“It’s all so boring.” That’s been my general attitude about the gun world for some time now. There aren’t a lot of new and interesting things coming out. Much of my writing now concerns older guns, cheap, crappy guns, and the occasional mechanical marvel…that likely failed. It’s largely because those are the guns I find interesting.
That’s not to say there aren’t some cool, weird guns. The Dragon by Rideout Arsenal is one of the more interesting options that have come out in the last five years. The problem with interesting guns these days, though, is that they’re expensive. Too expensive for me. I’m a beer guy with an interest in scotch that I can’t afford.
We’re arguably in the best of times for guns if you’re looking for modularity, reliability, and price. The problem is they are all kind of the same. Sure, the Smith & Wesson M&P and GLOCK aren’t identical, but the shooting experience is pretty much the same. That goes for every AR-15 anyone calls “new.”
People often look to the past and say the guns back then were more interesting, and while there were a lot of interesting guns, there were also olden times when things got boring. The interesting times are what I call chaos eras. These are the periods when people tried new things to see what would stick.
Inevitably, though, things would get boring again. So why does everything eventually get boring? It’s due to something called dominant design. When someone comes up with a good design that works and sells, everyone else seems to imitate or outright copy it. Success breeds imitators.
This is hardley exclusive to the gun industry. Successful products and technologies enter a period of dominant design. Cell phones, cars, and computers have all entered these phases. It seems to happen to everything enters that sticks around long enough.
The Mechanics of Boring
But things are a little more complicated than saying that guns got boring because the gun designers hate you. The dominant design model was developed by William Abernathy and James Utterback in 1975. They demonstrated that evolving industries follow a cycle that looks something like this:
Disruption -> Era of Ferment -> Dominant Design -> Incremental Commoditization
To illustrate this in the gun world, let’s look at the SIG P365 (keep in mind that this is a radically simplified version of the actual model created by Abernathy and Utterback).
When the P365 was introduced, it had the size and specs of a single-stack, but the capacity of a GLOCK 26 and it disrupted the world of concealed carry firearms.
Then the era of ferment started. Everyone scrambled to make their take on the P365, but better…if they could. Springfield’s Hellcat turned things up to 11. Literally. It held one more round than the SIG and they had an optics-ready version, too. Smith & Wesson, Taurus, Kimber, and everyone else eventually came up with their own entry into the micro-compact market.
The dominant design grew out of these entries into the market. The stack-and-a-half mags became dominant in guns that were (barely) an inch wide. Optics-ready designs became the standard, too, and people still wanted to shove lights on the little guns, so they got rails. If your gun didn’t match these requirements, it was essentially dead on arrival.
Who even remembers the FN 503 or the CZ P-10M?
From there we got incremental commoditization. We got cheaper guns. The Taurus GX4 and Ruger MAX-9 promised the same features at a lower price point. Companies then introduced various models of these guns, sometimes growing in size, like the P365-XL and Hellcat Pro.
Then they refined the triggers, introduced comped models, and essentially wrung out every ounce of value they could from that dominant design.
The Cycle Keeps Repeating
You can track this pattern with nearly every dominant design. Some we forget about. Before the Colt New Police and S&W 1899 M&P, we had a ton of interesting revolvers attempting to crack the double-action, quick-loading cylinder code.
Most people don’t remember the Merwin & Hulbert twist mechanism, or the Tranter or Starr revolvers. None of those became dominant designs. Once we hit on the swing-out cylinder with a decent double-action, most other designs became much more niche and fell away.
The Chaos Era
The chaos era is where the interesting guns rise. But interesting doesn’t always mean good. The interesting eras come before the dominant design era. Chaos eras give us things like the Savage M1907, the Spencer carbine, and belt-fed revolvers.
Let’s call the last era of chaos the modern chaos era. I pin this time as approximately 2004 to 2016. You can fudge the dates plus or minus a few years if you want. I choose this era because it’s when I more or less got into guns beyond plinking and hunting.
It was an interesting time spurred by the expiration of the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban and the spread of shall-issue concealed carry laws across the country. We had a ton of new gun owners and there was a big shift in the industry toward concealed carry guns and semi-automatic rifles.
The AR-15 ended up being the dominant semi-auto rifle fairly early on, but handguns were a different beast entirely.
This era brought us some chaotic guns that were ultimately failures. There was the Taurus Curve and View. Both were little concealed-carry pieces that never gained popularity because they weren’t reliable (and kinda weird).
The same could be said for the Remington R51, a gun I very much looked forward to back in 2014. And let’s not forget the USFA Zip .22, a spectacular flop that aimed to be the ultimate plinking pistol.
They were failures, but they were interesting. In fact, the era was full of interesting failures. I think a lot of us miss this era. Even if things didn’t always work, they certainly got our attention.
But the chaos era didn’t just bring us bad guns. It also brought us some good one, like the Boberg XR9-S and Rohrbaugh R9. Those were good guns and certainly helped inspire the single-stack nine genre that would eventually become dominant now.
However, these were expensive guns. We have the same phenomenon today with the Dragon and Ounce. Guns typically fit into a triangle. One side is good, one is interesting, and the final is affordable. Sadly, you only get to pick two in most cases.
The Boring Era Arrives
The epilogue of the most recent chaos era is the Hudson H9. It tried to do something new, namely, combining the trigger of a 1911 with a striker-fired design while lowering the bore axis. It wasn’t radical, but it was different and interesting without being a gimmick.
The H9 wasn’t cheap, but it also wasn’t priced out of this world like the Laugo Alien. Sadly, it didn’t work out, and while Daniel Defense has brought it back, I still don’t know anyone who actually owns one. The H9 ultimately led us into what I call the current boring era.
We are now neck-deep in a boring era. Everyone has a comped gun, a red dot-ready gun, a modular chassis, yadda, yadda, yadda. That’s because consumers have demanded it. We want a gun that costs $500 or less, can shoot 2,000 rounds without a cleaning, and has zero malfunctions.
Dominant design occurs because customers won’t tolerate differences or pay more for marginal improvements. It’s cool your that gun is 2% more accurate than the competition, but if it costs $500 to a grand more, forget it.
The chaos era wasn’t embraced by the gun world at the time. Most of the guns then were seen as gimmicks and derided. That’s understandable when you want a high-performing gun. Even today, boring and reliable outsells interesting.
The Browning short-recoil operation has a century-long record of success. It’s not tough to make it work, thanks to the design’s institutional inertia and the widespread experience of mass-producing it.
Why use a gas-delayed system? Or a lever delay? Those exist, but they aren’t common because who gives a shit about these things when Browning short recoil works so boringly well?
The Modular Era
While I’m calling it the boring era, I’m just being churlish. In reality, we’re in the modular era.
The current era is increasingly about modularity. Carliss Baldwin and Kim Clark wrote a book called Design Rules: The Power of Modularity and, to put it in one sentence, it argues that modularity drove the computer industry and shows how it can drive others as well.
These days, the firearm itself isn’t necessarily the innovative part of gun design. The gun is just a standardized platform for innovative attachments, which take the form of accessories and even ammunition.
It used to be that innovation came from the design of the gun itself, but these days it’s defined by what we can attach to the gun. Look at the Army’s M7. Regardless of its faults, the idea was to strap a smart optic to a gun firing a new type of high-pressure round to create a more effective rifleman.
At the core, the M7 is just a short-stroke gas-piston rifle, a design that’s been around for decades. The ammo and optic are what make it innovative.
On the civilian side, just about all of our guns are optic-ready these days. They all have rails, threaded barrels, and lots have a removable chassis that allows you to change frames or even turn a handgun into a PDW. If your gun can’t do this and do it affordably and reliably, it’s increasingly stuck as an expensive niche product to show off on Instagram.
I Miss the Chaos
I miss weird and interesting guns, but I admittedly don’t miss buying lemons like the R51. Buying a Taurus Curve now for $150 bucks — knowing it’s a bad design — creates a (false) sense of nostalgia for an era of handguns, many of which really weren’t very good.
I also miss classic muscle cars, but I don’t think anyone wants a car with a rotted-out floor. We demand mechanical competence and reliability, which often funnels into a specific dominant design. Almost no one wants to pay for idiosyncratic madness.
So yes, modern guns are boring, but we’re living through one of the most technologically interesting periods in firearms history because of all the cool and effective crap we can attach to them.
Modern handguns are cheaper, more reliable, and more shootable than ever before, and because they work so well, we don’t have much room for the weird. Ultimately, when it comes to guns, boring is good from a performance perspective. But it’s still boring.