Recoil Magazine has finally done it, they found an actual factual porn star gun bunny.
But she’s not the problem, she’s the symptom.
The whole gun industry just sucks.
It’s not that different from the car industry, to be honest.
Both have succumbed to two powerful and evil forces: risk-averse marketing and efficiency.
Look at that cover. What do you see?
Plastic fantastic (both the pistols and the boobs) and ARs.
That’s it. That’s the gun industry right now.
Go to a gun store and tell me what you see.
ARs of every conceivable make, with little more than subtle differences in machining aesthetics.
Striker fired polymer pistols in 9mm, with little more than subtle variations in grip texture and color.
9mm carbines that are a combination of the above two groups.
A few 1911s.
A few bolt-action rifles that haven’t changed much in the last 60 years.
Somebody’s reproduction of a popular Cold War-era stamped sheet metal gun.
Glocks are popular so everyone makes their version of it.
ARs are popular so everyone makes their version of it.
That’s the industry. Designing something new and innovative is difficult and it comes with the risk that it won’t sell. Economics of scale and design for manufacturability on CNCs means that mass manufacture of common components is cheap.
So the entire gun industry has fallen towards the event horizon of mass manufacturing the same few most popular and common designs. Anything that strays from that is obscenely expensive. Of course, being obscenely expensive, they don’t sell as many so marketing is disinclined to try new, novel, and different again, further reinforcing the drive to the black hole of all guns being Glocks and ARs in different colors and a few different calibers.
Just watch Forgotten Weapons and see how the industry was before this attitude took over. Look at the diversity of designs.
I said it is like the car industry. We have a nostalgia for a time when cars were designed with flair. Fins, fairings, and flash.
Now, marketing and production efficiency, combined with fuel efficiency standards and fluid dynamics software, means that every new car on the road looks just like every other new car, all going towards the nexus of optimizing aerodynamics against interior space, which produces roughly the same shape every time.
No wonder pickups are so popular, at least you can tell a Ram from a Ford from a Chevy. Every crossover is indistinguishable from the next.
Panic buying of ARs and high capacity 9mms didn’t help matters either. That further reinforced the idea that all the consumer base wants is plastic wonder 9s and ARs.
So what is the gun industry left to do to draw your attention?
Tits and ass.
You can have this black plastic gun with a 4-inch barrel that holds 19 rounds of 9mm or that black plastic gun with a 4-inch barrel that holds 19 rounds of 9mm or maybe this other black plastic gun with a 4-inch barrel that holds 19 rounds of 9mm and for $100 more there is this special edition black plastic gun with a 4-inch barrel that holds 19 rounds of 9mm but done in Flat Dark Earth.
Are you bored by your choices?
Are exaggerated lighting cuts in that black plastic gun with a 4-inch barrel that holds 19 rounds of 9mm like your pistol had a run-in with a drunk machinist with an end mill not doing it for you?
Well here is an Instagram model with perky tits and a fantastic ass in tactical yoga pants and a skin-tight shooting shirt holding that black plastic gun with a 4-inch barrel that holds 19 rounds of 9mm.
The sad thing is that I know people in the industry who want to make new, novel, and interesting. I know people in the industry who are passionate firearms enthusiasts and want to build cool things that are different.
Market forces are like a riptide, they are almost impossible to fight against, and sadly I’ve watched some good people get washed out of the industry because of them.
It’s sad but the result is that the industry is selling more guns than ever before, but with less variety in designs since the dawning of the self-contained metallic cartridge.
The fewer the guns that are interesting, the more they distract you with tits.
I truly, honestly, sincerely, hope that if the panic buying market ever slows down, that at least some of the industry will use those record profits to take some risks and come up with something cool and different.
Too bad. I guess I’m lucky, since I haven’t read a gun magazine in eons. Ever since my safes were full.
I think I have just about one of everything.
Favorites are .45 1911, S&W highway patrol (first .357), 03A3 30-06, and everything from .22 up to 10mm, and of course ARs.
Started collection in 1982.
Most accurate handguns are S&W revolvers. Old S&W revolvers.
Thanks for the post!
I’ll add one other driving force to same same. Government regulations.
I’d love to design and sell guns to my friends. Maybe come up with something neat.
But having looked at a lot of designs a big issue fire me is accidental NFA item. It is hard to make a reliable semi auto that never goes boom boom.
And now that I’ve made one I’ve got to get a FFL in order to manufacturer and sell them.
This takes it from tinkering in your shop making a few per year to pay for your hobby to expensive to get started.
And nobody is pitching new home built ideas to the military because NFA. You need the FFL plus somebody to sign a letter for a product that you don’t have yet…
Look at forgotten weapons and the number of weapon submitted to gun trials before NFA and after
Therefore, if I didn’t now any better I’d say that you had been party to some of my conversations with other engineers in the gun industry because we have had that exact conversation several times.
Also, beyond the FFL, you have to deal with ITAR, Department of State, and Department of Commerce (and probably a few others) because firearms fall under those regulations as well with regards to exports/imports and protecting data related to defense articles. You’re in the hole a lot before you’ve made your first dollar with no real chance that you’ll recoup any of it.
Speaking of export laws, those come into play even if your product never leaves the USA — just the act of hiring non-citizens (or disclosing technical specs to such persons) can create trouble.
That applies to many other fields, by the way; I’ve been building computer systems that include encryption for decades now, and I’m way too familiar with all the c**p.
Go the PGP route and print it in a book and publish it.
IIRC all the export issues talked about with 3d printed guns suddenly disappeared once actual talk of court came up. I don’t think the gov wants to test that one in court.
To paraphrase an administrator in college: “We would love for you to sue us! Then we would know if we actually can do what we are doing to you or not!”
Oh boy. Where could I start on this one.
I’ve worked in the gun industry, just like j.Kb, in an R&D and Production Engineering capacity. I won’t say I’ve seen it all, but I’ve seen a lot.
To the nature of interesting designs, modern stuff bores me for the most part. I find myself being drawn to the older and “obsolete” designs. As a gun nerd, I always said my lottery collection would look like a mashup of Reed Knight’s collection and the video list for Forgotten Weapons. Things like De Lisle carbines, Merwin & Hulbert revolvers, LeMats, S&W Schofields, Remington Model 8s, M1941 Johnson rifles, the different pistol designs from Savage, Colt, etc. back in the early 1900s . . . you get the idea. I find myself jonesing more for a 3” Lew Horton Model 625 in .45 Colt, a 3” Mode 24, or any number of .32 revolvers or pistols than just about any plastic fantastic out there right now.
As to the culture of the gun industry, nothing j.Kb says is far from the mark at all. The industry is basically (1) who you know, (2) how good you look doing something for social media, (3) what’s the safest thing we can make so that our PowerPoint charts look good to the CEO.
If anything, all of it taught me to loathe influencer culture. People that provide nothing more to the industry than a nice ass in a pair of leggings getting the red carpet rolled out for them. People that have the ability to make shit happen, yeah get back to your cube and get to work (some companies get it about treating the good people right, but many don’t). I have (to steal a line from LawDog), paw to Freyja, been in the middle of a test for a product that was getting ready to launch and had a marketing guy kick me out of the range because some they had flown in an IG gun bunny to fuck around in the plant that day. Engineers, designers, production people that have devoted almost all of their professional lives get told to kick rocks but marketing types will bend over backwards to get on the good side of a gun bunny.
Not long after that incident, after already being on the downhill side of it all, I left the gun industry.
Funny thing, after I left my email/phone/LinkedIn was blowing up with recruiters wanting me to come work for XYZ gun companies. They all told me the same thing, they couldn’t get experienced engineers. Why, you ask? Experienced engineers had been leaving the gun industry and they don’t want back in, both because of the instability/uncertainty of the industry and because of the behavior of the companies towards employees.
Nope. Just a home machinist who does computer nerd stuff for money. As somebody that has made a few 80%’s into 99.99%s I was more interested in the issues of FFL and such as I didn’t want to actually “manufacture” firearms.
At the start of the panic, a good friend of mine was concerned because she didn’t have enough ammo/rifle for the situation. She got screwed by her ex, up to and including him selling 10s of thousands of rounds that were bought on her dime for them. He sold the ammo (some of it was mine actually) in order to pay his “bills” when he got kicked out.
She’s 7.62×39 person, I have some but not alot and not the sort of ammo supply that would make a difference. So I dropped off a battle pack and an AR, before I did that I had to make sure the AR I was loaning to her was built on a commercial lower and not an 80%.
Some AssTF wants to ask me about 80% and I have the jigs (self made) and prints and picture proof of making it. Damn sure I never bought an 80% made by somebody else.
I started looking at some of the older “how to make a gun” books. Something more than “here’s and 80%, drill here here and here and you have a firearm.” and too many of them come damn close to NFA (easily convertible to full automatic) or were NFA out of the box (Firing semi only but from an open bolt).
ATF scares me a whole lot.
It’s a market, so once the panic buying dies down, and the market becomes saturated, someone will come along with a new, innovative, exciting product, and they’ll sell like hotcakes (CZ Scorpion was one), then the gun manufacturers will jump onto THAT trend…it was ever thus…
To be fair, strip away the cool chassis, my Evo is basically the same as a Tec 9, or any other hammer fired straight blowback system.
I love mine, but it’s really not that innovative under the skin.
This isn’t my first time seeing this. I remember the the 80’s and Smith and Wesson with their gun of the month. The same basic actions reworked month after month. Colt and customer makers with a “new” 1911 every month. Then Glock love them or hate them came along and turned the market upside-down.
The truth is exotic never really sold. Its called forgotten weapons for a reason. Most of them flopped big time. If you didn’t get a military or law enforcement contract it doesn’t sell.
Sighting systems is where the breakthrough tech is right now. Someone will get it figured out and dominate the market.
Personally I’d love to pick up one of the new Savage Impulse rifles. I personally Haven’t seen them in the wild yet though.
Nothing new? Well, there’s Boberg, who didn’t succeed due to business issues, and his design is now made and sold by Bond Arms. It’s very nice. I want Bond to revive the .45 ACP variant, though; Boberg had trouble making that one reliable.
There are a pair of interesting gun designs in Neil Smith’s novels (Pallas and Ceres); I’d love to build those, but my machinist skills aren’t really good enough. It would be wonderful to see people’s reaction to a real life Ngu Departure, though. Given how it’s supposedly constructed — designed to be very easy and inexpensive to duplicate — it would be a lovely f*** you to the victim disarmers.
I think you are right to a great degree and id add in the significant weight of entrenchment. Same old people making the same old thing because its safe and reliably profitable and because theyve lost it all in the past on gambles.
Another factor is the consumer. Not the aveage end user but the more deeply involved consumer who will bitch about cost and novel ideas as unproven and the cost to sell novel ideas. Think of the great di vs piston debates of like 5-10 years ago. Ultimately meaningless but it produced its naysayers and fanbois at the time and i think damaged the possibility of some teritiarily involved people from supoorting a new product or trying something new.
You also have culture and entertainment driving a lot of this. Many dudes are getting into guns because of call of duty, modern warfare, and john wick. Thsts all high speed low drag plastic fantastic gun foo operator ars and glockesque pistols. Part of this is also a generstion of veterans driving culture and the market to procure the service weapons they are familiar with.
In the end for the average consumer and knee deep “gun guy” i think cost is the ultimate deciding factor. Why should i spend 3k on fancy rifle when i can spend 1k on ar that does the same thing arguably equally as well?
I actually have a background that makes me a candidate for the firearms industry. I was recently conacted by a headhunter looking for a new product design engineer for a pretty big name. All of the things you mentioned are why I didn’t even respond to the contact. Being in the industry is really cool, if you’re a gun guy anyway. It’s just not a great industry for a family man who needs stability.
Always reply nicey to the headhunter, even if you’re not interested. You never know when you might need a new job, and having a headhunter remembering you as the nice and polite prospect never hurts.
Chrisrm1, your assessment is spot on and I probably got contacted by that same headhunter. A lot of companies are having trouble recruiting engineers and other high skill professionals. It’s a great gig if you’re (1) a young/single professional or (2) an older person who doesn’t have the family obligations/concerns anymore and you’re looking to sock some more away until retirement comes. In between, not as much.
Also, being in the gun industry is also a good way to ruin being a gun guy. I bounced from the industry almost 2 years ago and I’ve barely picked up a gun since I left.
I beg to disagree. About cars:
I grew up in the 50’s. Started to drive in 1960. Sure, the cars looked different but all those fins, Jayne Mansfield bumpers and so forth were wastes of sheet metal. The cars were terrible. Couldn’t stop, couldn’t go around corners, were by today’s standards slow. And unreliable.
By 50K miles they were worn out.
About guns:
Back in the day if you bought a new 1911 the first thing you did was send it to a gunsmith so he could make it work. Maybe you could get a Hi- Power. And shoot ball ammo.
If you wanted a rifle you had lever and bolt actions, maybe a surplus Garand, Springfield or M1 carbine. In pistol caliber, a Thompson or a Marlin camp carbine. Maybe a Ruger .44 or later, a 10/22 ( which was and is wonderful)
but still, not much of a variety. The Remington Nylon 66 was a nice, innovative gun that didn’t sell.
Now we have a wide range of choices, all of which are affordable, reliable, accurate, and easily personalized.
They work first time, every time. ( Well, not Kel- Tecs)
We have 1911s that work out of the box in 9mm, .45, .38 Super, 10mm. We have itty- bitty pocket autos in .380, 9mm, and revolvers in .327, .38, and .357 mag. Yeah, there is silly stuff out there. Nobody makes you buy it.
As to gun bunnies:
I don’t mind. One thing they do is oppose the stereotype of gun folks as semi- toothed illiterate white trash. Yeah, even
porn stars, who are widely supposed to be liberal. Maybe a few professors should be in the mix, too. I was one. I do wish they’d use a little sex to sell training, though. Whatever it takes.
And a lot of the stuff we have now is almost boringly reliable. But it’s lighter, cheaper, more accurate, holds more rounds, is easier to get hits with, and so on.
My Shield 1.0 isn’t as ‘interesting’ as my Colt 1908 .380- but the Shield has way better sights, is easier to carry, holds a better & more efficient 9mm cartridge, and can be equipped with CT laser & flashlight combo, and still fit comfortably in a pocket.
Likewise, I could get a Ruger LCPII that is a little bigger and a lot lighter than my Browning 1906 .25acp, and same thing- better sights, reliability and so on.
We’ve never had it so good.
You should expect this sort of thing from Mall Ninja Monthly since they pander to the “influencer” wannabe crowd. On the bright side it shows diversity in the community to have a porn star on the. cover instead of the usual tattooed and bearded “operator”.
If you want more diverse content the Dillon Blue Press is free.
As for homogeneity in guns and cars, well some of it is convergence on what’s most efficient. In gun design we went from a period of diversity and experimentation into an era of relative design stability because designers and users figured out what worked. The experimental era largely ended in the 1950s when everyone agreed on basic mechanisms for various gun types. This is why the overwhelming majority of semi-auto pistols are Browning style tilting barrel short recoil or Browning style blowback. The other systems were less efficient, although we do have a few outliers with rotating barrel short recoil, gas delayed blowback and Boberg’s unique feed system.
It’s the same with cars, after settling on internal combustion around 1920 peak design diversity occurred in the 1960s when we had 2 stroke, 4 stroke, and rotary, front, rear and mid engines, front wheel drive and rear wheel drive etc. and the both the Fiat 128 and a combination of safety, emissions and fuel consumption regs forced a convergence on transverse engined front wheel drive cars for mainstream use. Then a bit of me tooism led to the dominance of crossovers and half of them looking like a Mazda CX-5.
There are still innovations out the like electric cars and the Savage Impulse straight pull bolt action which is both innovative and from an unexpected source.
I think everyone is missing the fundamental cause of the situation-that being that producers are in a wartime production mode, people are (with good reason) very apprehensive now,producers are cranking out standardized military pattern weapons that take military standard ammo & magazines, and the customer base is much wider and the advertising simply reflects that.
You get into business to move money from other people’s wallets to your’s.
If the other people want tupperware guns and the 1911 du jour, that is what you sell. Going off reservation is a good way to go bankrupt. There are a LOT more people willing to buy Glocks and their look alikes than anything innovative.
And, yes, the car industry is in the same boat. (No pun intended.) Either you are getting a Prius look alike, a BMW look alike, or a Korean mid-size look alike. Very few other options out there. Yeah… the big 3 are doing a retro muscle car revival thing now, but as soon as the boomers start moving out of their mid-life crisis phase that will die off quickly.
Thinking the gun industry would be any different is unrealistic.
“There are a LOT more people willing to buy Glocks and their look alikes than anything innovative.”
What he said. They make what sells. Of course there are people out there looking for something different, and those different things are out there, if you’re willing to pay for them.
“New and innovative” turns quickly into “very expensive” because creating a brand new gun design, making it reliable and safe and accurate and ergonomic and all the things it needs to be, can take lots and lots of R&D.
If, after bringing the new model to market, you can only expect to sell thousands of them rather than millions, that R&D expense has to be spread across fewer sales to make it up, therefore, the new, innovative thing you just marketed is going to be an order of magnitude more expense than the design that you’ve sold millions of to spread the R&D expenses across.
It’s a similar principle behind the gun bunnies. Marketers use these strategies because they work. Granted, more and more women are getting into the shooting sports and I encourage that, but the mechanical realm (cars, motorcycles, guns, etc) mostly interests men. Even with the women who shoot that I know, many of them aren’t interested in it in an intellectual way…it’s a means to an end. They want to defend themselves so they find a gun they’re happy with, learn how to feed it and care for it and use it, and they’re done. They have no interest in reading about how the latest and greatest imitation Glock or AR clone is so much better than the original design.
Of course there are exceptions, but that’s the point…they’re the exceptions. Marketing doesn’t market to the exceptions, they market to the key demographic.
Unless, of course, it’s a “woke” company…then they intentionally try to piss off their key demographic just to prove how enlightened they are.
I’m a male and you described me. I’ve always liked shooting, but I’m not a zealot about them. I found the few that I use, bought/traded for them, don’t need the latest/greatest/sexyist, end of story. To paraphrase Robert Duval, don’t want more, don’t need more, couldn’t afford more if I did.
Aside from all the tattoos she’s easy on the eyes. That being said I’d rather see Kim Rhode on the cover.
I don’t care for glocks & striker fired pistols are “meh” to me. My wife & I both prefer wheelguns to semi-autos, & while we are happy to put our hands on anything that reliably goes bang we will buy what feels good to shoot. She is shorter of stature so anything bullpup gets her attention, whereas anything I can tinker with gets mine. We like bolt guns but my .06 has too much recoil for her so we found something milder & I restocked it to fit to her. Our AR collection comtains lots of PSA & not a single Daniel Defense or Wilson Combat. No hate on them, but as Matt said in a comment above, why spend that kind of money when I can spend less than $1k for the same effect?
Not that I know this from personal observation, of course, but have any of you seen Ms. Rotten’s oeuvre?
Oh boy. Where could I start on this one.
I’ve worked in the gun industry, just like j.Kb, in an R&D and Production Engineering capacity. I won’t say I’ve seen it all, but I’ve seen a lot.
To the nature of interesting designs, modern stuff bores me for the most part. I find myself being drawn to the older and “obsolete” designs. As a gun nerd, I always said my lottery collection would look like a mashup of Reed Knight’s collection and the video list for Forgotten Weapons. Things like De Lisle carbines, Merwin & Hulbert revolvers, LeMats, S&W Schofields, Remington Model 8s, M1941 Johnson rifles, the different pistol designs from Savage, Colt, etc. back in the early 1900s . . . you get the idea. The older designs just evoke more of a sense of accomplishment than a lot of the stuff churned out nowadays I find myself jonesing more for a 3” Lew Horton Model 625 in .45 Colt, a 3” Mode 24, or any number of .32 revolvers or pistols than just about any plastic fantastic out there right now.
But, the thing is, those unique designs don’t sell. People want it cheap and they want it now. If that’s what’s moving, that’s what the bean counters want.
As to the culture of the gun industry, nothing j.Kb says is far from the mark at all. The industry is basically (1) who you know, (2) how good you look doing something for social media, (3) what’s the safest thing we can make so that our PowerPoint charts look good to the CEO.
If anything, all of it taught me to loathe influencer culture. People that provide nothing more to the industry than a nice ass in a pair of leggings getting the red carpet rolled out for them. People that have the ability to make shit happen, yeah get back to your cube and get to work (some companies get it about treating the good people right, but many don’t). I have (to steal a line from LawDog), paw to Freyja, been in the middle of a test for a product that was getting ready to launch and had a marketing guy kick me out of the range because some they had flown in an IG gun bunny to fuck around in the plant that day. Engineers, designers, production people that have devoted almost all of their professional lives get told to kick rocks but marketing types will bend over backwards to get on the good side of a gun bunny.
Not long after that incident, after already being on the downhill side of it all, I left the gun industry.
Funny thing, after I left my email/phone/LinkedIn was blowing up with recruiters wanting me to come work for XYZ gun companies. They all told me the same thing, they couldn’t get experienced engineers. Why, you ask? Experienced engineers had been leaving the gun industry and they don’t want back in, both because of the instability/uncertainty of the industry and because of the behavior of the companies towards employees.
Love them or hate them Keltec is one of the companies throwing down a bucket of legos and telling people to make something and they keep on doing it. Very interested in that new 5.7.
That new BRNO pistol looks awesome otherwise…..yeah its kinda 50 shades of beige due to safey safe will it sell marketing.
To be fair, the gun shops in the 80’s were mostly 1911’s, revolvers, and Remchester bolt actions for the new stuff.
The reason that everything looks alike is that we’re on the mature side of the development curve. The AR system and plastic SFA using a Browning style tilting barrel are the right mix of price, simplicity, useability, and reliability, after over a century of pretty much every other system being tried at one point or another. All the supposed innovation in gun designs usually isn’t.
It’s a lot like commercial jet aircraft. There’s a good reason why most large airliners look like they do, and really haven’t changed since the 50’s. It works.
Good point; the main exception to that is the choice of material. Plastic for gun frames, and plastic for airplanes, that’s about about the only change since 1950.
One could nitpic, and point out that we’ve also learned how to make the striker safer, and the turbine engine a lot more efficient, but those are more evolutionary over revolutionary changes.
And that’s the key- we’ve tried every other kind of firearms mechanism, from simple blowback to rotating barrel to swinging link to gas delay to roller lock to locking block and so on. Over time, Browning’s cammed tilting barrel has proven to work best, and is easy to replace, maintain, manufacture, and so on. So, it’s the standard now.
Plastic frames are super easy and cheap to make, reliable, are lighter than metal, and you can even do a Sig style replaceable chassis & FCU. So they’re standard.
Precisely.
And in fact, the same is true for many other aspects of technology. Evolution, but no fundamental change. Cars: the last major change happened around 1900. Airplanes: 1950-ish (jets). Computers: 1973 (microprocessor) or maybe the graphical user interface (around that same time). Printing: 1800s (litho -> offset printing and around that same time the Linotype). Individual communication: 1800s (telephone). Public communication: 1940 (TV) or even 1919 (broadcast radio).
The only new gun which I would consider revolutionary as of late…The Alien by Laugo Arms.
That is innovation.
Article is on point, but misses many other points which some here have addressed.
I don’t read Recoil magazine…glad you pointed out why I won’t either.
Another point re adoption of innovation that just occurred to me thanks to Renov8’s comment above.
Regulation prevents adaptation of innovative products.
I looked at the gun mentioned above and I was like whoa cool! I’d get one. But I live in CT so that means no 11+rd mags unless it takes a type I already have because of out AWB 2.0. So to me that becomes no sense paying a premium to instantly reduce the function due to regulation. Just stick with the same platforms you have to maintain function.
I’ve made that same decision multiple times. Why would I buy anything new that holds over 10 rounds if I cannot access that function? I have actively not bought guns because of this and went with other compatible platforms.
lack of innovation ????
I give you –
https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2021/08/05/arcflash-labs-gr-1-anvil/
The folks over at Arcflash labs are excited to announce the introduction of the world’s first and only handled Gauss rifle – the GR-1 ANIVL. The GR-1 is a high-energy Gauss rifle capable of producing up to 100 Joules (75 ft-lbs) of muzzle energy – similar to that of an air rifle. The GR-1 is being marketed as a novel armament concept to circumvent the need for gunpowder, avoid firearms infringement and provide a new way to arm yourself. Better yet, Arcflash has put their GR-1 ANVIL into production and it is currently available for pre-order.
100 Joules is a start
I want to see it at 1,000 joules ≈ 75,000fps
Not a fan of women no matter how attractive covered in tats. It’s a turn off.
A gun is not a fashion statement. Sure they all pretty much look alike because the buying public has decided (or it has been decided for them depending on who they listen to/read) what they want and aren’t all excited about the latest firearm style/design.
Do you see innovative and really different hammers? Not much difference amongst them except for the differences in specialized usage. Like there’s a claw hammer, there’s a roofing hammer and for a change of pace there’s a ball peen hammer. But they all pretty much look alike. And that’s a good thing.
You want to buy style or fashion then you will pay for it just as any other industry that caters to those who want style or fashion.
But if all you want or need is a tool that can fire a bullet at an oncoming threat then you’re not too worried about how it looks just whether it does the job.
I’ve never like this infatuation some seem to have for a firearm. As a style or fashion. It makes me realize how the gun deniers can fixate so quickly on a firearm being some sort of psychological crutch or substitute for something else.
I’ve never bought a firearm cause it looked kewl. Or tactical. Unless that was what it was for. (tactical i mean) I wanted a firearm of a certain size and occasionally of a certain price.
So let’s just let the market do it’s thing and sigh about the good old days when there were a jillion firearms out there each on with it’s very own type of bullet and cartridge making some of them almost impossible to find nowadays.
There’s a reason (and I really don’t like this but then there you are) that all the cars these days look alike. Because people aren’t buying them as a fashion statement or a style or a financial flag. And altho I wish it wasn’t so for many reasons i’m still happy to see it happen.
The reason so many cars/vehicles resemble each other? The same reason eggs all look alike, that’s the best shape to get them through the chicken/air.