What do I call it?
Man, that was one of the hardest things to decide when we started on this project.
It’s a reasonable, simple question that should have a straightforward answer……but it doesn’t if you put thought into it.
I thought about names that included my last name, more for nostalgia reasons than anything else. My Dad started a machining and fabrication company in the late 70’s, Dellinger Enterprises, and I might want some connection to that in my own company. Also, it’s sort of a pride and accountability thing to have your last name on the building. An artist signs his work, and it would be a logical basis for the name of the business. For some reason, I just couldn’t get that to work. I wanted the name to be bigger than me and descriptive of what we do. A statement, rather than just a name.
There was the off-the-wall “Barn Gunworks”. I thought of that more from a merch standpoint with visions of T-shirts that said: “What the hell is a Barn Gun?” or one with an old barn and a bullseye on the side with the admonishment: “We can hit it!!” This a reference to the old Southern adage, “hit the broad side of a barn”. Ultimately, I decided that wouldn’t work either and was discarded. I still think the T-shirts would be cool though.
Then there was the all-too-common “Accuracy” or “Precision”-something. Just about everybody in the gun industry, especially dealing with rifles, is “accuracy” and/or “precision”. In addition to being unoriginal, it doesn’t really describe the goal for our company.
Accuracy is described as “the closeness of measurements to a specific value”. In the gun world, we take accuracy to mean how close the point of impact is to the point of aim. In simpler terms, if you hit where you aimed, it is considered to be an “accurate” shot. But accuracy is relative, not absolute. It’s akin to saying something is “fast” or “powerful”. It all depends on the context.
Precision is defined as “the closeness of measurements to each other”. Shooters often say that precision is how tight the groups are from a given firearm. This is where we get the term “precision rifle”, or a rifle that is built to produce shot groups where each shot is as close as possible to previous impacts. Much like the 0-60 or ¼ mile time for an exotic car, while an admirable and necessary metric, it really is only one aspect of what we work to achieve here at PWS.
We’ll discuss the meaning behind the name Performance Weapon Systems in Pt. 2.
