One thing I always enjoy reading about is terrible products but gun-focused websites tend to not really openly talk about terrible commerical guns barring some very obvious targets (like Hi-Point Firearms products). In fact if you search for articles called “Worst Guns of All Time” you’ll find dozens of different articles on websites but they all seem copy and pasted from each other (Lot of Chauchats, Gyrojets, and Nock guns and similar in those lists)
Now, I’m curious what are some non-military commercially mass-produced terrible small arms made in the last 50 years that aren’t terrible solely due to build quality (thus excluding all those crappy Saturday Night Specials which werent meant for long-term use). Guns that either had design defects or were just unpractical designs that somehow made it to market. Range toys like AR pistols or very specific marksman handguns I’d also exclude since being impractical was part of their design since they’re made just to shoot targets (unless of course they also failed at their sole job as well)
Perfect example of a bad gun I don’t se people talk often about is the Colt All-American 2000, Colts attempt at making a polymer semi-auto handgun to compete with Glock and win back market share from police departments, and which they staked the companies future on. Then it comes out and it’s got terrible accuracy, reliability problems (since it was meant to be a cops sidearm this was kind of a big deal) and most of all a completely terrible trigger that was too stiff, too long, and broke at 12 pounds of weight which killed off target shooting interest. The weapon was so terrible it was pulled from store shelves soon afterward.
