Inventors, instead of evolving a pistol from their imagination, should consult an expert pistol shot, as to what improvements on existing pistols are required.
We are told by writers who use the fashionable word “imagination,” that to do anything, from governing a Nation to destroying submarines, “All that is needed is a man with ‘Imagination.’”
“Imagination” may do many things in legend or story but it will not teach a man pistol shooting, or enable him to invent an automatic pistol. I put experience and technical knowledge before “imagination” and theories.
In rifles there is the same sort of difficulty. It took me years before I found a gunmaker who would try to make a rifle on the lines I consider desirable for big-game shooting.
Big game is shot at short range, so flat trajectory is of no importance. What is important is to have a rifle which is light and well balanced and yet will knock down an animal with a terrific blow at close range. One does not want the sort of rifle so largely advertised as an ideal rifle for big-game shooting—a rifle which weighs as much as an arm-chair, balances like a poker, kicks like a horse, and is warranted to shoot into a two-inch bull’s-eye at four hundred yards, but is impossible to align on a rapidly moving animal at a few yards off, owing to its clumsiness and weight.
Inventors of firearms expect their customers to adapt themselves to their weapons instead of making the weapon to fit their customers, and answer to their requirements.
I stopped a man just in time, taking a Lea-Metford to shoot rooks with!
I was lecturing on the cruelty and uselessness of docking horses, amputating the bones and nerves of the horse’s tail and searing it with a hot iron, and what for? A man in the audience stood up and said: “If I did not dock my horse he would be too long to fit between the shafts of my cart.”
This is just the inventor’s attitude:
You must shorten your trigger finger by cutting off the first joint. I cannot alter all the blue prints of my invention just because you find the trigger too far back for your finger. Your finger is too long; my invention is perfect.