What's that? You don't like guns? You don't want to talk about guns? Funny. I don't recall asking.

Sit down and listen to me rant about a gun. Or don't. I don't give a shit.

This absolute abomination upon which your lamps almost certainly fell as you scrolled to this rant is a 3-inch snub barrel 1911 from Springfield Armory.

If you cringed just as hard reading that as I did writing it, then you know what this rant is about. If you didn't, then prepare to be educated.

I'll tell you this now: I'm not a gun nut. Feel free as a bird to correct me if I get anything wrong. But nobody else will listen to me.

Let's start with the gun itself. When John Moses Browning, Patron Saint of Firearm Design, created the M1911, he formed it specifically around the .45 Automatic Colt Pistol bullet. The five inch barrel, steel construction, and overall shape and structure was designed for one purpose: To make the most out of a .45 round. Five inches on the barrel gave the slide plenty of time to rack, strip a round, eject the spent casing, feed a new bullet into the chamber, and then reset, ready to fire once again. It was perfect. Full stop.

Then some fucker came along and said "But what if I chop two inches off?"

This created a cascade of problems. Forst and most glaringly: It just looks ugly. But beyond that, it doesn't work as a gun. Going from five inches to three means that the slide has basically no time to rack, strip, chamber, and reset. To get it to work, manufacturers stuff a tiny, extremely tense spring into the weapon, which means it snaps back with the force of a god. This means that the muzzle flip is so bad, if you have anything less than an iron grip, that gun will go flying out of your hands. Plus, since the barrel is so short, the majority of the powder doesn't even burn until the round leaves the barrel, leaving it with a deafening report and blinding muzzle flash. As if that wasn't bad enough, the snappy slide means jams and failure-to-feed issues are very common.

I'm out of characters now. Goodbye.