Some years ago, a woman came up to me as the class I was teaching was breaking up. I had seen her down at the other end of the range blasting away with some kind of auto, but otherwise paid no attention.
“Are you an instructor,” she asked, perhaps prompted by my hat, which declared, in bold letters “INSTRUCTOR.”
“Indeed,” I replied.
“Well,” she said, “I bought this pistol at the recommendation of a police officer in my town, but there seems to be something wrong with it. Would you take a look?”
“Well,” I replied looking at my watch, “I have only a few minutes, but I’ll take a quick look.”
After packing my own stuff and putting it in the trunk, I went down the other end of the range. It seems this lady had blasted about half a box of 9mm at a 2-foot by 3-foot target 25 yards away and landed nary a single round on paper. She had, however, properly cleared her weapon, removed the magazine, and laid it down on the bench.
I did a quick inspection and then a quick field strip and could find nothing wrong with her gun, a pistol I’d therefore never held, much less fired. I reported this to her, and said that maybe if I fired a couple of rounds I could find the problem. She invited me to do so.
So I loaded two magazines with three rounds each and fired them. The pistol, while small in size, felt good in my hands and the sights were much better than you find on small autos (of which I’ve never been a fan). The pistol functioned flawlessly. We then walked to the target and observed the arrival on paper of two 3-shot groups; each group was about 2-inches in diameter and the two groups were about 2 inches apart on centers.
“Don’t think there’s anything wrong with your pistol,” I observed, perhaps unnecessarily.
I then made some inquiries and learned that the lady was a young professional (accountant or something, I think) with a suburban office; her job required that she be out and about most weekday nights visiting clients. She had taken a firearms course that seems to have taught her some of the rules of safety (but little about marksmanship), and then purchased this particular pistol on, as she had noted earlier, the recommendation of a police officer in her town.
‘Twasn’t good advice, as the learning tool for new handgunners is the revolver. I gave her a bit of information about the difference between pistols and revolvers, both from a pragmatic and from a learning-curve perspective, and then I gave her less than 15 minutes of rudimentary marksmanship instruction. I then looked at my watch again and said, “I really have to go now.” But before I left, she pumped off two 5-round magazines and printed all but one or two on the paper.
Two days later I went down to Four Seasons and bought a SIG 239.
I am not, I say again, generally a fan of small auto pistols. But this one is not only mechanically superb and capable of extraordinary accuracy, but it relates to the user in terms of feel, functions and sights better than any small auto, and many full-size autos, I’ve encountered.
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