Well, determining whether a gun is. "keeper" or not takes extensive evaluation, IMHO, and there's no way to do that without putting rounds thru the gun. Even within a "type" (eg, 1911's), I've found I need to shoot a given gun quite a bit to know if I'm going to keep it.
I've owned about 20 1911's over the years, but only have 3 keepers. Buying/selling/shooting lots of 1911's taught me a lot about what's important to me about autopistols that i couldn't have learned any other way.
It's not expensive, relatively speaking, to do that. Buying a gun, shooting the bejabbers out of it, then selling it so you can buy another gun means I can buy a new gun for less than $100, on average. Do that enough times over a few years and you can get a LOT of experience with a LOT of gun types for relatively low cost.
