A Farewell to a Firearm
Trading Down from an AR-9 to Something Much More Boring
I didn’t own a firearm when I took my first defensive handgun class in June 2019. The range handed me an anonymous Glock 19; a month later I bought a Smith & Wesson Shield because coworkers swore by its compact utility. By winter, after dry and live-fire practice had tightened my groups to a three-inch circle at seven yards, the Shield’s snappy, clunky trigger felt like a kink in my progress. I upgraded to an M&P 9, and I might have been the best shot in the follow-up class.
Around that time I caught wind of the pistol caliber carbine (PCC) phenomenon. Cowboys had long guns and revolvers that shared ammunition, so it wasn’t a new idea—but when companies like Ruger and Hi-Point began marketing 9 mm rifles, it seemed like a reasonable way to extend defensive capability while trying something different. As with anything in American gun culture, the debates were loud and circular: are the ballistic gains worth the bother? Shouldn’t you just buy a proper 5.56 AR? And the perennial Pavlovian gun nerd question: does it take Glock mags?
Through friends and a bit of personal curiosity, I tried a few: Ruger PCC, Hi-Point 995 (built like a Panzer Tiger and just as easy to service), CZ Scorpion S3, Kel-Tec’s folding Sub2000, Palmetto State Armory’s AR9—whose trigger pin walked out on the very first magazine—and eventually, I assembled an Aero Precision EPC-9.
The Aero seemed to promise an elegant middle ground: controllable follow-up shots, shared 9 mm logistics with a pistol, and the private pleasure of making “same mags” a flex. It looked the part too—clean lines, modular, that slick mid-tier friend who’s just trouble enough to be fun. It felt like an answer to a question I hadn’t realized I was asking.
For a while, it worked. At the range the EPC-9 made long strings of fire feel calm, almost civilized. The rifle-length sight radius let me close groups at distances where my pistol would have been guessing. It rewarded tinkering: swapping handguards, tuning triggers, adjusting stocks. It fed the part of me that enjoys small engineering problems solved with patience and a hex key.
But the honeymoon faded along two axes—practicality and patience. Practicality, because in the quiet between sessions I kept asking what problem the EPC-9 actually solved. My real-world defensive scenarios, if they ever came, would be close and quick. The conveniences of a PCC weren’t converting into confidence, only into more parts, more magazines, and the cost of zeroing yet another optic. Patience, because the EPC-9—elegant though it was—had the little dramas of anything assembled from many parents. Each new frustration tipped it further from “pure and simple” to “garage project number thirty-seven.”
In hindsight, the whole PCC experiment unfolded inside a peculiar social weather system—a circle of liberal and left-leaning shooters who saw guns as extensions of mutual-aid ethics and DIY philosophy. It was a scene that prized both politics and precision: range days that doubled as workshops, debates over optics punctuated by mutual aid planning. The lines between practice, performance, and identity blurred. For a while it felt radical, even righteous, to make competence its own form of critique. But under that was a quieter competition—the culture of flex. How tuned was your build? How tight were your groups? How well did your politics excuse your pleasure?
Leaving that scene changed the math. The EPC-9’s frustrations weren’t just mechanical anymore; they were social echoes. I wasn’t measuring against malfunctioning feed ramps so much as against a whole value system that turned tinkering into virtue. I realized what I wanted wasn’t a better gun—it was less noise.
The most damning technical issue was reliability with defensive hollowpoints. A jacketed hollow-point’s expansion past typical handgun distances is debatable—FMJ will perform predictably—but if the premise of “same mags” includes using the same defensive rounds across platforms, then a carbine that won’t feed the ammunition you actually prefer undercuts its own argument. For me, that small inconsistency was decisive.
Then there was the ledger: time and cash and the slow burn of diminishing returns. Hours of tuning and troubleshooting became a kind of tuition I hadn’t budgeted for. I’d convinced myself the EPC-9 was an investment in capability; in the end it looked more like a liability dressed up in sci-fi Strike Industries parts—a very pretty paperweight.
So I went to the shop with a compact, practical plan: trade down to something lighter, simpler, and honest about what it could do. The Smith & Wesson Bodyguard 2.0 felt like the opposite of the EPC-9’s personality—deliberately boring, efficient, unapologetically small. The Bodyguard didn’t promise an alternate lifestyle or a second hobby; it promised a pocketable answer, low fuss, and a quieter budget. Trading the EPC-9 for that little .380 was unromantic and exactly correct.
Walking out with the Bodyguard felt like closing a chapter. There was a sting—financially, sure, and the throb of letting something fun go—but also relief. The trade signaled a change in what I valued: less about owning toys that made me feel clever, more about owning tools that fit my life. At the range, the new gun was blandly competent; no Instagram angles, no half-satisfied tinkering sessions, just a machine that did what it needed to do. Boring turned out to be a kind of grace.
In purely economic terms, the EPC-9 was a money pit. The trade-in value barely amounted to quarters on the dollar—but the Bodyguard was on sale, and somehow I still walked out with twenty-six bucks in my pocket. The math didn't work, but the story did. What I bought, really, was tuition: a few years of learning how curiosity becomes discipline, and how a hobby becomes a mirror. What I was really paying to escape was a seven-pound boat anchor that couldn't reliably feed the ammunition I'd actually want to use—an expensive solution that had become its own problem. The lessons were priceless; the change just about covered lunch.
And if I lost the social context that once made all this feel communal, I also lost the compulsion to keep consuming. Fewer toys, fewer justifications, fewer late-night parts orders. A smaller arsenal, a quieter mind. Maybe that’s the real comedown—the moment when boredom stops feeling like defeat and starts feeling like an unburdening.