This is not a picture of your ideal handgun and certainly does not match any criteria that I have. There are, however, certain very necessary attributes you really need to consider when selecting your personal gun. Often, we just see a gun we like and buy it. Sometimes because Uncle Tom or Aunt Sally said that is the best gun since sliced bread, we buy it. Our range buddy or the gun shop salesperson said that is the gun the pros use or that police officers use, so you cannot go wrong. Other times we just focus on one or two must-have factors that we prefer, then we seek out guns that match just those two things. What is your approach to selecting your personal handgun? I want to share my approach and Checklist to help you.

Very rarely, do we take a big picture, total perspective objective approach, specify our use for the gun, decide our criteria up front, prioritize them, and then evaluate the 3 or 4 gun alternatives that we are considering against a standard set of criteria. Frequently, we do not even shoot the guns we are considering, but just assume they will perform right for us. If we do shoot our gun options, we do not test shoot all of them using a standard drill for all guns we are considering. In essence, we just emotionally, subjectively, and irrationally select THE “apple” or do not compare the types of apples, or compare an apple with an orange.  What I am saying is that we should take more time up front and have a more objective, systematic, structured way of selecting our personal handgun, rather than a seat-of-the-pants approach. We should have our goal/use defined, criteria specified, factors identified and ranked, and a way of objectively evaluating each alternative against the same standards. This not “much ado about nothing,” as Shakespeare would say. Yes, it takes time and effort to do this, but just think what you are doing. You are selecting a tool that could possibly save your life. You must count on it to do its job. It certainly is worth the focus. I want to share my approach and you can decide if you want to use my Checklist or reduce the factors down to your set, etc. Hope it helps!

When selecting my personal handguns, I first decide on my primary use for the gun and identify several factors and criteria that are important to me, prioritize them, and use a standard evaluation scale to evaluate each gun option against each criterion. For years, I have used a standard 5-Point Likert Scale (given below) to evaluate each of my following 22 factors or Criteria for each pistol I am considering. It is important to identify specifications and also use a standard shooting drill for all guns to compare the same factors for each. My Criteria and factors are generally defined below to help. So, I assign my points to each criterion, then total all points for all 22 factors for each pistol and compare them. The pistol with the highest Total Points is probably the pistol for my specific purpose, if I honestly assessed each factor. For your different purposes or use for the gun, you might delete some of the below factors or add your own. I do that sometimes, like reduce the 22 to 7-8. The 5-Point Scale for each criterion is:

 

 

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE PDF VERSION OF THIS CHECKLIST.

Here are some General Definitions of each of the 22 criteria to help you decide on your personal pistol.

* ACCURACY – able to hit the target as desired for your first shot out-of-the-box without gun modifications; use the same distance, drill, grip, speed, target aimpoint, etc. for each gun

* RELIABILITY – consistency over repeated trials with the gun; can you shoot it...