I don't normally take actual backup guns to the backup gun match; it's usually some oddball old pistol. But today, I decided to bring out the new S&W Shield Plus in .30 Super Carry. It's actually exactly the sort of gun that the match is designed for. I chose to minimize the size of the gun by us...

Yesterday we looked at the history and development of the vz.82 pistol; today I am taking it out to the BackUp Gun Match. this should be a pretty competitive pistol in this environment, and it actually meets the characteristics of a backup gun quite well. It is light and compact, but still offers...

I was talking to the guys who operate BattleGnome at Lynx Brutality this summer, as they also made the holster and mag carriers for the Arex Delta I used at that match. They are really cool, down-to-earth folks and had just finished prototyping a Tokarev holster. There are no modern options for a...

Yesterday we were looking at the new resurrection of the AutoMag pistol, and today I have it out at the monthly BackUp Gun match. Is it appropriate to bring this behemoth of a pistol to a "backup" match? Sure!

My experience with magnum automatic pistols has been very mixed...actually, just mo...

I have found the "cheek pistol" concept form Rhett Neumayer at Demonstrated Concepts to be pretty interesting. When I was thinking about what pistol designs might be suitable for this sort of use, the Calico M950 jumped out as a really neat candidate. It's a downward-ejecting design that doesn't ...

Dan Coonan first designed his pistol in graduate school as a drafting project: a 1911 pistol chambered for the .357 Magnum cartridge. No easy feat, designing a self-loading pistol magazine to cycle a big rimmed revolver cartridge! This was in 1977, and he went about creating a business to manufac...

Yesterday we took a look at the history and the mechanics of Dan Conan's .357 Magnum 1911; today we are going to take it out to the range. Specifically, a BackUp Gun Match, plus a bit of extra range time afterwards...

Developed in the 1990s and entering production in 1996, the CZ100 and CZ101 were CZ's first polymer-framed pistols. They were offered in both 9mm and .40S&W, with the CZ100 being a double stack design (magazine capacity 10 or 13 rounds) and the CZ101 being single stack (magazine capacity 7 or 8 r...

In the early 2000s (specifically 2006/2007, I believe) US Delta Force decided to replace its .45 ACP 1911 pistols with something having a larger magazine capacity. After testing a number of different platform initially, they settled on two to purchase and fully evaluate. These were the STI 2011 (...

Social media is very excited these days about "exploding" SIG 320s...so let's consider what might actually be happening.

Of course, this discussion is invariably clouded by the fact that the P320 did have a legitimate drop-safety problem a few years ago. It was fixed, but many people don't bot...

Finland used a variety of FN pistols prior to WW2, and had already evaluated the High Power when Russian invaded and the Winter War began. With an urgent need for more arms, Finland ordered a batch of High Power pistols, which FN was happy to include with the other arms orders already being deliv...

Edward Felk was an Australian who decided to produce semiauto pistols in Australia. In 1994 he patented a couple features of his new design, and set about finding a way to produce it. He ended up subcontracting with Star of Spain to produce barrels and slides, while the polymer frames were produc...

Today I'm taking FN's new High Power out to the range for some first shots. I'm curious to see if it really is more comfortable to shoot than the original High Power, and if it can digest a wide variety of ammunition (something the originals were not great at)...

It seems like everyone is making a copy of the Browning High Power these days, and FN themselves have jumped into the arena as well. What FN is making isn't just a clone of the original pistol, though - they have built something largely new, taking inspiration and design cues from the original BH...

The Browning High Power (“Grande Puissance”, aka GP-35) was developed by Fabrique National in Belgium, designed primarily by John Browning’s apprentice Dieudonné Saive. It began in the very early 1920s as a pistol designed for a new French Army requirement, but eventually split into two separate ...

The HS-95 was developed by HS Produkt to replace the PHP pistols. With the experience of producing many thousands of PHPs, the company had a much better understanding of how to design a pistol for production, which is immediately obvious in the HS95. It is a traditional tilting-barrel Browning ac...

With the HS95, Croatian manufacturer IM Metal (later to become HS Produkt) had learned how to effectively manufacture a good pistol. However, the design had some shortcomings and had not been accepted by Croatian police forces, nor had any commercial export contracts materialized. The company rec...

The “Kordun” (named after a region in Croatia) was the first pistol design from Marko Vukovic, lead designer for IM Metal and later HS Produkt. It was made in 1985 for the Yugoslav Peoples’ Army, with the goal of being a softer-shooting and higher capacity sidearm than the then-standard M57 Tokar...

In the aftermath of World War One, German police forces were responsible for maintaining social order is a very chaotic Germany. They were reequipped with small arms, and in particular needed pistols. The ideal sidearm would have been the P08 Luger, but the Treaty of Versailles caused Luger produ...

The vz.82 and its cousin the CZ 83 are pistols that originated when the Czech state export company during the Cold War began looking for arms it could export to bring in hard currency. The current service pistol, the vz.52, was, shall we say, not widely desirable and its 7.62x25mm cartridge was n...

The vz.52 pistol was originally adopted by Czechoslovakia as a short-term option, with an intention to quickly replace it with something better. The problem was that without a viable domestic pistol, the Soviet Union would have forced Czechoslovakia to start production of the TT-33 Tokarev. Out o...

During the late 1920 and early 1930s, the Walther company worked on developing a military pistol in 9x19mm. They began from the basis of the PP/PPK design, and produced three separate designs, the first two designed “MP” (Military Pistol) and the third being the Armee Pistole (which was followed ...

Today we are looking at one of the surplus US Army M17 pistols that SGI put on the commercial market about 3 years ago. These were some of the very first M17s issued to Army units, and they were turned back in to SIG and replace in late 2019. The obvious difference between these and their replace...

A very small batch of special target model pistols was made at the very end of Astra 400 production in 1945. They were fitted with Patridge front sights and adjustable revolver-style square-notch rear sights, much improved over the stock Astra 400 sights. In addition, they were fitted with a spec...