolute bottom of the barrel when it comes to factory-made guns. Names such as Raven, Lorcin, Bryco, and Jennings have been immortalized in the firearms community for just how ''bad'' they were. By 2020, all of these companies are out of business, with the sole exception of Phoenix Arms which remains based in Ontario, California, and continues to produce cheap pocket pistols that typically sell for around $100-150.

* The German [=StG=] 44 is widely considered the purveyor of the assault rifle concept which dominates military infantry standard-issue today. However, due to the war going on at the time, the materials used to make the later batches were often of poor quality and production was necessarily rushed; tests done by the British around the end of the war revealed that the bolt could be immobilized by pinching the sides of the receiver, and that the entire gun could be rendered totally inoperable by propping the gun up and then pushing it over, dropping it from waist height, or even ''sitting'' on the receiver. Hilariously, the British [[ItWillNeverCatchOn also dismissed the sturmgewehr concept]] as a horrifically expensive and overly complicated alternative to the typical submachine gun. It was deemed too heavy a rifle with too fragile a bolt and receiver to change the war by Allied Intelligence, but it was well liked within the German military, even with the shortcomings. German soldiers who had used the MP 44 versions (characterized by much better overall construction) considered the later batches to be little more than cheap knockoffs.

* World War 2 era Japanese small arms tended to be barely tolerable by Western standards, with a few exceptions, most notably the Arisaka rifle, which at worst suffered greater recoil impulse in "last-ditch" rifles due to lighter and simpler stock designs. Most of their machine guns in particular were awkward to use owing to their outdated design philosophy. R. Lee Ermey test-fired a Type 92 in both ''Lock N'Load'' and ''Mail Call'' where he addresses the gun's really heavy weight, low rate of fire, and horrible tendency to jam if any mistakes were made by the gun crew. In fact, in ''Lock N'Load'', an improperly loaded ammo strip caused a fragmented case to cut his knuckle, also jamming the gun in the process. As it turns out, a heavy static-defense machine gun more suited to the stalemate of World War 1 tends to have problems keeping up with combat that doesn't suit its intended battle doctrine.