"Stop being Poor!"; a clarification.

JakeKiere

Newbie
If you really want (insert high quality item/class/etc. here) because it is the best out there, you can make the choice to eat ramen, sell shit, and pinch pennies to get there. "The poors" don't understand this concept - their priorities are different. These folks would rather be comfortable drinking Starbucks every morning, meaning they'll have to settle for sub-par products, training, etc.

I understand the concept, but it all comes back to the "buy once cry once" mentality.

EDIT: Just realized this is an old thread!
 

erwos

Amateur
I'm resurrecting this purposefully, especially since I'm seeing more memes about flexing on the poors these days. I was kinda thinking about this topic further as I was catching up on the podcasts. I want to give a different perspective, which is that I think the concept of grade vs quality is lost on people.

Quality is essentially how well you execute on your requirements. If you're advertising a rifle as good for 10k rounds, and it suffers a failure at 1k rounds, well, you've got a quality problem. This is essentially the problem with a lot of the budget ARs - you might even have what are mostly nominally decent parts, but they're either assembled incorrectly or have systemic issues (over-gassed and beating itself to death in 5k rounds).

Grade, though, is essentially your set of technical requirements. If you're trying to hit that $800 price point and you omit chrome lining, ambi-safety, ambi-bolt-release, a fancy muzzle device, etc. and maybe set the accuracy standard to 1.5MOA, that's purposefully going to be a lower grade gun than a modern KAC SR-15, which I think most people would rightfully designate a high grade gun.

Low quality is NEVER acceptable. Lower grade may be acceptable depending on use case. It is entirely possible to have a low-grade, high-quality gun. It may not be ultra-cheap - quality costs money - but it could very well be a very reasonable deal for certain uses. You could make a good argument, for example, that the Colt LE6920 is a pretty good example of a medium-to-low-grade, high-quality gun. Not a lot of frills and no promised accuracy standard, but executed very well (or it was in the past, anyways).

There are a lot of manufacturers out there marketing their low-ish grade guns as high grade guns. Ironically, they do themselves a disservice, because by failing to fulfill their implied high requirements, they wind up with guns that are perceived as low quality.
 

Sunshine_Shooter

Established
@erwos I like what you wrote, but the use of the word 'grade' threw me off at first. Most of the internet (that I frequent, anyway) would replace 'grade' with 'feature set'. Other than that, I agree 100%.
 

erwos

Amateur
I'm a project manager by profession, so I like to use project manager-y terms. Gives a different perspective on things.

The one other point I'll make is that I often think that the financial limitation aspect of purchasing gets completely hand-waved away in many discussions. The assumption is that there's always more money, but sometimes, there's either no more money, or spending more would severely compromise other important goals like... saving for retirement! Or having savings at all! It's also one thing for an individual to sell stuff and eat ramen to buy that MAWL; it's another to make THEIR FAMILY sell stuff and eat ramen so they can buy that MAWL.

The goal should really be helping people understand their needs and goals, and spend their money in the most efficient way possible towards those needs and goals. If that means they've got to "settle" for a BCM instead of a KAC to advance their goals more efficiently, so be it.
 

Oak City Tactics

Moderator
Staff member
Moderator
My take on stop being poor. iPhone X check, Xbox One S check, Apple Watch check, 2019 truck check, Ski Nautique G25 check, Smith and Wesson MP15 check. I see this all the time with cops. Best of everything, cheapest rifle. If you are keeping up with the Joneses but not the Buffoni’s, Knights, or Hodge’s that’s being a poor as in poor decisions where your life is concerned. Also if you own 31 Frankenstein AR’s all sprouting from an Andersen lower but don’t have one duty grade rifle because “those guys are too expensive”. That’s being poor.
 

Oak City Tactics

Moderator
Staff member
Moderator
What’s not being poor is a coworker who you have to work to convince to buy a legit first AR with the necessary accessories and it takes him 6 months of shopping and saving from off duty to finally get one because he’s got a kid in college and normal adult responsibilities and bills. When he did it he did it right. That’s not being poor.
 

Door

Newbie
Glad this thread got bumped. As someone who is arguably a “poor” in the sense that I have a very limited amount I can spend on firearms and related training/equipment, I’ve learned an important lesson- as much as a BCM or an LMT would press on my budget, I really can’t afford stuff that doesn’t work. My first AR, first gun in fact, was an Anderson/PSA abortion, and for the amount of money my “broke” student ass put into that thing trying to make it what I wanted it to be, I could have been most or all the way to a nice BCM. That thing ended up being sold to help with an engagement ring, and now that I have even more responsibilities on the horizon I’m in even less of a position to spend what money I can set aside on things that I can’t rely on or expect to last, at least until I can use my degree to land a decent paying job. I imagine most men and women with low incomes or otherwise tied up financial resources can say something similar.

And a decent defensive firearm is not very expensive at all these days! $500 probably won’t get you a trustworthy AR15, but it will net you a pretty high quality used 9mm handgun+light. $300 or so will net you a Mossberg shotgun or police trade in .40 these days- all reliable and effective firearms. Yeah that’s maybe not the most optimal weapon you could use relative to an AR but it will work when you need it to. Even for new firearms there is good stuff cheap these days. You can regularly find M&P 2.0s and CZ P07/9s for under $400 online. If the Facebook crowd all knew about gun.deals and ammoseek you’d probably find far fewer people carrying cheap FMJs or insisting that Taurus is where it’s at. Yeah, when you’re making $9 an hour those prices still might mean a month or two of saving up but it is very doable for a lifesaving tool!

I really think the biggest thing is people don’t know better. I didn’t. Which is why resources like P&S are so great and so important. As nice as it is that the NRA and big youtubers promote firearms ownership and hobbyism, they very rarely provide truly valuable information about equipment selection and actual defensive use- and often promote stuff that’s of questionable quality in exchange for ad revenue. So there have to be people out there wading through the BS to provide good info.

Now, as for negative humor. I came up on 4chan and /k/ is where I got into guns, so I don’t mind humor with a hostile tone and honestly get a lot out of it- “bullying the poors” is actually not the worst way to communicate this stuff in a community like that. But I think the vast majority of people, especially people on mainstream social media platforms, do not *get* that kind of humor and become defensive very quickly. Most people don’t take well to abrasive humor when it’s at their expense- I don’t think that makes them unworthy of knowing better. So this edgy Discord/imageboard humor is not really appropriate when you’re dealing with boomers or facebook moms. It absolutely has a place in communities like this where people are more savvy, but I think we’re doing a disservice to them, ourselves, and the truth itself when we talk to the uninitiated in this way.
 

Unobtanium

Regular Member
One of my friends is a successful attorney. He likes the 2A. He asked me what AR I recommended (in 2014?) I told him Daniel Defense + training. He promptly bought a DPMS base model and then sought training. The rifle shit the bed so bad the experience was compromised. He then bought a DD.

His first move was absolutely what is cause for being told to "stop being poor."

Anyway, I posted this when searching for pvs14 data in lieu of deciding to buy one vs. BNVDs because being debt free is more important to me than an item I'll mainly use for stargazing and hiking 2 to 3 times a month.
 
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