Reliably Unreliable Guns / Real Life

• As it happens, this trope is Older Than Steam: Every firearm made up until the advent of percussion ignition would often misfire in normal conditions or fail to work at all in bad weather. And it goes the other way too: they could also accidentally fire on their own if their lock-work was badly forged or would only fire several seconds after pulling the trigger (hang-firing was guaranteed if a gunman dumped too much powder into the gun's priming pan).
  • A very famous example of this was the attempted assassination of President Andrew Jackson. Assassin Richard Lawrence was thought to have chose a pair of guns known to be especially susceptible to moisture and made his attempt on a very humid day. The other more popular theory is that the bullets were terrified of Jackson.
• Another Older Than Steam variant is the aim: prior to the advent of riffling, most firearms had such abysmal aim, that one of the best ways to handle someone shooting at you was to walk straight up to them.
  • An example is found in a letter George Washington sent to his brother, John Washington, during the Seven Years' War. The enemy's guns' aim was reliably so poor that, rather than fear or nervousness or even tension:
  I can with truth assure you, I heard Bulletts whistle and believe me there was something charming in the sound.
• 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. 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 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 Truth in Television 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.
• Regarding firing while dropped, this is (in some cases) Truth in Television; many manufacturers will not certify guns as being "drop safe", and in safety guides hunters are advised not to climb while holding loaded guns or lean guns against trees in order to avert this trope. It should be noted that such events are exceedingly rare even in "unsafe" guns, from simple statistics.
  • The South African Vektor CP1 pistol was recalled in 2000. The recall states that the loaded gun can discharge if bumped or dropped. While those sold in South Africa had the defect corrected and were shipped back to their owners, Vektor's lack of any overseas infrastructure made this impossible for the roughly 2000 that had been sold in the US (intended to be the pistol's primary market), and thus they simply paid back $500 to everyone who returned the pistol (compared to the purchase price at the time of $400). As a result, the CP1 is now very rare in America.
  • As of late 2008, the Ruger LCP and SR9 were recalled for parts replacement, due to potential discharge if dropped.
  • Wartime examples of the Luger are notoriously not drop-safe, even with the safety catch engaged. Part of this is an issue of people swapping parts in Luger pistols without finely tuning them (the Luger design outright required certain parts to be hand-fitted) and the rest is a matter of bad carrying habits.
  • Here is a news story about a Kahr P40 going off after being dropped on a hard tiled floor.
  • The specific model of gun hasn't been included in the press reports, but at least one San Antonio, TX security guard is carrying a not-drop-safe firearm on duty. In July 2019, while he was pushing carts back into the grocery store where he was working, his gun fell out of his belt^note It is hoped the reporter meant "belt holster" and discharged. Two shoppers were injured by either the ricocheting bullet or shrapnel from that ricochet.
• The Franchi SPAS-12's design as a dual-mode shotgun (able to be fired in both semi-auto and pump-action) created various issues in both modes, such as inconsistent cycling when fired in semi-auto. Particularly, movies will typically depict it as pump-action-only because it flatly refuses to cycle blank shells in semi-auto, even with a blank-fire adapter and the hottest 12-gauge blanks available^note Which kind of makes sense when the whole point of being able to use it as a pump-action gun is to be able to use lower power ammo like beanbags and other non-lethal rounds. The SPAS-12 was originally designed for law enforcement but found few takers due to high cost and the fact that LEO's really have no need for a semi-automatic, a pump-action shotgun is more than adequate for police use. The weapon also made use of several cheap rubber parts that have disintegrated simply through age (what with production ending in 2000, and owing to the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban, ones in the US are invariably at least half a decade older than that), creating issues such as the magazine cutoff sticking, making the bolt lock back after every shell in semi-auto mode. Most damning are issues with the safety, which in its original lever-type design would not only fail to prevent the weapon from firing while on safe but will even cause the weapon to fire if the safety is toggled while it's loaded. A recall order was issued to replace these with a different cross-bolt safety, but it was only a marginal improvement - while toggling it doesn't fire the weapon, it also frequently fails to actually put the weapon on safe after aging, and was only installed on a small percentage of SPAS-12s to boot (although Franchi's other shotguns can exchange trigger groups and come standard with the improved safety, so swapping an old one out is easy).
• America's oldest gun manufacturer, Remington, began to go downhill almost as soon as it was bought out in 2007 by Cerberus Capital Management, a vulture capitalist company that had little understanding of firearms. Soon reports of bad Remington firearms started spreading like wildfire. For the longest time, it was a mystery why they didn't go out of business... right up until October 2020, when they filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
  • The Remington Model 700 rifle has a reputation (pre-dating the Cerberus acquisition) for having a highly questionable safety mechanism, which is infamous for either causing the gun to randomly fire, or for not doing anything to keep the gun from firing while it's engaged. The trigger mechanism used on the rifle from its original design to about 2007 also had gained a bit of a reputation for causing the weapon to discharge on its own, though Remington has dismissed these claims, instead blaming negligent users for not properly maintaining their weapons and pointing them directly at other people for extreme lengths of time, even pointing out that some of the claimants admitted to the police that they "may have accidentally" pulled the trigger themselves. Noteworthy in regard to this is that military rifles based on the Model 700's action continue to use the original trigger mechanism, and it is also still available for custom orders, which, if there were dangerous reliability issues inherent in its design, would only be the case if Remington wanted to go out of business. In which capacity it has duly succeeded, as previously mentioned.
  • The Bushmaster Advanced Combat Rifle, which was their entry into the US Army Individual Carbine competition to replace the M4 in 2010/2011, was eventually offered for civilian sale with a modified receiver and trigger sear; it had to be recalled when it emerged that the rifle could slam-fire uncontrollably on single trigger pulls. Apparently, the design team had failed to test the trigger sear to ensure it would reset reliably when the trigger was released by the user.
  • The Remington R51 fiasco, a redesigned and modernized version of the Remington Model 51 pistol which was developed almost a century earlier. Anticipation for the gun was sky-high: it looked beautiful and was a revival of a design by legendary gunsmith John Pedersen. Early advance reviews of the R51 from gun magazines and industry experts were glowing and full of praise. However, when the gun became commercially available in February/March 2014, actual buyers and new media reviewers^note YouTube channels (most notably the Military Arms Channel's review), bloggers, social media discussions, and independent gun websites savaged the R51. The problems included things such as a gritty and sticky slide, badly designed magazines that frequently caused rounds to not chamber right (which could lead to case ruptures, an extremely dangerous malfunction), poor trigger reset, a steel slide riding on an aluminum frame that would wear down the receiver rapidly, and a hideously complicated takedown and reassembly procedure. The last one is very significant considering that Remington had marketed the gun as something that could be easily used and handled by the elderly, handicapped, women, and in general, people with weak hands. While firing the gun is one thing, cleaning it is an exercise in frustration and it is very easy to reassemble the slide incorrectly, causing the slide to lock back after every shot, which could mean death in a real-life combat situation^note especially dangerous considering this gun was designed as a concealed carry/self-defense firearm. Remington eventually recalled the gun in July 2014 and spent over two years trying to fix the problems, but the Gen 2 release in August 2016 still saw plenty of issues with it. All told, the fiasco heavily damaged the reputation of Remington as well as the entire gun review industry.
  • The next follow up after the R51 was the RP9 series. While not as disastrous as the R51, the RP9 still faced plenty of anecdotal reports of being prone to jamming and sensitive to ammo, which is exactly what its design (a polymer-framed striker-fired pistol) is supposed to avoid.
• The Chauchat light machine gun, at least the M1918 variant issued to the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I. While the original Chauchat did indeed have some problems, most of which had to do with its open-sided magazine (inviting all sorts of outside debris onto the cartridges and into the chamber), the rather quirky 8x50mmR Lebel cartridge (with a heavily tapered casing making automatic feeding complicated and necessitating an odd bulky half-circle magazine) and the fact that Gladiator, a bicycle company with no prior firearms experience, was the one handling most of the production, its flaws are exaggerated and it did not jam after "less than 5 shots" as some pop-historians would have you believe - most instances of them doing so in the modern day are from the simple fact that the weapons are a century old at this point and simply haven't been maintained properly, and quality commercially-made 8x50mmR Lebel is virtually non-existent (to say nothing about the weapon taking deliberate abuse from its detractors, as some firearms reviewers have expressed a desire to smash it against a tree to "prove" how bad it was, something they would never even imagine doing to any other machine gun).
  • Most of the M1918 version's bad reputation is the issue of having been rechambered from the original 8mm Lebel to the American .30-06 Springfield. The M1918 was, in short, a godawful conversion that didn't take into account the significant differences in cartridge size (8x51 to 7.62x63) and shape (straight-cased Springfield versus tapered Lebel), in addition to several other mistakes (in particular screwing up the conversion from metric to English units - and never noticing this until private testing decades after the war - meaning the M1918's magazine and chamber weren't even the correct size). As a result, the majority of M1918s didn't pass factory inspection, and the few that did make it to the frontline experienced the severe jamming issues the Chauchat is "infamous" for, usually being discarded by US troops before they could fire off a full magazine.
  • Worse is that vastly superior options to the M1918 Chauchat existed at the time, namely the Lewis Gun and M1918 BAR, but - rather than being passed over just for their early teething problems^note Some of the Lewis gun prototypes exploded during the Army's endurance test, after burning through several magazines; the gunners ran away and refused to handle the guns even after they'd been reassembled. Early production runs of the BAR, meanwhile, had incorrectly-tempered springs and receivers that could not interchange magazines, which would not be corrected until after the war. - were ignored for completely petty and short-sighted reasons; the Lewis gun was passed over simply because the AEF's chief of ordnance, General William Crozier, disliked the weapon's designer, Colonel Isaac Lewis^note Which admittedly was not totally unjustified, as Crozier's perception of the Lewis gun was based on the aforementioned exploding prototypes, while General John Pershing delayed adoption of the Browning Automatic Rifle as long as possible, mostly because he wanted to retrain the army on how to use it in conjunction with Springfield M1903 rifles converted into trench carbines by means of the Pedersen Device according to Plan 1919, and partly to keep it a secret until several could be deployed all at once, because the American Expeditionary Force's leaders thought it was a far better weapon than it actually was by virtue of being an indigenous American design and were irrationally fearful the Germans would be tripping over themselves to capture and reverse-engineer something similar to weapons they'd already been dealing with for four years.
• A less famous, but no less awful example of light machine gun design was the Italian Breda 30 which saw service in World War II. Its numerous design faults teamed up to make it an extremely unreliable weapon, especially in the desert conditions of North Africa. The gun used short-recoil operation with a ludicrously short unlocking period (so short that most people mistake it for a pure blowback mechanism), necessitating that the rounds be oiled to prevent them from being ripped apart during extraction. This didn't always work, leaving the front part of spent casings hopelessly jammed in the chamber, plus the oil attracted dirt into the working areas of the weapon, causing another type of jam. Furthermore, the gun used the same bad idea as the Chauchat with an open-sided magazine that invited even more dirt onto the oiled rounds and into the operating mechanism. On top of that, the closed-bolt design reduced air circulation and also put rounds in the chamber at risk of cooking off if fired continuously without being allowed to rest at all, which could injure the gunner. Oh, and the over-engineered-and-overly-massive magazine was not meant to be detached and replaced under normal conditions, instead making use of 20 round stripper clips to reload it, which had the effect of drastically slowing the rate of fire if the gunner operated by himself. So even in perfect conditions where every round fired and extracted correctly, one would still spend most of his time reloading it (unless he had an assistant gunner to help load the thing). The only good thing about the Breda 30 was the very high quality of the machining operations done to make the parts fit together, so that it didn't rip itself apart.
  • The worst thing about the Breda 30 is that it was probably not the worst automatic weapon of the Italian Army. That would be the Fiat-Revelli Modello 1914 heavy machine gun: designed before World War I, it was a "wedge-locked" short-recoil-operated design with a water-cooled barrel and unusual indexing-magazine system. The operation of the action was simple, but the Revelli action had harsh extraction problems and it also gave the gunner a risk of losing his fingers if he failed to keep them out of the bolt-track. Contrary to popular belief, there was no integral cartridge oiler, necessitating that the assistant gunner apply oil to the typewriter-style indexing magazines, but the oil didn't make things much better. The 1935 revision of the design, while more modern with a change to a heavy 8x59 mm cartridge, an air-cooled barrel, and a proper feed-belt crafted for it, was considered even worse than the 1914 design (notably because the violent extraction of the heavier cartridge required the use of more oil) and was usually thrown out in favor of its very reliable competitor, the Breda M37.
• The Enfield L85 (better known as the SA80) was basically Britain's way of telling the United States that when it came to the design of infantry weapons, "anything you can screw up, we can screw up bigger"; the design itself was fairly sound, albeit rather maintenance-intensive and complicated to disassemble, but had to be built to extremely fine tolerances. Unfortunately, the initial in-service version was the last project undertaken by the Royal Small Arms Factory, whose workers had recently learned they were all going to be laid off. The reader can doubtless imagine the effect this had on their workmanship, especially as each stage of development got progressively worse as time went on. A report listed 50 issues inherent to the system, including spontaneous malfunctions, firing pin breakage, safety breakages, and magazines spontaneously dropping. Heckler & Koch managed to (mostly) salvage the design in the upgrade to the A2 standard, though they're still saddled with the A1's reputation, and the light support weapon variation is still not seeing much use at all except as a rarely-used DMR or a tool for hazing the newest member of a squad (while the longer barrel and standard 4x sights make it a fair bit more accurate than the standard version, the non-changeable barrel and bullpup action make it very difficult to fire for long periods or even use magazines suited for that; its initial role is instead being fulfilled by the L110A1, a British version of the excellent FN Minimi). And even after improvements, the L85 takes a ridiculously long time to change a magazine (and by the way, the user has to take his mind and his eyes off any ongoing fight that's going on just to do so).
  • Some British units posted to actual or threatened war zones point-blank refused to take the SA80 and held on to their old SLRs.
  • On a visit to Britain, Mikhail Kalashnikov was shown the SA80 by its designers, who proudly asked him what he thought of it. The old man shook his head sadly and explained to his British counterparts that he had designed a weapon for the Russian Army on the principles of simplicity of construction, use and maintenance. He had deliberately engineered a weapon with the fewest possible moving parts so that even the dumbest soldier could strip, reassemble and maintain it in any conditions. The stupider the soldier, the simpler the weapon: design to the lowest common denominator. He then took another disbelieving look at the SA80 and remarked:
  Going by this, you must have very clever soldiers.
  • To sum up how bad the L85 made soldiers suffer in real combat areas like Iraq, here's some useful input from a guy who actually had to show British soldiers what was wrong with their primary weapon and close quarters fighting style.
• Real Life military use of an unstable gun as an effective weapon: In World War II, the standard British SMG, the MkII Sten, was prone to accidental discharges when dropped; it could in fact empty its entire magazine that way, an attribute occasionally used to turn it into a field-expedient grenade substitute. Later models improved, at least to the point where you no longer took your life in your hands by merely being in the same room as one with a round chambered but would still misfeed at the slightest provocation. The most infamous instance of this was the assassination attempt on Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in 1942 - the Sten that was used in the attack jammed, and the commando had to use a grenade, which indirectly killed Heydrich instead.
  • This is partly justified in the fact that the Sten was designed to be produced cheaply and quickly. Because the British Army needed to replace all of the weapons which they abandoned during the evacuation of mainland Europe, quality took a backseat to quantity. Once the threat of a German invasion of Britain began to decrease, the Sten's quality slowly rose to higher levels.
  • Most sources mention the biggest issue with the Sten wasn't the mechanism, but rather the magazines (which were very similar to the magazines used by the MP40 - they were actually direct copies of those of the earlier MP38, including all of its flaws). Indeed, the MP40's magazines were prone to spring failure when fully-loaded with 32 rounds (though most soldiers got around that by only loading 28 or 30 instead), and were also extremely susceptible to dirt and getting bent-out-of-shape from abuse, thanks to their design of holding ammo in staggered columns that converged into one column before feeding into the chamber (compared to more modern staggered-column magazines, which generally keep bullets in their separate columns up to the moment they're being pulled into the chamber).
  • It's not only that but the first Sten was made with no safety measures, especially with the bolt in forward position (if it was in back position, the cocking handle could at least be put on a notch in the gun's body).
    • A closer example is, in fact, that so many game/film characters hold the MP40 and Sten by the magazine. In reality, that is a very good way to make them jam (which is why the Haganah and IDF, which relied on Sten guns during and in the run-up to the Israeli War of Independence in 1948, drilled it into their soldiers never to do this). The proper "foregrip" of an MP40 (which is otherwise a highly reliable SMG) is to hold the magazine well firmly with the index finger and thumb. Or between the mag well and the trigger guard. The Sten? Well, there's not really anywhere comfortable to grip (with either hand) on the MK II and Mk III versions. Unless you have the Canadian Mk II, whose wire stock/grip at least doesn't look like something a sadist would design. Wrapping leather around the barrel shroud and the grip might be a good idea, though, and going by photos was especially common on suppressed variations. On the other hand, some other photos show that many British and German troops during WWII held these weapons by their magazines anyway.
  • There is an urban legend among the German Bundeswehr that this issue is present with the IMI Uzi. The legend goes that, in Close Quarters Combat training, soldiers are advised on how to use the gun as a makeshift "roomsweeper": load a magazine into the gun, cock it, release the safety and throw the gun into a room/down some stairs/down an elevator shaft. This practice is neither found in any official training manuals nor has the gun ever been used that way. The Uzi actually has global renown for being a highly reliable, accurate, and controllable submachine gun.
  • The Lanchester SMG was a British copy of the German MP28 SMG (an evolution of the World War I MP18), that was introduced during the aforementioned desperate rearmament period following Dunkirk. While it was a robust and well-made weapon, it did have an unfortunate tendency to fire off bursts whenever the butt was given a hard knock while it was cocked and loaded. This was due to the way the blowback action was designed (open bolt with large mainspring holding the bolt under tension), not due to manufacturing errors.
  • The Australian-designed Owen gun, which was supposed to replace the Sten and the US Thompson in Commonwealth forces, had a similar problem made worse: even with the safety engaged, it was still known for accidental discharge if dropped or mistreated. The Aussies didn't care, though. They considered its almost complete immunity to jamming far more important, especially given their tendency to be fighting in muddy jungles or sandy deserts where any cyclic reliability problems get exaggerated.
  • Another mechanically dubious weapon of the British arsenal was the PIAT, a handheld spigot mortar designed in WWII to eliminate the telltale and lethal backblast from other anti-armor launchers. Whilst the mechanism was incredibly simple and almost never jammed, it was a bastard to cock, requiring over a hundred pounds of force to do so - many soldiers simply couldn't do it alone, especially when trying to keep themselves in cover, even being physically impossible for soldiers of a smaller stature due to its design. To help with this, in combat, only the first round needed to be cocked — subsequent firings would use the propellant to blow the firing pin backwards, cocking the weapon. This was the theory, at least. In practice, unless the weapon was held very tightly, the pin wouldn't be pushed back enough to be recocked, as the firer would have been knocked off his feet by the recoil (remember those hundred pounds of force needed to cock it the first time?^note And this was with the actual mechanism involving a moving spigot, to reduce the recoil) and would then have to manually re-cock it in combat - neither fun even when nobody was trying to kill him, nor safe when somebody was. It should come as no surprise that it received some unprintable nicknames for its difficulty of use, and almost everyone who needed an anti-armor launcher would requisition American Bazookas or simply rely on stolen Panzerfausts.
• The German MP 38 submachine gun (often incorrectly called the "Schmeisser" — it was actually an Erma product) originally was prone to accidental discharges if it was dropped or bumped on its rear end, such as when the soldier carrying it hit the butt on the ground when jumping down from the back of a truck. The bolt would "bounce" back against the recoil spring (compressing the spring), but not far back enough to be locked back by the sear, thus it would then be pushed back forward under spring pressure, chambering and firing the top round in the magazine. A "quick fix" was a leather strap that looped over the bolt handle to secure the bolt in the forward (uncocked) position. The later MP 40 version (the one that accounted for most wartime production) had safety notches to turn the bolt handle up into to lock it in place, to prevent this from happening.
• 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 made in the final months of the war 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.
  R. Lee Ermey: Damn thing hurt me!
  • The Type 11 light machine gun had similar issues stemming from its feeding system. The weapon used a unique hopper design to feed cartridges from six of the same five-round clips used by the famed Arisaka rifle. This allowed users to top off their weapon's ammunition supply without having to remove the hopper, but it also gave it a tendency to jam if the slightest amount of dirt got past the spring-loaded hopper cover, an undesirable characteristic in the mud and grime of the Pacific Theater. Additionally, the side-mounted hopper required the buttstock and iron sights to be offset to the right. The Type 11's integral oiler, installed to improve extraction of low-quality cartridge casings, made the dirt problem worse if the gunner failed to keep the receiver perfectly clean. What can be said about the Type 11 is that it was an attempt to use mechanical innovation to solve logistical problems that sadly made it unable to keep up with the changing nature of warfare.
  • Another case was the original model of the Type 100 SMG, which was inspired by the Bergmann MP-18. In addition to mass balance issues caused by the side-mounted magazine, it would frequently jam due to dirt getting into the open action. The spring-loaded firing pin was latched back in the bolt face until a round was fully chambered (this intended to prevent out-of-battery discharges), which sadly got jammed up by said dirt. A lightened, folding-stock version for paratroopers was even worse, as the lighter weight made the weapon too fragile for general use. The updated Type 100/44 removed this feature, among other improvements (like a simpler bolt with a stationary firing pin), but the weapon was still also underpowered compared to the submachine guns in use by the other armies in the war, and production for all variants only amounted to 27,000 weapons at best.
  • The Nambu Type 94 airman's service pistol was unfairly notorious for its exposed trigger sear bar that would drop the hammer if the sear were deliberately mashed when the safety was off (this is also a problem for any Luger pistol that's found missing its trigger sear cover plate). Some souvenir-collecting American soldiers, unfamiliar with the design, allegedly set off the pistol while checking it out (with a round still in the chamber and with the safety turned off) and concluded that all Japanese handguns were inherently unsafe to carry just from that incident (and a bunch of fake surrender myths also popped up to go with that exposed sear bar). Thankfully, keeping the pistol in a proper holster will prevent any unintentional discharges.
  • The Type 14 Nambu, the official Japanese full-sized service pistol throughout the 1930s and WWII, was itself an adequate enough weapon for the era, though wholly unremarkable. The 8x22mm Nambu round it fired was barely adequate by modern military standards (its power was comparable to the .380 ACP); otherwise, it would have been a decent weapon. Oh, and the firing pin was also somewhat fragile... and instead of implementing Colonel Nambu's rather simple fix to this defect, the Army's logistics units just issued spare firing pins, with the expectation that when a pin broke the officer would disassemble his gun and replace the pin after the fight was over, assuming he survived whatever happened when his Type 14 jammed. Even worse was that the primary striker spring tended to weaken over time, which nobody could quickly replace (in contrast, the aforementioned belittled Type 94 had an unusually reliable firing hammer spring - a bit too reliable for servicemen foolish enough to abuse their weapons on purpose). No surprise that many officers chose to draw their swords when their Nambu pistols jammed. Other officers wound up buying the compact Type 94, if only because it was guaranteed to fire when the trigger was pulled.
  • The Imperial Japanese Navy had experimented with making a copy of the American M1 Garand rechambered for Japan's own 7.7mm Arisaka cartridge, the Type 4. It ultimately ended production at about 250 units, none of them seeing service, and many more of them not even being assembled, due to frequent jamming - particularly, it had to be redesigned to feed from two five-round stripper clips in a manner similar to the Lee-Enfield, since while 7.7mm worked well enough with the Garand action, the en bloc clip design flatly refused to correctly carry the round. These issues were due to the abysmal condition of Japanese war industry in 1945, and the fact that the war ended before they had any real chance to work out the bugs in the design. Few Type 4 Rifles survived, owing to bombings and the Allied order to dump the majority of Japanese weapons into Tokyo Bay after the surrender.
• The Ross Rifle, a target and sporting rifle designed by Sir Charles Ross and adopted as a substitute for the Lee-Enfield by the Canadian military before WW1. The Ross was a pound lighter than the Enfield, and more accurate because it was designed to very tight tolerances. It, however, had several noticeable issues.
  • Part of the problem was the use of a straight-pull bolt mechanism: this allowed the Ross a shorter cycle time than even the mighty Enfield (which cycled faster than most other rifles of its day due to cocking on the closing motion, which makes use of stronger muscles in the user's hand and arm), but also required a complex system of cams and grooves which became ridiculously stiff with even the slightest mud contamination, and couldn't handle ammunition made to loose tolerances. Stories exist of soldiers resorting to stomping on the bolt handles of their rifles and still failing to budge them an inch.
  • It also suffered from inadequate engineering and poor manufacturing quality.
    • Bolts made from a batch of poor-quality steel would deform in normal use, a problem exacerbated by the fact that the left rear locking surface doubled as the bolt stop, getting whacked into the receiver every time the action cycled.
    • The chambers were being "pinched" out of specification by the clamp used to screw them into the receiver.
    • Worst of all, the bolt could be re-installed after fieldstripping with the bolt head rotated halfway-round (180 degrees) in its sleeve from its correct position. Done this way, the bolt would not engage the camming surfaces in the bolt sleeve. It looked correct, and it would close, but it would not lock — but the rifle would still fire with an unlocked bolt, ejecting it backwards with great force. While testing has shown that the bolt wouldn't actually be ejected from the rifle, given where a shooter's eye will normally be that wouldn't have saved them from getting a large piece of metal in a very bad place at a very high speed. This was a fault in the design that was never entirely corrected (one version was altered by pinning the bolt in place, but that meant that the very dirt-sensitive rifle's bolt could not be disassembled for cleaning), and one of the major reasons the Ross had a very short tenure as the standard service rifle of the Canadian Army.
  • These issues were fixable and would have been corrected after a proper "shake down" period where flaws are discovered and corrected in armories by trained gunsmiths — but politics prevented this. Canadian Minister of Militia and Defence Sam Hughes, a personal friend of Sir Charles Ross, overstated the rifle's capabilities, covered up its defects, and obstructed efforts to correct its problems^note Ranging from lying about all its issues being fixed, to claiming the highly experienced British general in charge of the Canadian Expeditionary Force was an idiot (he already hated said officer because the man refused to let Hughes promote untested officers, dismissed incompetent Canadian officers who Hughes had given positions to, and criticized the poor training Canadian soldiers had been given), to claiming the numerous Canadian officers who were writing complaints about how terrible the rifle was were either lying or being forced by the British to say bad things about it until, finally, he was forced out of office by the public scandal and the rifle was taken out of combat service.
    • This was especially strange, because it wasn't like they hadn't done this before: The version used in WWI was the 1910 Mk III, which was a massive redesign of the original 1903 Mk I, that was created after the Royal Northwest Mounted Police (who would become the Royal Canadian Mounted Police) tested it and found 113 defects considered severe enough to warrant rejection on their own. The changes between the models were so extensive that there wasn't a single interchangeable part between the Mk III and the 1905 Mk II.
  • Needless to say, after their first engagement in 1915, Canadian soldiers usually ditched their Ross rifles for Enfields as soon as they could. Eventually, many of them ended up being used for basic marksmanship training (both in Canada and in the US), where their shortcomings weren't an issue (training obviously being a much more controlled environment than combat) and their use for that purpose freed up more battle-worthy rifles for the front lines.
  • All that said, because the Ross was designed as a target rifle rather than a military one, it was a fair bit more accurate at range than the Lee-Enfield, and so it remained a fairly popular rifle for Canadian snipers, who tended to do a better job than the average soldier at keeping their rifles clean and were a lot less likely to assemble the bolt wrong, thus negating some of the design's primary flaws. But it'd still jam at the drop of the hat even for them, if the ammo was anything less than pristine, and so, while the rifle continued some service well into World War II, this was almost entirely limited to branches that weren't on foreign soil and therefore likely to actually fire the weapon.
  • The original adoption of the Ross was actually somewhat justifiable: During the Second Boer War, Canada wanted to use the Lee-Enfield. Understandably, the Canadians didn't want to have to wait for their weapons to cross the Atlantic Ocean, or risk being cut off from supply if Britain was somehow blockaded, so they wanted to produce the SMLE domestically. However, the British refused to license it for production in Canada. Sir Charles Ross, the creator of the Ross Rifle, offered to personally finance the construction of a factory in Canada to produce his rifle for the Canadian military, which the Canadian government agreed to. By the time the war broke out, the British had changed their tune and were trying to get the various armies of the Empire to use the Lee-Enfield, but Canada already had a lot of Ross rifles, and even once they wanted to replace them, the British didn't have enough to replace them all (and attempts to do so were slowed down by Sam Hughes' antics).
• The German StG 44 is widely considered the Ur-Example 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 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.
  • Similarly, the FG 42's action was so delicate that full-auto fire could potentially break the gun apart; this was a problem for a few other weapons around that time and later, too, like a fully automatic version of the Soviet SVT-40 rifle and the M60, mentioned below, which was based on the FG 42's action.
• The IMI/Magnum Research Inc. Desert Eagle has a higher than usual tendency to not cycle properly, one of many reasons why it's loathed by some gun enthusiasts. Manuals for later models include a line about how failure to cycle can be caused by the operator not holding the gun firmly enough, resulting in the whole weapon moving backwards instead of the slide. So as far as they are concerned, the problem is Shur-Fine wrists.
  • That problem is known as "limp-wristing", as noted on the main page's opening. Any autoloading pistol, if you don't resist the recoil enough and simply let it move backwards and upwards with your hand, will jam. This is a bigger problem for the Desert Eagle compared to most pistols because it fires big-ass rounds, and big-ass rounds, generally, means huge recoil,^note the .357 versions actually have relatively low recoil, at least for people who can handle holding the gun in the first place, precisely because it's such a heavy pistol, but .357, by virtue of being the smallest of the Desert Eagle's possible chamberings, is viewed as the least cool of them, so you never see or hear about Deagles chambered in it which results in the gun being harder to handle properly than your usual 9mm, causing a jam. Many Desert Eagle owners who can get a good grip and resist the recoil usually say that it's a reliable enough weapon.
    • Its magazine design can also cause issues, as it's a "free-floating" magazine; pressing upward on the magazine, either by using a(n incorrect) teacup grip or by resting the grip on a surface while shooting, can cause it to jam. This is enough of a potential problem to warrant a mention by the manufacturer. While this isn't a real problem for target shooters in a controlled environment (where it was intended to be used anyway), it's more than enough to prevent it from ever holding any sort of "duty" role - the only actual military use it's ever had has been with Polish special forces, who in general seem to favor bulky and impractical handguns since they also use the Mk 23.
  • It can also happen if you get wimpy rounds that don't move the Desert Eagle's heavy slide back enough. Unlike with .44 and .357 Magnum revolvers, the Desert Eagle when chambered for one of those rounds can't be used effectively with .44 or .38 Special, unless the springs are swapped out to account for the lower pressure rounds. Otherwise, you'll have to rack the slide manually for every shot, which obviously defeats the purpose of a semi-automatic.
  • Early in the Desert Eagle's life, it wasn't widely understood as being closer to an M16 in action than a normal automatic pistol or revolver. The direct gas system taps gas from behind the bullet using a port drilled into the barrel. Most revolver rounds are all lead, without a copper jacket. The soft lead would get shorn off and clog the gas port, causing a failure to cycle and being a complete pain in the ass to clean out. When using jacketed rounds, as recommended by the manufacturer, the gun works just fine, although there are still some cycling issues inherent to using rimmed revolver cartridges in an automatic.
• The M50 and M55 Reising were submachine guns issued to the Marines during World War II as a substitute for Thompsons, which were in short supply (especially for the Marine Corps, which always had to wait until Army and Navy orders were filled before getting anything) and too bulky and heavy for constant jungle patrols. The Reising was accurate and reliable in trials — unfortunately, the trials were designed for a civilian law enforcement weapon, not a military one. While a cop would have no trouble with his gun (since he'd only be using it in his own city and would be keeping it in storage most of the time), the complex internals of the gun would easily foul and jam in the sand, mud, and salt water of the Pacific campaign. The design of the magazine (along with poor subcontractor manufacturing quality) meant that it could also easily be slightly damaged and therefore be made useless. The folding stock of the M55 lacked any sort of locking mechanism to hold it in place, thus it would often fold in by itself when fired. It would even jam just from too-humid air, which rusted the firing pin. As if this wasn't enough, the weapon was cocked by pulling back a tab attached to the bolt... at the bottom of the handguard. In other words, a rapidly reciprocating piece of metal right by your delicate fingers. The cocking piece was inside the handguard (which had a groove cut into it for that purpose), meaning that your fingers were probably safe... unless you accidentally slipped them into the groove instead of around the side.^note This would be very bad, as the cocking tab was strong enough to break your finger. But this provided the most common of the Reising's many opportunities to jam; if the groove filled with mud, the cocking lever would be blocked from moving. To make things worse, the Reising had parts that didn't properly interchange from one gun to the next, and replacement parts needed to be hand-fitted. The only reason the Marines used them at all was they were available immediately, rather than "maybe in a few months" like the Thompson. Not surprisingly, Marines would take almost anything else and dump their guns as soon as possible. Lt. Col. Merritt Edson commanded his battalion to dump all of their Reisings in a river so they could draw better guns. One NCO reportedly "decommissioned" his gun by smashing the stock over the head of a rather unruly prisoner in the brig. After the Marines' dismal experience with it in the Pacific, the remaining Reisings were either assigned to duty they were more suitable for - namely stateside police, factory guards and Coast Guard patrols - or foisted off on Canada and Russia, the former of whom also only gave theirs to battalions that were stationed in Canada or guards at local POW camps.
• The FAMAS F1 was designed a few years after France withdrew from NATO^note Sort of. France withdrew from NATO's military command structure after the US and UK basically laughed at their demand to be given equal authority of NATO operations, but they remained a NATO member. Given that NATO is an exclusively military alliance, what that distinction actually meant is somewhat complicated., in turn allowing France to design a new infantry weapon without being forced to comply to NATO standards. The result was one of the most mind-bogglingly weird and boneheaded assault rifles designs of the twentieth century, not helped by a laundry list of poor decisions. The downsides stem from the fact that the FAMAS F1 uses a rifling twist rate of 1 turn in 12 inches, same as early versions of the American M16 rather than the faster 1 in 7 rate preferred by other European NATO members, and uses a lever-delayed blowback mechanism, which has a nasty tendency to mangle brass casings on ejection, necessitating use of locally-produced steel-cased 5.56mm "F1" cartridges; as time passed and production of the rifle and ammunition ceased, the French military was left sitting on their reserves. As operations in Afghanistan and Chad showed, when a standard FAMAS F1 was fed with modern NATO-standard 5.56 NATO ammunition, the effective range would drop to an abysmal average of 50 meters (about 165 ft; a modern 9x19mm pistol can equal this, for context), effectively making the rifle useless. Because France was not anymore able to produce this proprietary ammunition locally, they had to contract a manufacturer in the Emirates, however ammo purchased from them turned out to be of low quality and poor manufacture; coupled with an awkward, proprietary 25-round magazine instead of STANAG-compliant magazines (some genius thought it would be a great idea to go with cheap magazines designed to be thrown away after being emptied once... and then later some other genius decided it would be a great idea to save money by reusing the cheap disposable magazines), this effectively killed the F1 as an effective, modern-day infantry rifle. Nearly all of those problems were fixed with the more modern variants, such as the FAMAS G2, which has a STANAG magwell and a barrel with a 1:9 twist rate that can work with both local F1 cartridges and the now-standard NATO SS109. However, the G2 was never purchased in high numbers by the French military (only the Navy officially adopted it), citing an ever-shrinking budget, and an administration unwilling to replace the some 300,000 F1s equipping the armories. The French military finally announced in September 2016 that they would be replacing the FAMAS with the HK416 beginning in 2017.
• 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 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, due to the parts being built by cheap subcontractors rather than Beretta itself. Furthermore, the M9s 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).
  • Interestingly, almost the exact same issue has befallen a Beretta clone, the Vektor SP1, though in its case due to wear and old age rather than poor manufacturing. Forgotten Weapons details a batch of pistols imported to the US in mid-2020, several of which have locking blocks that are cracked and ready to fail at best, and already missing one or both locking lugs at worst. Fortunately, being a clone of the Beretta, the designs are similar enough that a Beretta locking block is a cheap and more effective replacement.
  • 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.
  • Ironically, the government standard Colt M1911 was less reliable 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.
• Instead of adopting the M9, Delta Force stubbornly stuck with their 1911s into the 2000s, when they attempted to switch to the double-stack 2011 design by STI (now known as Staccato), famous for pioneering the platform in competition use. Unfortunately for STI, 2011s at the time were notorious for having magazine reliability issues owing to them being designed for .45 ACP and having to be adapted to .40 S&W, which at the time had reached its peak of being the tactical pistol round of choice and had been specified for Delta's new sidearm. Delta Force soon returned all of their 2011s to STI, who promptly quietly sold them onto the civilian market without mentioning they had briefly been used by Delta Force.
• The French MAS 44, 49 and 49/56 rifles have been known to slam-fire due to their free-floating firing pins getting stuck in the forward position, though only with commercial ammunition. The free-floating firing pin was never a problem with French military ammo, which has unusually hard primers even by military standards, and in military service they were famous for extreme reliability. But the 7.5x54mm ammo now produced for civilian sale has standard primers, and even a light strike can cause them to fire. Some owners solve this problem by grinding about half a millimeter off the tip of the firing pin or replacing it with a lighter titanium one, while others prefer to load their own ammo using the military-style hard primers that the gun was designed for.
  • The Russian SKS rifle (see the MythBusters episode above) also had a free-floating firing pin, which led to similar issues; earlier models had springs keeping the firing pin from getting stuck forward (a feature that was eliminated as a cost-cutting measure), and there are after-market kits to modify models that aren't already set up that way. This is at least a somewhat-common issue for almost every weapon to use a free-floating firing pin; even the SVD sniper rifle has been known for slam-firing when loaded with ammo using softer-than-standard primers, according to Wikipedia.
• The Carl Gustav M/45 had an unusual safety and was prone to going off when dropped.
• Pistol-grip fore-ends on pump-action shotguns commonly show up as a cool looking accessory in film, television, and videogames, making a shotgun nearly resemble the old dual pistol-grip M1928 Tommy gun of 1920s gangland infamy. In real life, these grips jut out at a cumbersome angle from a critical operating part which can make cycling the weapon difficult, provide poor ergonomics for supporting the hefty forward weight of a shotgun (which carries its ammunition in a magazine tube right over the slide), and, worst of all, create a risk of twisting or bending the gun's action bars, preventing the bolt from seating in battery or damaging the weapon.
• The M60 machine gun, despite being heavily inspired by the brilliant MG 42, has more than a few unbelievably baffling design flaws for a standard issue weapon:
  • The quick-change barrels all include bipods, non-adjustable front sights, and non-adjustable gas systems. On top of all this unnecessary extra weight from gunners effectively carrying half the gun on every spare barrel, this also meant that gunners can't keep the weapon on target during barrel changes, consistently hold zero between barrels, or adjust the gas system to account for differences in ammunition or fouling. And, despite all the other stuff they threw onto the spare barrels, the one thing they didn't put on them was a carrying handle, necessitating the issuing of easily misplaced asbestos gloves to gun crews or, apparently, using the bipods as a handle, which simply exacerbated the problem of keeping the weapon on-target between barrel changes in any situation other than a tripod mounting.
  • The barrel latch was very easily to accidentally hit, therefore making it very easily to drop the barrel while firing.
  • It was also both very easy and very possible to unknowingly reassemble the gun improperly during either maintenance, or barrel changes, by putting in the gas piston backwards. This has the effect of turning it into a single shot, straight pull, bolt action weapon.
  • The "proper" reloading procedure, going by period training films, was almost Byzantine in its complexity, involving lifting the top cover and locking the bolt back to ensure the weapon was empty, closing the top, pulling the trigger to lock the bolt forward, then forcing a belt in through the side before pulling the bolt back again - all of which was not helped by the fact that any other sort of action during that sequence, like pulling the bolt back before putting in the belt while the top cover was closed, or closing the top without the bolt locked back, could damage the feed system.
  • The sear and operating rod are easily worn down, meaning that the gun can suddenly "runaway" and continue firing even when the trigger has been released. Even worse, the safety and the trigger group are both housed within the pistol grip, which is only held on by a single pin and retaining clip. These can both be easily damaged or fall out during normal use, resulting in the whole trigger assembly falling off of the gun. Like the above, if such occurs while it's firing, it will continue to fire until it either jams or runs itself out of ammo.
  • Most of these issues got worse with wear, so the gun tended to perform passably if recently refit, but degrade horribly over time^note see this account from an armorer who worked with M60s, who notes that he thought he was doing a good job if only one-third of his company's M60s were in working order, and that there were significant periods where none of them were - the only reason his company didn't get reported for having no working machine guns was because they had to remove that from the reporting criteria to account for the M60; this was especially an issue for the M60E3, which attempted to reduce the weight of the weapon, but succeeded at the cost of making it even less reliable, since manufacturing techniques in the '80s still weren't up to snuff to making parts lighter without using weaker materials and making the parts more brittle. So much so that even the receivers got labelled as replaceable parts^note for context, a broken receiver on any other Army-issue weapon resulted in other working parts attached to it being stripped to replace the parts on other guns - only the trunnion was considered to be long lasting. Modern variants like the M60E4/E6 and Mk. 43 have finally fixed the M60's issues for beating themselves to death, but save for the SEALs and the Coast Guard, almost every branch of the US military has abandoned it, either switching to the M240 (deciding reliability at the cost of even worse mobility than the already-cumbersome M60 is a fair trade) or looking towards the newer Mk. 48, a 7.62mm conversion of the M249 that still manages to be lighter and more reliable than modern M60 variants.
  • To make matters even worse, US Army Ordnance rushed the design into service without actually making sure the package was idiot-proof (namely, putting the gun into simulated nasty field conditions and having soldiers try to fire and fix the thing in such conditions). That some veteran machine gunners willingly tossed the M60 away in exchange for some captured Soviet PKs during their service in Vietnam says a lot.
• 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 - one of the prototypes flatly refused 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, 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" 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).
• Even the memetically tough AK series of rifles can suffer from this, generally due to wildly differing build quality. You see, whilst the ones coming out of foundries in the former USSR or the more advanced Eastern Bloc nations will generally be of a high standard, because Mikhail Kalashnikov never patented it (he wasn't allowed to, to make it simpler for satellite states to produce their own and modify the design for their own needs) hundreds have been produced in underground factories or backstreet metal shops. The soundness of the design can only do so much for abysmal build quality.
  • 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 more substantial external dirt before it causes a jam. To give an idea, the YouTube channel InRange TV, run by Forgotten Weapons' 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 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 worst possible AKS-74U knockoff ever made, made out of a 5.56mm AK by a man with a parts kit, a Dremel, and no idea what he was doing. 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 since been fixed by Brandon Herrera, another gun-focused YouTube personality who is particularly associated with AKs.
  • Kalashnikov Concern itself made a video about the worst AKs their gunsmiths had ever seen. All of them were Chinese budget models created after China itself moved away from the platform and the US banned imports of guns from China. Examples from this line often ditched properly forged springs and used off-the-shelf parts from factories not concerned with gun-making, including using a pen spring in the extractor. The rifles often couldn't cycle properly when firing at an upwards angle, and sometimes the barrel would fall out when the weapon was pointing down. Construction of many such rifles was extremely weak, with selector levers often breaking apart, and one example was easily torn apart by hand. The gunsmith in question estimated they had a lifespan of a mere four hundred rounds before needing to be serviced again (for anyone who asks, four hundred rounds of life span means that the rifle would barely fire more than thirteen AK magazines' worth of ammunition before falling apart).
  • One thing that AK enthusiasts tend to forget (or conveniently ignore) that, like many Soviet bloc-issued military equipment of the mid-20th century, there was one quality above reliability that manufacturers prioritized: Replaceability/reparability. Soviet-era equipment often tended to be notoriously unreliable, but still extremely modular and easy to repair, even with makeshift parts if factory parts were unavailable. There's a reason that so many AKs were built, because often the best way to deal with a malfunctioning AK was to toss it and grab another AK.
  • 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 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 (which seem to lose their zero under any amount of recoil stress).
• So far as Chinese weapons production during the Cultural Revolution is concerned, the Type 63 assault rifle's performance suffered from its attempt to transition soldiers from the bolt-action rifle and the Norinco-produced versions of the SKS to the AK-derived Type 56 assault rifle. The Type 63, being a hybrid of Simonov's stock, barrel, and receiver with Kalashnikov's rotating bolt and gas system, is basically the Chinese equivalent of the American M14, including several of its inherent problems. It was promising, but the stock design did not make for good sustained automatic fire. Worse, the purging of intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution caused production delays and even unapproved design changes in the factories after 1969, resulting in some late-production guns being serviceable for less than 10,000 rounds as opposed to the original service life of 15,000 rounds.
• Thanks to Britain's strict firearms laws, the most readily available black-market handguns are literal Shur-Fine Guns, either ancient First or Second World War souvenirs stolen from some veteran's attic (and poorly maintained), or crude Metro 2033 or Chechnyan-style derringers kludged together from starting pistols or BB guns. Actually, firing one of the latter takes more balls than brains, as most such conversions will fire exactly once.
• 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 roughly 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.
  • The Mosin-Nagant safety's so unintuitive that most of the rifle's users to this day aren't even aware of it. When the bolt is closed and a round is chambered, there's a handle on the back end of the bolt that can be pulled back and twisted counterclockwise. This prevents the striker from dropping when the trigger is pulled. What makes this safety hard to use is that you're pulling directly against the striker's spring, which is already compressed, unlike using what's effectively a lever and a ramp to pull it back when opening the bolt.
• Germany's attempts at developing a military grade semi-auto rifle during World War II were plagued with issues:
  • 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 considering a port in the barrel is how most gas-operated designs function today, 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 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.
  • Mauser's G41 (M) was even worse, as it obeyed all the requirements of the order listed above. The complicated charging system, which only had the advantage of not letting mud into the receiver of the weapon, slowed production considerably as it had to operate like a bolt-action rifle when loading or when operating with the gas system deactivated. The Gewehr 41 (M) was also heavier than the Walther counterpart and was thus relegated to secondary line duties on the Eastern Front.
  • The Gewehr 43, developed from the Gewehr 41 (W), replaced the annular gas cylinder with a more conventional short-stroke gas piston system based on that of the Soviets' SVT-40, which for the most part eliminated inherent mechanical issues. However, by this point the war was turning south for Germany, so wartime shortages left them having to use cheap parts that broke easily (even in the modern day, several gunsmiths specialize in G43 parts for the purposes of keeping surplus examples firing), and constant cleaning was required thanks to an exposed extractor spring. Also, it had a rather nasty reputation of exploding if it was over-gassed.
• 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. They come anywhere from "as good as factory-made" to "will actually explode with 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 ones, and even then there's a chance they'll blow up).
• While the Soviet Union's RPG-7 rocket launcher is very reliable as it is mechanically an over-sized single-shot rifle, the extremely simple rocket just reeks of having No OSHA Compliance. The rocket has a rather unsafe impact fuse located on the tip which will cause the warhead to explode as soon as it strikes something, and the only thing resembling a safety is a plastic cap that covers the fuse while it's screwed on; once that is removed, there is literally nothing stopping it from detonating. Insurgents in The War on Terror often remove the cap so the weapon is ready to fire at any moment, which has lead to many horror stories of them being Hoist by Their Own Petards due to tripping while carrying the weapon and blowing themselves up.
• The Czech-made Skorpion is a rather distinctive little machine pistol and is by all accounts perfectly serviceable. Enter Armitage International, a South Carolina gun manufacturing company that decided that the original's 20 rounds of .32 ACP just weren't enough—no, they needed to copy the design wholesale and scale it up to take 9mm instead (since none of Česká zbrojovka's attempts to make Skorpions in anything other than .32 ACP entered mass-production). The end result is the Armitage International Scarab Skorpion, a titan of a machine pistol that takes modified MAC-10 magazines, meaning that it edges into being a small SMG. Where the Skorpion's toolings and functions work just fine, the Scarab is a mess. It loads poorly, feeds even worse, and manages to have almost every kind of problem one can imagine thanks to its rather primitive construction. To say that the damned thing can't even go through one magazine without having multiple issues is not an understatement. Just watch as Ian McCollum struggles to maintain his goodwill as the gun continues to give him grief.
• Subverted by World War II torpedoes, owing to how they work. Whilst torpedo launchers (torpedo tubes) usually were very reliable, the ammunition themselves weren't. Almost all WWII torpedoes were problematic.
  • German G7e torpedoes had notorious problems with magnetic detonators. The torpedoes tended to either ignore the magnetic field of the target completely or be too sensitive and explode prematurely. The problem was so dire the German U-boat captains preferred to use their deck guns when feasible or lay mines. Famed U-Boat Captain Günther Prien compared them to trying to shoot with a wooden rifle. A study ordered by Admiral Karl Donitz concluded that poor-quality torpedoes had cost U-boats one battleship, seven cruisers, seven destroyers, and five transports. Magnetic detonators of all nations had significant problems, in part because the designs failed to account for something that was little-known at the time: the strength of Earth's magnetic field is not constant. It varies at different latitudes, and this alters the magnetic signature of a steel hull that the detonator needs to react to.
  • The G7a torpedo, which had a contact detonator, was slightly more reliable, but also had a tendency to malfunction when least wanted. Of the seven torpedoes fired against HMS Royal Oak, only four detonated. Moreover, it ran on the surface, and left a telltale bubble wake, leaving the U-boat prone to retaliation by the enemy.
  • The American Mark 13 aerial torpedo, used on airplanes, was the epitome of reliably unreliable ordnance. It has been estimated that only 1 in 12 actually worked as designed with every failure imaginable being reported, from sinking straight to the bottom upon launch to running itself in circles. It was so unreliable that pilots eventually simply refused to carry it into battle and insisted on bombs instead. The problems of the Mk. 13 wouldn't be fully resolved until 1944. As an anecdote, three Japanese sailors from the aircraft carrier Kaga were rescued at Midway riding a dud Mk. 13 - its warhead had broken on contact and sunk. The rest of the torpedo had surfaced, effectively becoming a life preserver.
  • The US' submarine-launched Mark 14 torpedo had problems similar to the German torpedoes: both the magnetic and contact detonator versions had high failure rates. The worst problem was that the torpedo tended to run too deep - it simply passed under the enemy ship. This occurred because the test torpedoes were launched from normal atmospheric conditions. But since atmospheric pressure inside a submarine varied greatly, especially after prolonged submerged activity, the pressure inside the submarine would tamper with the sensitive instrumentation, effectively recalibrating the depth sensor. The detonator mechanism was a legacy from older models, and it worked for low-speed torpedoes, but for the high-speed Mark 14 torpedo, the same impact deceleration that caused the firing ring to move was also large enough to cause the firing pin stem to bind and fail to detonate the booster. Then there's also the problem of circular runs, where the torpedo being launched and programmed to turn wouldn't stop turning and ended up hitting the launching submarines. The surface version, the Mark 15, was fitted with collars to prevent this, but the submarine version never got this. Worse, the problem with the magnetic detonator was exacerbated by the fact that the Rear Admiral who helped develop the thing kept obstructing with the orders to deactivate its usage.
    • 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 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, 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 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.
  • A unique double subversion occurred with the Japanese "Long Lance" ship-launched Type 93 Sanso Gyorai. It was basically a device Made of Explodium. It had a larger warhead than any other torpedo of its era, longer range (40 km), and it was fast (almost 40 kn). All this was gained by using pure oxygen as propellant instead of compressed air. Whilst it was a formidable weapon, it was as dangerous to the user as it was to the enemy. Many Japanese warships were lost due to a hit on the torpedo tubes, detonating the ship's torpedo battery. Unfortunately, the Type 93 wasn't immune from duds either; a failure rate of 20% was estimated.
  • On the other hand, British and Italian torpedoes and their detonators usually worked, and Japanese submarine and aircraft-launched torpedoes, which used compressed air instead of pure oxygen, were fairly reliable. That said, they still had some duds, particularly in one engagement where the HMS Sheffield was saved from sinking to friendly fire when torpedo bombers launched from the Ark Royal, hunting for the Bismarck, mistook Sheffield for her and dropped torpedoes with magnetic detonators that failed and caused the vast majority to detonate prematurely. Sheffield went on to contact Ark Royal to inform them that their aircraft had torpedoed them by mistake, and also that the torpedoes didn't work. This ended up being a good thing, as it caused the torpedo bombers to switch to using the reliable back-up contact detonators, meaning that they actually worked during their next sortie, when they found and hit the Bismarck, damaging her steering and leaving her a sitting duck for the Royal Navy's battleships.
• The M16 assault rifle, early in its life, had this reputation thanks to political meddling from the US Army Ordnance Corps. The direct impingement gas system introduced carbon fouling and propellant gases into the rifle's interior by directly blowing some of the gas from firing against the bolt, which would be bad enough on its own, but was exacerbated by the fact that it was discovered almost at the last minute that the stick powder the rifle was tested with and designed for could not be mass-produced to the testing specifications, and the replacement was a form of ball powder that achieved the same ballistics as in testing but burned far dirtier. It didn't help that the original models of the rifle lacked a forward assist (rendering it totally inoperable when it jammed and requiring full disassembly to clear it) and were issued without cleaning kits and/or cleaning instructions due to false advertisement that the rifle was "self-cleaning"^note When used with proper ammunition, the gas tube - and only the gas tube - is considered self-cleaning, like all direct gas impingement systems. Someone somewhere took this to mean that the entire rifle didn't need to be cleaned manually. when no weapon is or ever has been, even today. Part of this was intentional sabotage from Army Ordnance, who wanted to go back to the 7.62mm M14 battle rifle simply because they wanted to look better than all the competition from the private sector. The Army's M16 also lacked chroming of the bore and chamber to save on costs (early testing models had these and were shown to still reliably function several years later). While quickly fixed (with the standardization of the Model 603, which had a forward assist and chrome-lined bore, as the M16A1 by 1967, around two or three years after the first mass adoption) as the soldiers were trained in its proper maintenance with a graphic manual on the subject by comic book great Will Eisner, the rifle has yet to shake off the reputation, and even modern versions that eliminate several of the earlier design issues are still saddled with the reputation for jamming at the drop of a hat. Many army veterans bitterly note that Army Ordnance never consulted them about how the M16 and/or its successors should have been designed and never tested the weapons in field conditions simulating those of the active front-line. It is worth noting that by the end of the war, the Vietcong had learned to dread the sound of what they called "The Black Rifle" and knew that when they were heard, major trouble was nearby. This could probably, however, be attributed as much to the elite forces who tended to wield said rifle as the rifle itself, if not moreso. It helped as well that a number of said elites had access to earlier versions of the rifle and the original ammunition it was designed for.
• American-made versions of the British Hispano .404 were unreliable, due to the use of a longer chamber (a flaw that was never corrected)^note The US considered all guns above 15mm caliber as artillery, which meant they were built to looser tolerances, which was the reason most American warplanes were equipped with the .50 caliber Browning instead. One of its descendants, the Colt Mk 12 autocannon, had a tendency to jam during hard maneuvers. Seeing as how dogfighting involves hard maneuvers, this was obviously bad for the plane and pilot.
• Guns on aircraft came back into use after, based on experience with the F-8 Crusader (which used the Mk 12 above and was nicknamed "The Last of the Gunfighters" for being the last US plane to have guns as its primary weapon), the Air Force tried to make later aircraft like the F-4 Phantom II use only missiles. The missile of choice, earlier variants of the heat-seeking AIM-9 Sidewinder, ended up being an incredibly finicky and temperamental weapon, which would often fail to launch entirely, would launch but fail to actually track the target in question, or would switch from tracking the heat of the target's jet exhaust to either tracking the heat from the jungle canopy below and hit the ground or the heat of the sun and make an ill-fated attempt to leave the Earth entirely - leaving plane and pilot totally at the mercy of Vietnamese MiGs, which still had cannons. Later variants of the Sidewinder are more reliable, to the point of being the heat-seeking air-to-air missile of choice for Western fighter planes and even several former Soviet states.
  • 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 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).
• Any guns made by the infamous "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 had gone 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 Heckler & Koch G36 assault rifle, which is the standard rifle of the German Bundeswehr and is used by military and police forces in more than 40 other countries, is to be phased out of Bundeswehr service by 2019, and will probably be phased out elsewhere, due to accuracy dropping significantly under sustained firing. The culprit in this case is under-engineering to save weight, which left a too-thin free-floating barrel that droops when hot, supported by polymers without any sort of insulation that soften when hot, which together can cause rounds to drop off target as much as 50 centimeters at a distance of 200 meters or 6 meters at 500 meters. This is a significant black eye for H&K, which had been long considered a highly reputable manufacturer that supplies arms in particular to top-tier special operations forces around the world. As of 2016, H&K is litigating the matter in court to lay the blame with the German government, and the government's position is clearly not helped by the fact that the military contract that resulted in the G36 was poorly worded, to say nothing of the fact that troops stuck in firefights tended to treat their assault rifles as light machine guns and lay down on the trigger rather than fire short bursts (which accounts for the accelerated overheating problems aside from the hot weather in Afghanistan). Ironically, the likeliest candidate to replace the G36 in many roles is the HK416, Heckler & Koch's piston-driven version of the M16, a weapon design that is now nearly 60 years old.
• The SIG Sauer P320. Originally released in 2014, the pistol largely flew under the radar of most gun buyers, until it was a finalist in the U.S. military's Modular Handgun System trials to find a replacement for the aging Beretta M9. On January 19, 2017, the P320 was announced as the winner of the MHS competition, and the U.S. Army would move to adopt it as its new duty handgun later that year. Interest in the P320 spiked after this, and its newfound fame led to pistoleros all across America buying it up. Then, six months later in July 2017, rumors started circulating that a certain police department was planning to suspend use of the pistol due to it not being drop-safe (i.e., the gun isn't safe to drop because it may fire). A week later on August 2, 2017, these rumors were confirmed when the Dallas Police Department did precisely that. Less than 48 hours later, SIG issued a statement claiming the pistols were safe, concluding with the sentence, "There have been zero (0) reported drop-related P320 incidents in the U.S. commercial market, with hundreds of thousands of guns delivered to date." The follow-up to that statement can be described as a very good example on why Tempting Fate is never a good idea:
  • A few days later on August 7, 2017, a lawsuit suddenly surfaced that had been filed on August 4 by a Stamford, Connecticut Special Response Team officer who claimed he had been seriously injured when his P320 had shot him in the leg after it dropped while the gun was still in its holster. The same day this was revealed, the firearms retailer Omaha Outdoors released a video proving the gun was not drop-safe and announced they were suspending all sales of the P320. The cause was tentatively determined to be because the P320's trigger is heavier than what a trigger on a polymer-framed gun would normally be, and because of this, when dropped at an angle that allows the slide to hit the ground, the trigger will move just far enough back to discharge a shot. The one P320 variant that did not fire at all when dropped was the P320 X-Five, a version of the firearm that has a lighter trigger. ^noteOther polymer guns such as Glocks or the Smith and Wesson M&P avoid this by having light triggers and some kind of safety on it that requires actual pressure on the front to move the trigger back; the P320 has no such safety. In response, SIG issued a press release claiming they would offer a to-be-determined "voluntary upgrade" of all P320 pistols, which later turned out to be a free modification to the trigger to make it lighter. It didn't stop a whole slew of videos uploaded to YouTube of other P320 owners testing to see if their guns were drop-safe... and more often than not, they weren't. One video shows the P320 firing even when dropped right-side up.
  • Another major aspect of the whole scandal is that the officer filing the lawsuit claimed his incident occurred on January 5, 2017, two weeks before the gun was selected as the winner of the MHS trials... meaning that, at most generous, the pistol had passed the U.S. military's tests without this flaw being discovered. A number of explanations have arisen, such as that the P320 being tested is a special model that comes with a manual safety, or that the government's drop-safe testing only requires a gun to drop on its muzzle and the sides (not the rear). But the most contentious explanation is that the P320 may have cheated its way through the trials. As a matter of fact, the other finalist in the MHS competition, Glock, had already attempted to file a complaint (which was later denied) against the U.S. Army for how the trials were conducted, insinuating that the trials as designed had implicitly and unfairly favored SIG all along. With these drop-safe revelations now occurring, Glock may have a point. Ironically, some of SIG's marketing for the P320 has focused on its supposed safety advantage based on the fact that the pistol can be disassembled without dry firing, which in particular distinguishes it from the ubiquitous Glock.
  • Yet another explanation may be that the MHS trials were rushed and improperly conducted (more details here). Some have noted that the announcement of the P320 being the winner was done on a significant date, January 19, which was 24 hours before Donald Trump was inaugurated as President of the United States. Theories have been put forth that Army bureaucrats feared that Trump would order a review and even a redo of the already over-budget and behind-schedule MHS process (and considering how hard he had been on other infamously expensive weapons systems, he very well may have), and rushed the approval process simply to avoid his scrutiny.
  • A follow-up report done by CNN in June 2018 shed more light on the issue, identified more accidental discharges than previously known, and revealed that the military had discovered the problem in its drop testing. The military's pistols were fixed using the same modification that SIG later offered to the public... which explains why SIG had a fix for the problem ready to go suspiciously fast.
• SIG is starting to develop a worrisome reputation for this, or at least its Exeter, New Hampshire plant is. Its 2018 follow-up to the P320, the eagerly anticipated P365 that is SIG's entry to the very popular 9mm micro-compact market (where it competes with guns like the Smith & Wesson Shield and Glock 43), has been reported to have various issues including returning to battery, barrels warping, and broken firing pins after less than a month on the market. SIG is fixing guns under warranty as customers report problems, and supposedly has been retooling production to correct these issues, but it hasn't stopped them from being accused of letting their customers do "beta testing" on unfinished products. Some of these issues may be due to the P320 and P365 representing a significant shift in design philosophy for SIG, from its traditional steel-framed, hammer-fired guns to polymer-framed, striker-fired guns (that are $300-$500 cheaper). But given the company's heavy presence in the law enforcement and (now) military markets, quality control issues are an ominous development. Perhaps SIG should have tried field-testing its newer products before marketing them.
• SIG strikes again with the Cross bolt-action rifle: a review video by the gun YouTubr Nutnfancy showed that the trigger was unreliable and that the rifle could also fire simply by working the bolt without touching the trigger, usually after it fails to fire when pulling the trigger. The same week that video was released, SIG recalled all Cross rifles.
• The 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, 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, Ian McCollum 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 eventually jammed so badly that they had to call it a day so they could take it apart to get it working again. And then, 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, lovingly demonstrated through the rest of the video with slow-motion footage of the gun doing everything except simply cycling and ejecting correctly. You can see him tear into its shoddy design here.
• The WWII era Soviet Kirov-class cruiser's 180mm guns had a reputation for exceptionally poor accuracy, to the point it was said you were safest if you were in one of the ships a Kirov was attempting to shoot. While the B-1-P Pattern 1932 cannons were perfectly fine in and of themselves, the turrets they were mounted in were far too small to fit three guns in them (it was supposed to be a double turret, not triple turret). The result was that the guns were so close together that their muzzle blast blew each other's shells off course. It didn't help that the turret design also gave Kirovs an abysmally slow reload speed for a cruiser. Also, they were built in two different variations, one each with deep and shallow rifling, which required entirely different ammo - and even worse, the shallow-rifled versions had much worse life expectancies, requiring total replacement after at most seventy shells, versus the average of 320 the deep-rifled variants could handle.
• The ČZ vz. 38 hits a solid two-fer of mediocrity by having a poor overall operating history and the firearms equivalent of a face for radio. Its flaws were primarily related to its choice of round — .380 ACP, itself a breathtakingly mediocre cartridge — and simply being poorly designed around such a stubby cartridge. Its trigger pull is abominably heavy, made worse by the fact that it is double action only, with no external hammer for single-action operation. The end result is a gun that is difficult to fire in the first place, needlessly heavy and bulky, tends to fire in only the approximate direction of the intended target when you finally pull the trigger, and has no manual safety and thus no guarantee that a sharp blow of some kind wouldn't drop the internal hammer. Ian McCollum also showed that it was easy for a well-trained martial artist to steal the slide right off the gun. 10,000 were made for a military contract that never materialized, and it is a safe bet that the police and security departments who bought the gun were only too happy to be rid of it once something better inevitably showed up.
• The worst shotgun in the entire world is probably the Cobray Terminator, a terrifying-looking single-shot slam-fire abomination that aesthetically mimics a submachine gun. Ian McCollum tried it out at the range and concluded that the design was the absolute worst for any modern firearm.
  • The barrel is the only important working component, as it slides backwards to smash a chambered shotgun shell into the breech's stationary firing pin. As the shell fires, the barrel's locking tab springs to lock the barrel to the receiver (if you can even call it that) so that the barrel won't bounce. Opening the action requires depression of the locking tab and shoving the barrel handle forward. Good luck getting the thing to fire half the time! As shown on Forgotten Weapons, Ian could barely get the gun to fire 50% of the time, with its ability to actually fire or not seemingly depending on the individual shotgun shell (since one shell would fire on the first try, then the next would refuse to work no matter how many times he tried), and he ultimately needed to stop due to the barrel slam's recoil being genuinely painful when it actually did fire.
• The Mle. 1915 'Ruby' .32 ACP, which was the standard sidearm for French officers through most of World War I and is one of the most produced sidearms in history, has a reputation for highly variable quality, with some being excellent and others atrocious. While the FN1903 .32 ACP (a licensed version of the Colt 1903 Hammerless designed by John Browning, produced by Belgian manufacturer Fabrique National) was and remains well-regarded, the original factories were in the occupied zone, and neither Belgium nor France were in any position to set up new production lines. Desperate for more handguns of all sizes and types, French officials turned to a Spanish gun firm (Gabilondo y Urresti^note one of several traditional gunsmithing companies in the Ybarra region of Basque country) who were already making a knock-off of the 1903 Hammerless^note due to deliberate Loophole Abuse in Spanish copyright laws of the time; the law had an anti-fraud clause which stated that a patented device had to be actively manufactured or licensed for manufacture before the pending period ended for the patent to be upheld, but a protectionist sub-clause was added requiring the manufacturing to be in Spain proper, meaning that Browning's patents weren't enforced and agreed to reconfigure their production line to match the French specifications.^note This included them getting access to both the original licensed design - which the Belgians were probably quite happy to provide under the circumstances - and better quality tooling and steel than the Ybarra gunsmiths previously could afford. The first several batches of Gabilondo Rubies used this better process and gunmetal, and were notably better than their earlier products, but the agreement only applied to a few of the companies, so pretty soon the poor-quality gunmetal came back in. This worked out well at first, but as the demand rapidly outstripped production capacity, these gunsmiths began sub-contracting out more and more of the work, often to inferior gun manufacturers, and over time even the better gunsmiths began to let quality slide in order to produce the mountains of guns needed on the Western and Greek fronts. While they were generally rugged and dependable (mostly due to the simplicity of Browning's design), parts interchangeability quickly went out the window (with some models of this supposedly standardized gun barely even resembling the original), and the worst examples were known for misfires, jams, and a host of other problems. After the war, the French army destroyed the worst offenders, sold off many more, and still held enough of them in stock to see them through World War II and beyond.
• The 2020 production run of the Colt Python has been so horribly unreliable (to the point that the cylinder will jam up even if the gun is perfectly clean) that Colt has issued a recall. One wonders if any form of live-fire testing was done beforehand. Apparently, Colt assumed they could just dust off the old blueprints and cash in on the gun's newfound fame from its prominent usage in The Walking Dead, without bothering to make sure they'd implemented everything correctly.
• This is why the Aurora, Colorado theater shooting wasn't even deadlier than it was. The shooter brought a semi-automatic Armalite pattern rifle with a 100-round drum magazine that, fortunately for the people he was trying to kill, jammed during the shooting, forcing him to switch to a less powerful pistol. This malfunction bought some people time to escape. Police stated that, had his rifle not jammed, the body count likely would've been much higher than twelve dead and fifty-eight wounded.
• Many gun-control proponents have presented smart guns as a means of reaching a compromise with gun-rights activists, but the latter group asked hackers to show why tying the trigger of a gun to a computer system is a bad idea. Either the recognition system fails to allow the rightful person to fire the smart gun, or a criminal finds a low-tech method to bypass the recognition system altogether and force the trigger to work without the electronics. In fact, some smart gun recognition systems can be disabled with ordinary refrigerator magnets, allowing a criminal to steal a smart gun and use it without the recognition key.
• The main reason why the neo-Nazi Halle synagogue shooter didn't kill more people was that his two Luty submachine guns used home-made "rocket candy" as propellent for his ammunition, and owing to the massive fouling it produces, his guns jammed or misfired repeatedly. Reportedly, the livestream of his crimes that he uploaded to Twitch captured him complaining about their unreliability.
• The Ward-Burton managed to be one of those rifles that American troops wouldn't trust with their lives. While it was simple and mechanically reliable for its day, the Ward-Burton rifle had a very odd safety procedure: The bolt handle was supposed to be lifted a few degrees from its firing position (thus disabling the trigger sear) and a small locking piece in the receiver frame would then be slotted into a corresponding position within the bolt handle base. This particular undertaking was not something easily taught to soldiers of the period. Worse, there was no external indicator to let users know that the rifle had a cartridge in the chamber. Not surprisingly, this resulted in very prolific accidents where soldiers accidentally shot each other with supposedly empty rifles. The result of this embarrassing debut of bolt-action rifles was that the US Army adopted the single-shot Trapdoor Springfield rifles instead.

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