We hear a lot these days about the machines coming for our jobs. That artificial intelligence will think for us, write the briefs, read the scans, draw the plans and drive the trucks and cabs. Maybe some of that will happen, and maybe it won’t. I’m not qualified to predict 10 years out, and I’m wary of anyone who says they are.
What I can tell you is this: an algorithm would have told me not to touch a $150 revolver that took six hours to fix. And from a business standpoint, it would have been right.
The gun was an old Harrington & Richardson .22 Special, a top-break revolver that had been in its owner’s family for generations. The hook and hook slide were missing, and they are essential to the proper working of the firearm’s extractor. While I found the hook online, I was unable to find the exact hook slide. No parts up on my shelf, no catalog number and no overnight shipment. If that revolver was going to work again, somebody was going to have to make the part by hand.
That’s the kind of job the bean-counting spreadsheet dwellers hate, and I get it. It’s a drain on resources for little to no profit. But the profit motive doesn’t care that the gun came down through a family. It doesn’t care that the owner wanted to use the same revolver his grandfather had put in his hands. It doesn’t care that some jobs are worth doing because they matter to somebody, not because they make sense on paper.
I’ll be honest about something else: I wasn’t sure I could do it.
Fabricating a part from scratch with no pattern, no replacement to copy, just bar stock, a couple of blurry pictures and blown-up diagrams is the kind of job that makes you doubt yourself. I had a fair idea what it was supposed to look like, and I’d seen other examples in my shop. What got me through wasn’t a machine, and it wasn’t a manual. It was Ken Brooks.
Ken is a master gunsmith and an instructor at the American Gunsmithing Institute, and he teaches AGI’s advanced course on extractors and ejectors. The very mechanism I was fighting is the thing he’s spent a career mastering and passing on.
Before I reached out to Ken, I had already exhausted every other avenue. Every supplier, every picture, every measurement I could take. AI can hand you a procedure, but it cannot hear the doubt in your head at hour four and tell you to keep filing. The confidence to make that part came from another human being who’d been where I was standing. That is exactly how this trade has always been passed down.
So, here’s what the spreadsheet couldn’t see. The revolver belonged to a man whose grandfather taught him to shoot with it. The grandfather was a veteran. So was his father. That's how it tends to go in some families: they serve, they come home, and they put a gun and a lesson in the next kid's hands. They make America... well, America.
You can’t buy that, because it is not for sale. When that revolver stopped working, a piece of a man’s grandfather stopped with it, and no new gun off any shelf anywhere was going to put it back together. The only thing on Earth that could return that revolver to working order was a human being willing to lose six hours on purpose. So I did.
I’ve had a good career. I spent years as an attorney, and there were hours of that work that paid well. I’m not ungrateful for it. But I’ll tell you straight: I have never, not once, gotten from a billable hour what I felt when I handed that revolver back across the counter in working order.
I’m no doctor. I’ve never pulled anyone back from the edge of anything. I’m no police officer. I’ve never run toward danger so a stranger could go home safely. Those are the people who save lives, and I know the difference between what they do and what I do. But I can do this.
With my own two hands and half a day that I didn’t bill for, I took something a family thought was gone and brought it back. When I watched the man’s face and then his son’s face, I understood I had helped somebody. Not the way a surgeon helps, but in my own way, and in a real way. I gave a family back a thing they loved and could not replace.
That is a satisfaction I did not know existed until I found it at my little workbench. No spreadsheet will ever understand it, and no machine will ever feel it.
So, here’s my pitch, and it’s an honest one: Machines and math may be able to argue you out of becoming a gunsmith. They also may be able to argue you out of taking the good jobs, the six-hour ones, the jobs at the end of which you will have a firearm worth, yup, just about $150.
But if you come to it for this, for the hand that fits a part nobody makes anymore, the judgment to take a job that shouldn’t and won’t pay, the mentor on the other end of the phone who tells you that you can, and the plain human pride of putting your name on the result and handing it back to a grateful face, then you have found something an algorithm cannot touch and cannot take away.
I made money with my mind, but I have never been prouder of the products of my labor than the six hours I spent bringing one old revolver back to life with my hands.
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