Is this grounds for divorce?

[dburkhead]

Took my wife with me to the Indy 1500 to let her pick out a gun. (Intended to be her carry gun when she gets her license.)

She turned up her nose at a Kahr, at several wheelguns, at pretty much everything until we're about 80% through the floor when she spies, of all things, a Cobra FS380. I hadn't heard of Cobra, but that retainer at the back of the slide looks awfully, and alarmingly, familiar (I have a gun at home that has one just like it). And $149 for a NIB gun is a bit of a red flag to begin with.

Saddened I might be, but it's to be her gun so, we complete the paperwork and home we go with it. When we get home I look over the manual. There are no instructions for field-stripping, but that retainer still looks awfully familiar, so I try stripping it just like I would that other gun. Yep. More than just the retainer, the action of the gun is just a slightly scaled up (.380 rather than .22) duplicate of the action in the Jennings J-22 that was my first gun. At least the safety has been redesigned into something not quite as, um, scary.

Well, I try to put a bright face on things. After all, I've had some pretty good luck with "junk" guns in the past. So long as I use CCI Mini-mag in the Jennings it actually works fine, and once I got past the first couple hundred rounds in the Phoneix Arms HP22a, that worked fine as well.

So I take wifey's new gun to the range. Wanting to give it every benefit of the doubt, I run 150 rounds through it. About one time in 4 (and close to 9 times out of 10 on the last round in the magazine) it "stovepipes" in that the spent casing catches (usually lengthwise) between the slide and the barrel preventing the slide from closing and chambering the next round. There's no problem with ammo feeding, just spent cases not ejecting properly. And no wonder. The only "ejector" is the firing pin. When the slide comes all the way back, the firing pin protrudes from its hole. At least the Jennings had an actual ejector.