Prepping Guns: 4 Lessons To Learn From My Expensive Mistakes

It’s a hard thing to do, admit that you made a mistake… especially to do so in public. I’ve made a lot of them over the years, as have we all… and some of those prepping mistakes have been quite expensive. 

Expensive mistakes

When it comes to firearms, every company makes the occasional “lemon” that doesn’t operate as intended, or that has problems. Having said that, some companies simply make better guns than others. In addition, there may be absolutely nothing wrong with the gun, but from a prepping standpoint it’s purchase is still a mistake.

Let me share why

Here is a list of 4 things I have done wrong over the last 15 years when buying a prepper gun (samples to follow):

1. I bought a gun (of a good & popular brand) even though this particular model had bad reliability reviews early in it’s release… I purchased it because later models had the issue fixed.
2. I bought a gun from a company that I had a bad experience with previously.
3. I bought a gun that that ate expensive ammo quickly instead of the same gun in an affordable caliber. 
4. I bought a gun that I didn’t like the ergonomics of thinking “it’s OK, I will get used to it.”

Each of these mistakes ended up with me being unhappy with my purchase, and every gun listed here except one I have gotten rid of. 

The gun from mistake 1: Sig Sauer 556XI r 

I purchased a Sig Sauer 556XI r rifle in 7.62×39, even though the rifle had a LOT of early teething pains. Early production models were notorious for jamming, but Sig figured out the problems with the rifle and the later production guns like mine work fine. The problem? The gun had such a bad reputation that sales were poor, and they have discontinued it and parts availability is already limited. You know you are in trouble on a gun when they remove all references to it from their website within a year of your purchase.

My thought was I wanted a reliable, accurate 7.62×39 from a top manufacturer to be my main self defense gun. Well… now I have a gun, and can’t buy spare parts kits for it even though it’s only been out of production for a year. Since this is a $1600 gun, this is an “ouch” situation. This is the one gun I still own, I’m debating whether to keep it and try to find parts, or to sell it and cut my losses. It’s a great gun (mine didn’t have the defective gas rod that plagued the early production models) and goes bang every time. Time will tell.

The gun from mistake #2: The Chiappa Little Badger .22

There’s really no excuse for me on this one, after the horrible experiences I’ve had with Chiappa guns. You would think that after this experience I had with a gun from Chiappa (click me) I would have avoided further firearms from them. Nope, I was dumb.

I saw this little single shot survival rifle in a local gun shop, it was cheap and I had some time to kill so I bought it to be a bug-out bag gun. I got the gun home, opened the box and found that the rear sight had fallen off of the gun. It’s held on by a couple of tiny screws which were stripped out at the factory, so back to the LGS (which, by the way, is 25-miles from me) to get it repaired. I had to ship it off, at MY expense, to the factory repair facility, and two months later they shipped it back to my dealer. I drove up there, picked it up, went out and started shooting it when THIS happened: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvllw4qqfcg

Of course, the factory answers “It’s broke, ship it back at YOUR expense and we will fix it for you again”. I junked it. 

The gun from mistake #3: A Henry .22 Magnum lever gun.

Unlike the Chiappa, which was broken from the start and has never been fully functional, there was absolutely nothing whatever wrong with the Henry. It was a pretty gun with sharp-looking Missouri walnut stocks, the gun functioned flawlessly, it was dead-on accurate and everything about it was great… except… it did the exact same job as a Henry .22 non-magnum… and the non-magnum (.22LR, L & S) rounds are a fraction of the price as the magnum rounds. 

The only problem with the gun was it shot much more expensive ammo than it’s nearly identical brother that I still own… I ended up shooting the non-magnum a lot while the magnum sat there collecting dust. 

Eventually, I traded the magnum off. 

The gun from mistake #4: A Kel-Tec PF-9

It’s not that I found the PF-9 a bad gun… in fact, here’s the review I did of it (clicky) earlier.

The problem (as I state in the review) is that my thumb hit the magazine eject button every time I fired the gun, causing the magazine to drop free and turning my semi-auto CCW into a single shot.

Sadly, I noticed this in the gun shop when I was buying the gun, and I thought to myself  that I would simply adjust my grip to compensate for the problem. WRONG.  

For other people, this isn’t a problem and they love their PF-9’s. It just didn’t work FOR ME and I should have not been in denial in the gun shop and looked elsewhere. 

The Bottom Line:

Four purchases, four mistakes, four sets of regrets. I hope something I shared here may prevent you from making one or more of the same mistakes I made.