These men only understand lying down with a rifle, and poking about with the sights to find the target after they have put the rifle to their shoulder. Some have a lot of incantations first; they aim at the sky, bring the rifle down slowly, and then make a bull’s-eye on the wrong target as they naturally cannot know which is theirs of a string of targets, if they only fish about looking through a pin hole for it; they know nothing of the possibilities of a rifle or pistol, unless they are shotgun shooters as well.
The public consider “I did not know it was loaded” as ample and full excuse when one man shoots another in a so-called “accident.”
Not to know if the firearm you are handling is loaded is an unpardonable crime. It is so simple to open the firearm and see for yourself. I never take the owner’s word for it if he tells me a firearm is not loaded. Before I handle it, I examine it for myself.
The public think that no one but an expert can possibly know if a firearm is loaded; that the only way to know is to pull the trigger, and if any one happens to be shot, well, that is unavoidable and nobody is to blame.
It is to try to partly remedy this danger (it is impossible to make any firearm or instruction in its use “fool-proof”) that I ask any one who takes up this book to read the two following chapters, even if they take no interest in shooting. It may save a life.
Everything we do is a compromise, and nothing human can be made perfect in all particulars.
I give my ideas of what is wanting in automatics, not from a mechanic’s point of view, but from that of the one who has to shoot them.
Few mechanics are shooting experts. They make beautiful pistols from a mechanical point of view, but which are clumsy and unpractical from the shooter’s point of view.
Early inventors of automatics were not practical shots.
The inventor of one of the earliest automatics came to me with his invention. It was utterly impossible to handle or make any good shooting with it. It was like trying to eat soup with a fork. He kept telling me that if I “held it like this” and “did this,” I should be able to shoot with it, but it was as if he had told me if I sat with my face to the tail of the horse and held on by his hocks, I should be able to ride better than the usual way. Besides being of a most unwieldy shape, to grasp which you had to spread your fingers in all directions, this pioneer of the automatic pistol had all sorts of levers which must be moved by your different fingers in order to shoot it, as if you were playing the cornet.