Every gun shop has a mental list of the worst guns ever made, and in the video above, Nick from PewView shoots his way through a vault’s worth of them so you don’t have to. Full credit to him for the range time and the suffering. As a gunsmith who has had most of these across my bench at one point or another, watching a professional shooter struggle with them was both validating and very funny.
The budget handgun problem
The session opens with the SCCY CPX-2, a pistol that shows up in my shop mostly as a trade-in, which tells you something. It’s cheap, the company isn’t what it used to be, and watching Nick fight through a bill drill with it is revealing: the recoil feels awful for the caliber and the trigger is a long, mushy ordeal. Guns like this make you appreciate even the most basic functional pistols. If your budget is genuinely that tight, there are used guns I’d point you at long before a new one of these.
The weird ones that halfway work
The sub-guns were the surprise of the day. The MPA Defender, essentially a MAC-10 clone, turned out to be pretty shootable once you forgive the terrible safety design. And the Kel-Tec P50 is peak Kel-Tec: a strange magazine setup, no real sights, and a featherweight feel, yet somehow it’s genuinely fun. Weird isn’t always bad. Weird is sometimes just weird.
The worst guns ever made, bottom tier
Then there’s the double-barrel .22 Magnum revolver, which earned worst-in-show honors. The trigger requires a specific finger placement just to fire the thing, and accuracy is a rumor. Somebody designed it, somebody approved it, and somebody manufactured it, and I have questions for all three.
The tiny 9mm micro-pistol in the video deserves its own mention. There’s barely anything to hold, so recoil control is theoretical. It’s the classic case of “just because you can build it doesn’t mean you should.” I see guns like this come through on transfers and I always wince a little.
The surprise winner
The best gun of the day wasn’t a handgun at all: a 37mm pump-action flare launcher, a legal-to-own noob tube that just plain worked and had everybody grinning. That’s the real lesson here. Sometimes the ridiculous gear reminds you why this hobby is fun in the first place.
If the video inspires you to buy the opposite of everything in it, that’s what we’re here for. We stock pistols that actually work and you can browse the whole shop online. And if you already own one of the worst guns ever made, bring it by the counter in Roanoke. I promise not to laugh. Much.
Lance Rankin is the owner and Chief Gunsmith of Western Sport, a family-run Type 07 FFL and Class 3/SOT dealer in Roanoke, Texas, serving shooters since 2007. Born and raised in Texas with over 50 years of experience handling firearms, Lance purchased Western Sport in 2017 and turned his lifelong passion into his profession. He specializes in AR-15 and AR-10 platform rifles, manufactures Western Sport’s own AR-15 line under the Rankin Industries brand, and runs the shop’s in-house Cerakote coating operation. When he’s not behind the counter or the workbench, you’ll find him on his ranch deep into the night, hunting coyotes with an AR-15 and thermal optics. Lance holds an MBA and personally shoots and tests the products Western Sport sells.
