Biweekly Gun Shots 15 - The Absolute Worst Gun I Have Ever Owned...

...was a RG semiautomatic pistol in .25 caliber. This by coincidence, or due to lack of any gun smarts at all at the time of purchase, was my very first pistol. I bought it, if memory serves me right, for about $40 from a dealer in Las Vegas, Nevada quite some years back now. I was probably 21 or 22 years old at the time.

What can I say about it except maybe it would have been a better fishing sinker than it was a pistol. I don't remember how many rounds it held but you can figure around 7 or 8 fully loaded. I do recall it seemed cheap to me when I bought it, what with its flimsy plastic grips and just overall cheap look to it. It seemed cheaper yet, when it jammed quite a few times when I first fired it. It seemed cheaper yet, and bear in mind it was cheap at about $40, when I field stripped it for a cleaning and a spring fell out. I got it back in sort of, but the directions that came with it did not mention anything about springs that would fall out when cleaning it. I had to go back to the dealer to have it reinserted and he admonished me heartily for basically being a dork. Oh well - not only my first experience with my own pistol and with a crappy pistol but also with a pompous gun store jerk who just had to make me feel like a fool before fixing my gun.

Back to the pistol. As I recall, I practiced with it a bit and could actually hit something on the target from about 5 yards away. While practicing I learned another two things - .25 caliber ammo was expensive. The second thing I learned was that while it did not have much of a kick it had enough power to sling that slide back with enough oomph to tear open the flesh on my left thumb's forward knuckle when I held it in a two hand grip left thumb over the right one. OUCH - those two cuts through my knuckle (one cut from each side of the underside of the slide) that smarted and bled like a stuck pig. I think I did it twice before I realized why it was happening - as I said my first pistol. I guess I learned a third thing too - never hold a pistol like that.

I bought that pistol for one purpose - as a travel companion for a road trip I was to make by myself. Well not by myself, I had that little pistol and I had a little ball of fuzz (or whatever) with eyes and feet glued to it and an advertising label attached - sort of like the Geico stack of money but instead of cash for a body it was a ball of fuzzy material and it was green - maybe a time and a half as big as a large cherry. It was glued to my dashboard. I called it Zerk; and Zerk and I had quite some one sided conversations as I drove along the many - many - miles of that trip. The RG pistol, that I did not speak to; it was my silent traveling companion - there to speak only if I needed it to give out a loud report. Luckily I did not need it. Just before arriving at my journey's end, I took it apart and disposed of it into a deep bay (salt water) one piece chucked in one direction, a second piece in another direction, and so on until all the parts had vanished beneath the briny deep. Why did I do that to a perfectly good little piece of crap pistol? Well let me just say it would have been next to impossible for me to have obtained a pistol permit for it where I was headed. I should have just bought a shotgun, I would probably still have it but as I said I was pretty inexperienced in the world of guns at the time. Most of my experience until then had been shooting rifles at summer camp years before.

Do I miss that little Rotten Gun RG Pistol? Sure I do sometimes, Nah, not really - not all that much anyhow. It would have been nice if I could have kept it for use as a paperweight or as a fishing sinker. I suppose it was better suited to being a sinker and therefore it winding up below the waves seems a perfectly fitting place for it to have ended up.

All the best,
Glenn B