When choosing any concealed carry gun, there’s a few things I like to keep in mind: reliability, concealability, and shootability.įirst, reliability. Let’s talk about how I narrowed my list down, and then we’ll dive into the guns themselves. To keep this to a reasonable length (y’all know I like nothing more than running my mouth about firearms) I’ve forced myself to keep this to the top five choices out of the twenty-five that I’ve evaluated over the past year or two. I’ve carried just about every sub-compact 9mm from just about every manufacturer and I have just a whole slew of opinions about them. Thinking about picking up a sub-compact 9mm of your very own? Boy have I got news for you. In general though, these types of firearms make up the vast majority of carry guns these days, at least in terms of sales so it seems I’m not alone in thinking that a tiny niney is the way to go. We're comfortable chalking this issue one up to frozen lube, not the pistol.These days, it seems like I’m almost always packing either a compact or subcompact 9mm for my daily carry.įor someone who lives in the South like me, a smaller, easily-concealed handgun just makes more sense than trying to hide a full-size handgun, and is a lot more convenient. We shot day two on Sig's indoor range, and hundreds of rounds later, none of the guns exhibited the sticky slide problem. The guns were all cleaned and re-lubed with Slip 2000 for the second day of the event. Based on the range temps (our Kestrel showed the temp ranging from 12F after lunch to 8F when the sun went behind the trees in the late afternoon), frozen lube was a likely culprit. Turns out, the guns were all lubed with the same product in anticipation of the media event, though nobody present could say what it was. Our pistol slide felt sluggish, like a tight 1911 after 600 rounds without a reapplication of lubricant. At first, Sig employees thought some of the writers were limp-wristing the pistols, but by sunset it was clear there was another culprit. Of the handful of writers shooting the pre-production pistols on that cold, cold December day, all had the same malfunction. We logged scores of FRTB events and by the end of the first day, we got used to tapping the back of the pistol to help it the slide close the last few millimeters. Second, we had a lot of issues with the gun failing to return to battery on the first day of the two-day event.
So, like we said, it could be an issue with one pre-production gun, but it's something we'll look at closely when we get a production P365. It could be our grip or the way we were hitting the button, perhaps at an angle, but it's clear that someone with larger hands and/or more time on the gun made it work. We approached Strader on the line and he and his gorilla hands had no problem dropping mags. It dropped mags about a third of the time, leaving us to regularly shake the pistol or strip mags by hand. Our groups weren’t as tight as his, but we easily printed fist-sized groups at defensive distances.įirst, the mag release in our gun was finicky. Not incidentally, Strader is a former law enforcement officer, top-ten USPSA pistol competitor, and former president of the United States Practical Shooting Association he can shoot well.
#Subcompact sig sauer 9mm full#
We watched Phil Strader empty a mag full of A-Zone hits on IPSC steel at 50 yards. We spent a couple very cold New Hampshire days putting more than 1,000 rounds through pre-production pistols and can report its flatter-shooting, more controllable, and far more comfortable to shoot than a gun of its size should be. Sig is offering a 12-round, extended mag, below left, that adds a bit to the grip length improving the pistol’s controllability and capability. The elephant in the room was drop testing, and Sig showed us a Powerpoint slide illustrating the dozens of ways the pistol was oriented during its extensive drop testing cycle that saw the P365 subjected to more than 500 drops. We asked Sig Sauer’s pistol product lead, Phil Strader, if there's room to mill and drill the slide for an MRDS, and the answer was an unequivocal, “no.” There's a lot of bits packed into the grip tail, and the slide has no wasted space in an effort minimize the pistol's size. The trick to slimming the pistols down was to start with a tapered mag that reduced the grips thickness at the point where you'll feel it most up at the index finger/thumb radius. There's a lot to admire in the slimline nine, but the most important feature of the gun is the P365's staggered mags.
0 kommentar(er)
