{"id":5748,"date":"2017-02-03T17:38:25","date_gmt":"2017-02-03T22:38:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.luckygunner.com\/lounge\/?p=5748"},"modified":"2017-03-03T15:45:44","modified_gmt":"2017-03-03T20:45:44","slug":"the-handgun-test","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.luckygunner.com\/lounge\/the-handgun-test\/","title":{"rendered":"The Handgun Test: Making Gun Reviews That Don’t Suck"},"content":{"rendered":"

Note: If you came here looking for the handgun scoreboard, try this page<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>

This post has been a long time coming. The Lucky Gunner Lounge is only three years old, but I wrote my first gun reviews years before that. It was always my goal in these reviews to avoid some of the common pitfalls that frequently bothered me about other gun reviews I read and watched\u00a0— specifically, the tendency to drone\u00a0endlessly about technical details that don’t communicate anything to the average shooter about whether the gun is actually worth buying. Sure, there’s an audience for that sort of minutiae, but\u00a0much of that information falls outside of the realm of what I would consider to be “useful consumer advice.”<\/p>

But perhaps the more egregious sin of gun writers — and one I am more apt to fall into myself — is the habit of falling back on vague cliches to describe the experience of shooting a particular firearm. If you’re not going to bother to get out a shot timer and write down some numbers, don’t\u00a0tell me that a gun is “capable of quick follow-up shots” or that it has “manageable recoil.” Without any kind of objective measurement, those statements are meaningless to the audience.<\/p>

I have tried to avoid this kind of subjectivity in the gun reviews I do for Lucky Gunner, but it’s challenging. Without some fixed frame of reference, there are only so many ways to describe how well a gun shoots. In an effort to provide as much objective information as possible, my reviews usually include the results of bench rest group for accuracy testing, or I’ll weigh the gun’s trigger pull, or offer all of\u00a0gun\u2019s external dimensions, but that still doesn\u2019t give you a very good idea of how well that gun performs as a tool of self-defense. In reality, no gun review can give you all the information you might need to know, but a good review should offer more than just vague assurances of what a gun is capable of.<\/p>

With that in mind, today I’m unveiling\u00a0the Lucky Gunner Handgun Test — a project I’ve been working on for the last few months\u00a0to help\u00a0make Lucky Gunner\u2019s reviews better. The video below has a summary of the plan, or you can keep reading for a more detailed account.<\/p>