CHANGING HATS

After three weeks on the road, about 36,000 shots fired by 90 or so students. I have some time at home, which will be devoted to writing. “Instructor” cap comes off, “gun writer” hat goes on. Ten or so guns will be tested in the coming days.

A couple of ‘em, I’ve already been running while “on the road” teaching. One was a P320, SIG’s new striker-fired pistol. It gave me a 300 out of 300 when I shot a pace-setter qualification with it for our Illinois class. If you’re testing a deer rifle for an outdoor sports magazine, you’ll want to go deer hunting with it; if you’re testing a combat pistol, well, you’ll want to shoot a “combat pistol course” with it to see how it performs. I spent a day carrying it; it rode perfectly in a Leather Arsenal inside the waistband holster made for a P250 the same length; no surprise, since the brilliant SIG engineer Ethan Lessard developed the P320 from the SIG P250 platform. The P320 in the full size configuration is not a small pistol, but it’s no trick to conceal a fairly large handgun if you know how.

If you’ve read many of my articles in the gun magazines, you’ve seen me refer to the “test team,” a group which varies depending on where I am when the gun is being tested. If you read my latest book, “Gun Digest Book of the SIG-Sauer, Second Edition” you saw the picture of me with designer Ethan Lessard, and the prototype P320 whose frame was marked “P250” because it was an early version photographed at the SIG factory in Exeter, NH before the final gun actually came out. Researching who developed the gun, and why, and how is part of the story, too. When I write a gun up for a magazine, it ain’t just me pullin’ the trigger and puttin’ holes in targets: there are small people and big people, lefties and righties, men and women, to see how the gun works for different potential users.

Sometimes I feel like Tom Sawyer whitewashing the fence: my friends do the work, and I get the credit, and my friends like being “the first on their block” to test a new gun most others have only “heard announced on the Internet” but haven’t actually seen or touched. But, the fact is, it gives me a helluva lot more useful feedback to pass on to readers about how the given gun is gonna work for a wide variety of users.

Confession: teaching may be the most satisfying part of my job description, but testing is sometimes the most fun part.

Spoiler alert: No, the slightly higher bore axis of the SIG P320 doesn’t make it kick noticeably more than any similar 9mm pistol, and yes, you can shoot a perfect score with it out-of-the-box with 40-some people looking over your shoulder.

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