SIA, the point I was trying to make is that dogging Hi-Point pistols due to reliability is probably completely unwarranted.surprise_i'm_armed wrote:avel back to their home for a re-do.
What I truly think about this is that people (I mean, most of us, including me) tend to assume that because a gun is low-price, it must therefore be unreliable or poor quality. And then we assume that more expensive guns or brands are more reliable or higher quality. But this is not true, and Hi-Point is the perfect example.
I don't mind mentioning that I think Hi-Point guns are ugly, way too big, and have the ergonomics of a cinder block. But I have not seen a credible report of them being unreliable. On the other hand, I hear reports constantly of Kahrs with reliability problems, my friend's STI had to go back to the factory about three times (fortunately, the factory was in the same town as my friend lives in) and now he's trying to sell it because it just cannot be made reliable. All kinds of premium-brand firearms have terrible reputations for reliability so there really is little correlation between price and reliability.
I wonder if the Jiminez/Jennings complaints are really that well-founded. When I was first shopping for my first gun, I had a price ceiling of about $350 because that was all I could get away with spending without having a budget planning meeting with my wife, which would subject the purchase to a veto. I admit I considered a Hi-Point, and also Bersa, Kel-Tec, Taurus, Stoeger, and other bargain brands. Taurus was the only maker among those that had any kind of a credible history of reliability issues, but all of these brands got the snob's disapproval. In fact even the gun I wound up with, even though of a more premium brand, still gets the snobs sniping "you should have bought a real Glock".
Again IMHO, I think we need to be really careful that we don't conform to the stereotype when new or potential gun owners begin asking around, so that we appear to be ignorant snobs. When we tell a potential gun owner not to buy a piece-of-junk Hi-Point because it'll blow up in his hand and it's a range accident waiting to happen, then he reads credible reviews that they are rock-solid reliable and then buys one and his own experience suggests the naysayers were wrong, then we have alienated another gun owner.
Maybe I can find some credible reviews of recent Jiminez pistols to see if they really are as unreliable as the "internet experts" suggest.