Tabla de contenidos para January - February 2019 en Combat Handguns

We at Combat Handguns are proud to present our first-ever Fully Loaded Guns & Gear Giveaway. Entering to win a new gun—in this case the Walther CCP M2 shown on the cover and reviewed on page 14—and related gear is as simple as visiting personaldefenseworld.com. But what do we mean by “related gear”? Elite Survival Systems (ESS) has included several products as part of this awesome giveaway. 1 LOADOUT RANGE BAG This range bag is the perfect partner for a day at the range. Made of 1,050-denier nylon, the bag measures 17 by 10 by 11 inches and has plenty of easy-to-access storage compartments, mag and accessory pouches, MOLLE slots and more. Features include closed-cell foam padding, wraparound handles, luggage rails, a removable dump pouch that attaches to belts and…

Capitalism thrives on competition. After someone finds something that works and sells, a dozen other companies will pile on and fight for a piece of the pie. This naturally breeds innovation, but sometimes it can get a bit overwhelming. I mean, think of all the different cars on the road, let alone SUVs that’ll never leave the safety of pavement. When it comes to polymer-framed, strike-fired pistols, I’m often reminded of a scene toward the end of The Hurt Locker. Jeremy Renner’s character has defied death hundreds of times while defusing IEDs in Iraq, but when he comes back home, he’s shown standing in front of a giant wall of cereal boxes at the grocery store, utterly paralyzed by all the choices. Heckler & Koch created the first striker-fired pistol—the…

SIG WE THE PEOPLE .45 CALIBER .45 ACP BARREL 5 inches OA LENGTH 8.7 inches WEIGHT 41.6 ounces (empty) GRIPS Aluminum SIGHTS SIGLITE night ACTION SA FINISH Distressed CAPACITY 7+1 MSRP $1,481 SIG WE THE PEOPLE CO2 CALIBER 4.5mm BARREL 4.5 inches OA LENGTH 8.5 inches WEIGHT 35.2 ounces (empty) GRIPS Aluminum SIGHTS Three-dot ACTION Blowback, CO2 FINISH Distressed CAPACITY 17 MSRP $120 Sig Sauer has been raising the bar for handguns and airguns for years. Well, just three years for the latter, but the company has come further in those three years than some established airgun manufacturers have come in twice that time. Sig has one objective with its CO2 models: to build training guns that are also suitable for the general consumer market. The company started late in…

What if I told you that you could have a full-sized, 9mm, striker-fired pistol for just over $400? And it has a manual thumb safety. That’s right, the new SAR9 from SAR USA is a striker-fired, polymer-framed pistol that has an external manual safety. You probably want to know if it’s worth it and have a whole slew of questions. Well, please allow me to elaborate for you. While wandering around a bit lost and confused at the 2018 SHOT Show, I happened to stumble across some of the friendliest people at the SAR USA booth. The company representatives all introduced themselves and gave me the rundown on some of their products. I was trying to listen to what they were telling me, but I just couldn’t stop looking at…

While new wheelgun production has slowed down, it’s still very much “steady as she goes.” Small concealment-sized revolvers predominate, but medium-framed five-, six- and seven-shooters are getting hot, and those with large frames and cylinders holding up to eight cartridges are also very popular these days. Whether you want a wheelgun for defense, hunting or just an afternoon’s plinking session, you won’t have any trouble finding one in everything from the .22 LR to the .500 S&W Magnum. So let’s take a look at some of the newest arrivals. CHIAPPA RHINO 30DS Chiappa is now offering its Rhino 30DS with an olive green frame and barrel shroud. This six-shot, 3-inch-barreled, .357 Magnum revolver has a fiber-optic front sight and an adjustable rear sight. Like all Rhino revolvers, it has a…

Though no military on the planet has ever adopted the semi-automatic AR-15 rifle for its armed services, anti-gun forces disparage it as a “weapon of war that has no place in civilian hands.” Oddly, the mayor of London says the same of any pocket knife with a blade that comes to a point. The yeoman warriors of England and the patriots of the American Revolution must be rolling in their graves. The prohibitionists use a philosophy of “the pet reflects the personality of its owner” to damn AR-15 owners as bloodthirsty monsters who care more for their guns than for the lives of children. There is no question that this same rhetoric can and very likely will be used against you in the court of law if you have successfully…

I have been in the tactical training industry since 2005 and have seen an unnecessary evolution of tactical gimmicks. I refer to these acts of buffoonery as “range theatrics.” Some of this assclownery is in the verbiage, and some is in action. On the verbiage front, the phrase “train like you fight” has become an overused and misunderstood axiom. Does it mean that we must train in full combat gear all the time? Does it mean that we have to train until we drop? The answer is no. It has nothing to do with how much black Velcro and MultiCam you strap onto your person. The term comes from athletics of yore: “Practice like you play.” Instead of practicing on half of the court, practice on the full court, for…

Testing your handloads is the next step after all that hard work you put into each case with the proper primer, the exact powder charge and capping it off with that perfect bullet. If you are a beginner, terms like “trajectory,” “ballistic coefficient” and “feet per second” are going to add a new dimension to your loading vocabulary, and it all starts to come to the surface while shooting your newborn handloads. Veterans, on the other hand, will continue to fine-tune their established handloads for the best accuracy balanced with a good energy factor. RANGE PREP If you are fortunate enough to have a place of your own with a few acres of land, you are perfectly positioned to test your handloads in the comfort of your own outdoor range.…

How much do you train? How badly do you want that title? A long time ago I heard a saying that I found really interesting. Ever since then, this quote has been in the back of my mind, giving me a small sense of anxiety about whether I am training enough. The saying goes, “No one rises to the occasion. Rather, we all fall back to the level of our training.” As much as we love to say that we step up our game once the pressure is on, or we perform better under pressure, the reality is that we really cannot do much more than what we have done in practice. Performance beyond our current capabilities is a temporary thing normally associated with very erratic results. Basically, the person…

I covered the rimfire SW22 Victory Kryptek when the series first came out in 2016. The standard SW22 Victory is a solid effort for Smith & Wesson with a 5.5-inch barrel, a 10-round magazine and a stainless steel finish, and I personally think it’s a much nicer gun than the Model 22A dropped from the S&W lineup in 2015. The Victory’s ergonomics are good, too. In my hands, the pistol shot well and ran flawlessly. The original guns have sold well enough since then, and now S&W shows no less than eight variants on its website, with four of those being Performance Center variants and four being part of the standard lineup. For this review, I received one of the latter—the SW22 Victory Target. WHAT IT IS Weighing in at…

The 10mm Auto cartridge has been around in one form or another for some 35 years. It grew out of a search for a pistol caliber starting with “4” that would be both powerful and provide a higher capacity than conventional pistols of the day. The cartridge was strictly niche until 1989, when it was adopted by the FBI following the disastrous Miami shootout. However, a cartridge with an overall length of 1.250 inches and a SAAMI pressure maximum of 37,500 psi needs a largeframe pistol, and the size of the chosen gun plus the recoil generated by the 10mm was too much for many FBI agents. The caliber was soon dropped, and the 10mm began to fade into obscurity as the .40 S&W cartridge took over the law enforcement…

For the past 10 years, the ever-burgeoning world of concealed-carry and personal-protection firearms has continued to grow and dominate the world of handguns and their development. I have had the privilege of testing a wide variety of firearms to scale the performance of one design versus another and how the consumer has driven the change in features for the needs of today. With the invention of metal-injection molding, three-dimensional printing and CNC machining, manufacturers have become far more reflexive to the needs of consumers and more adaptable than ever before. As a one-time marketer, I understand the importance of making sure you build a product that works, is as advertised and delivers on the promises you describe. This is evident in the evolution of the CCP (Concealed Carry Pistol) M2…

The 9mm Springfield Armory XD-S Mod.2 is the end result of a generation of mechanical evolution. Every millimeter of the thing has been tweaked, refined and polished. The outcome is a pocket-sized defender that carries like it’s not there, shoots like a dream and packs quite a punch. I have been blessed to carry and run just about everything. With a quarter-century’s worth of gun writing under my belt, it has been my privilege to squeeze quite a few triggers, all the while pretending like it was work. It is tough to impress me with a carry gun these days. However, the Springfield Armory XD-S Mod.2 is indeed concealed carry perfected. HUMBLE BEGINNINGS When I first got into this gig, my initial carry gun was a $50 FIE Titan in…

IN May of 2018, the U.S. Army issued a request for information (RFI) for a new Sub Compact Weapon (SCW). Specifically, Big Green wanted a compact, select-fire 9mm with a Picatinny rail for accessories—not for every soldier, but “those who might need a personal-protection-type weapon for certain missions.” Several companies entered the running before the Army canceled the request. Then, it resurrected it in August with a few changes. Essentially, the RFI is asking gun makers for a “highly concealable SWC system capable of engaging threat personnel with a high volume of lethal force while accurately firing at close range with minimal collateral damage.” As you already know, submachine guns have served military, police and private security firms for decades. For many years, the HK MP5 was the gold standard…

If you’re in the market for a fully upgraded target .22, you need to check out one of the new Performance Center (PC) Victory models. Combat Handguns contributors recently got an all-access tour of Smith & Wesson’s factory in Springfield, Massachusetts, and were able to get in some quality range time with several S&W products. S&W’s Matt Spafford explained the finer points behind these pistols and let us shoot to our hearts’ content. PC Victory models sport flat-faced triggers with adjustable overtravel stops. We shot one with a carbon-fiber-wrapped barrel and a muzzle brake. Every PC variant comes optics ready, and you can purchase them with or without a red-dot sight included. Tandemkross grips also come standard. In short, these guns are truly competition-ready. They were really comfortable to shoot,…

The .22 Long Rifle is without a doubt the most popular metallic cartridge in the world today. And I’m not just talking about rimfire cartridges. More .22 LRs are manufactured, sold and fired annually than all other non-military cartridges—rifle, handgun and shotgun—combined. And the reasons for its popularity are easy to understand. First of all, .22 LR ammo is inexpensive. When I was a boy, I remember going to the local hardware store with my brothers where we each forked over a quarter and a dime for a box of fifty .22s. This expenditure of part of our hard-earned allowances enabled us to enjoy an afternoon of plinking with our single-shot rifles. While .22s now cost more than they did back then (like everything else), most shooters can still afford…

Inland’s new M1 Carbine-based M30-P is definitely a large defensive pistol for the 21st century. This new handgun takes up where the M1 “Enforcer” pistol left off when production ceased in the late 20th century. The ballistics of the .30 Carbine cartridge may be close to ideal for use in today’s heavily populated urban centers because of its limited muzzle blast and recoil. On the downside, the minute you say “.30 Carbine,” a lot of people think about this cartridge’s reputation for poor stopping power in World War II and Korea. But that belief concerns military carbines using ball ammo. Today, six companies produce self-defense loads for the .30 Carbine, so the stopping power issue needs to be revisited. In addition, there are stories about the low quality of commercial…