Читать книгу The Gun Digest Book of Combat Handgunnery онлайн

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Colt’s All-American 2000 was a sad and ugly thing. Jams. Misfires. Pathetic accuracy and a horrible trigger pull. Heralded by the newsstand gun magazines as a great leap forward in technology, it soon died a well-deserved death.

Colt’s only good double-actions were their last, both DAOs. The little Pony .380 worked, and the Pocket Nine 9mm was a breakthrough: a full power, seven-shot 9mm Luger exactly the size of a Walther PPK .380 but 5 ounces lighter, utterly reliable, and capable of 2-inch, five-shot groups at 25 yards. While the triggers were heavy, they were controllable. Alas, only about 7,000 Pocket Nines were produced before a patent infringement suit by Kahr Arms shut down production.

Heckler & Koch

HK’s 1970s entries in the double-action auto market, the VP70Z and the P9S, did not succeed. The former worked well as a machine pistol and poorly as a semiautomatic. The latter, exquisitely accurate, was before its time. It needed its chamber throated to feed hollow-points reliably, and its decocking mechanism, which involved pulling the trigger, was enough to make police firearms instructors wake up in the middle of the night screaming.