I brought home a couple new toys recently.

First, I bought a lever-action Henry. These are supposed to be great for training. It is supposed to be a great training gun because the ejection of the bullet is separate; you can do it at your leisure, you have less recoil because the firing is not used to eject the casing. That also means less of a trigger pull because less work has to be done with each click.

I found this to be a very easy weapon to use, but my arms grew tired even on this little one and I will have to work on my stamina (seriously, can’t even finish the tube?).

I also bought the PPQ. I needed a full-sized, full-capacity centerfire. I didn’t really like the options that most people had. I didn’t want to get into the 1911 platform, I don’t like glocks, I was ambivalent to the M&P (but anything glock-like, I’m not a fan of), and the CZ I saw looked promising but they don’t come out of the box like that.

In the PPQ I expected good ergonomics, good balance, and from the videos, a ridiculously short trigger reset. I got all of those, but it turned out to be not exactly what I expected either.

I have a PPS which I enjoy a lot, but being a compact gun, it’s not really conducive to any of the games. It’s in .40cal because I actually like having a bit of recoil and the 9mm just didn’t do it for me. I got the PPQ in .40cal too. I expected that, since it’s a bigger gun, there will be less felt recoil. With people going on and on about how little guns have lots of kick, that seemed well, obvious, right?

But I was totally wrong about that. There’s more barrel so less gas is wasted. The PPQ has substantially more recoil than the PPS. So much so that I was genuinely surprised. I haven’t figured out a good grip yet, especially on this larger gun where there’s more room for my hands to move around, so the minute tilts that I would get in the past because of a limp left hand was wildly exaggerated. At first, I didn’t know what hit me when it’d cant wildly and the casings would fall on my head. I eventually fixed that, but then I started having feed problems and I just don’t know how to reliably make that not happen yet. I really need to take a good look at how I hold the gun and work it out.