Image provided by Panteao Productions, LLC.

We are diminished; ace trainer and competitive shooter “Super Dave” Harrington recently passed away. An outstanding military vet of Special Operations, a competitor and instructor, he was widely revered in the industry. Details of his memorial services are here.

Fair winds, following seas.

I believe everyone can understand the loss of faith that sometimes occurs in life; we’ve all had that moment when something/someone we relied on failed us. It can be our associates.

Like “perfection” and “justice,” actual faith is tough to find in this corporeal existence. While the first two are impossible to attain here-abouts, it’s still worth the effort to pursue them – just don’t get your hopes up.

Faith is not always pursued but is often just something one accepts. We all know who our “real friends” are and likewise know our foes. We are surprised to find out that those closest to us, those we believe in most, go against us. Conversely, we find those we considered adversaries sometimes come through on our behalf.

It’s interesting.

A rather famous gun writer contacted a mentor and asked if he’d ever been betrayed. The response was that it always seemed to be someone he considered solid, a 100%-supporter, who let him down. The guy he least expected to be in his corner backed him up even at extreme personal costs.

It’s that way with gear. When we buy something, we tend to believe we have it for a reason and that it’ll work as intended. Mostly, it does. Sometimes we make an error and it’s not the gear at all. I remember a few situations like that.

One case, back in the revolver days when duty holsters tended to be cut to expose the handgun’s trigger, featured one of our guys going through the Law Enforcement Equipment Company to get a hard-to-acquire S&W Model 59 duty pistol. A double-stack 9mm, it had the double action trigger for the first shot with succeeding shots being fired single action. He had it in a holster with an exposed trigger guard.

Before he could carry it, he had to qualify with it and to the range he went. It didn’t end well.

His finger was faster than his hand and he left the range embarrassed when the first round he fired went through the plug at the base of the holster and into the ground. In the current era, the pattern of the accident is reversed: people reholster with the finger on the trigger into a “safe” holster with a covered trigger, with predictably negative results.

The next week, LEECO had gotten him his four-inch S&W M19 Combat Magnum that he wore going forward.

He’d lost faith.

It wasn’t the gun; it nearly never is. Once the faith is lost, recovering it is difficult – even if it’s our own fault.

In another case, an officer shot at a felon and his Colt MKIV Series 70 45 Auto choked. No injuries resulted, but I ended up with that gun. He just couldn’t trust it after that and couldn’t get rid of it fast enough.

I can’t really say how much ammo I put through that gun. Aside from issues with the infamous “gun show” magazines (this predates Wilson Combat and other newer designs), that Colt shot everything I fed it – including some of my cheesy lead-bullet reloads. I did that knowing that the ammo he’d used in his shooting incident was famous for one thing – not feeding in 45 Autos, both Government and Commander-styles.

The original owner, who’d done some work to it, wouldn’t take it back even after I shot it enough to demonstrate reliability.

It had let him down.

It wasn’t a gun problem.

Years later, I was fiddling with a pistol and stupidly (and unintentionally) fired a round, causing some damage. I still thank God that I was shy of being as careless with the muzzle as I was with the trigger.

Red-faced and angry, I put that gun away and away it stayed until there was a chance to get it dolled-up by a custom gunmaker for a feature article.

The gun hadn’t done anything wrong; it was the idiot behind the gun. Still, it was put back until decades later, when the sting of failure diminished, but only a little.

Loss of faith is something to be handled gingerly. You can’t be blustering, ham-handed and absolute about it. It takes work to rebuild it, if that can be done at all.

Since then, I’ve heard of other tales. An early adopter of a new-technology foreign pistol – foreign in design and in manufacture – tried the new duty gun out. When he dropped the slide on a loaded magazine, the gun went full-auto.

These were the first rounds he’d fired through that type of handgun.

The maker quickly got ahead of the issue, spent a great deal of money in threat resolution on a large scale to prevent more of this – without a lot of public pronouncements – and that gun became a standard duty pistol for decades. The guy who had the “full-auto” moment? He was an adopter of the gun and used it through the rest of his career.

There are ways to handle the failure that leads to loss of faith. It ain’t easy, it ain’t cheap and it’s never 100%.

But it’s worth doing.

— Rich Grassi