Our book on Hungarian AKs, “Rifles on the Danube”, is available here:
https://www.headstamppublishing.com/danube-book
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Mauser firm was not in good shape. It had no new products, and its ability to survive marketing its name and legacy pistols was waning. Without much vision for the future, it turned to rebranding production from other companies, like Renato Gamba in Italy and FÉG in Hungary. From FEG they got the “Mauser Model 80” – a licensed copy of the Browning High Power – and the “Mauser Model 90” – a rebadged FEG P9R.
The P9R / Mauser 90 is often assumed to simply be a double-action modification of the High Power, but this is not true. The slide is almost identical is appearance to the High Power slide except for the decocking lever, but the frame has several important differences. The barrel lockup is taken from the S&W series of automatic pistols instead of the High Power, and the trigger mechanism is a stirrup around the magazine well instead of moving through the slide like a High Power.
In total, FEG made 26,000 of these pistols for Mauser. The plan was to sell them in Europe, but by 1995 sales remained poor and about 18,000 remained in Mauser inventory. In order to get rid of them, they were offered on the American market, where they were gobbled up by importers like Century between 1995 and 2001.
I purchased a FEG P9R brand new for $275 about 12 years ago. It had very good deep high polish blue finish. I really liked it, but unfortunately it jammed all of the time. It was very rare that I could get through a whole magazine before it jammed. Stove pipe, failure to eject. You get what you pay for.
Viewed through the lens of what was available at the time, these were a fantastic value. This was a great time to be alive, when Century was at the absolute apex of the import game and I had both a C&R and disposable income.
Athens had Pericles, Rome its Five Good Emperors, the High Middle Ages Frederick ‘stupor mundi,’ and we, Century importing away? I like a gun deal better’n most folks, but it takes more than that to make me say civilization has hit a summit and life as such is sweet. Must be a genetic flaws of mine. Like ol’ Moriarty I am prey to only negative waves.
Somewhat off-topic, yet still pertinent:
One of the “interesting” things about all these DA/SA automatics is that nobody really seemed to sit down and think through the entire conceptual frame they worked within.
Which they absolutely should have done, in my opinion.
DA/SA is one of those things that exists, and when you try to work out the “why” of it, you’re left going “What the hell were they thinking? Were they even thinking, at all?”
Every single one of these pistols provides a crappy inconsistent interface for the shooter, especially when you add in the fact that few can actually afford the ammo to develop and maintain proficiency on them, whether you’re talking individual or government entity.
Which leads to some really horrid results, out in the field.
Add in the usual schizoid approach to providing these pistols with manual safety whosits and decocking whatsits, and you’re beginning to see the nightmare that was the M9 for a trainer.
What the procurement people forget is that when you’re doing a military procurement, you’re actually buying pistols for the lowest common denominator, the majority who’ve never even handled a pistol, let alone shot one, and who’re generally quite fearful at the prospect. The operational complexity of the usual DA/SA mechanism-plus-“safety”-measures is what kills any hope of truly effective broad-based use of these devices, and nobody ever goes out to actually examine what the hell goes on in the middle of things on the various training ranges.
Like the idjit-class morons who create the majority of our technical manuals for computers and software, the base assumption is that everyone is a proficient and knowledgeable handgun shooter, and they just casually assume a lot of things about the average shooter that are absolutely not true.
What I find really annoying is that there are a lot of people who treat the whole thing as one of those “expert games”, where the point of all of it is to be able to say “Gotcha!!” when the tyro doesn’t know or understand some trivial esoteric point about the whole thing. Most mechanical safety systems seem to be based on this concept, which you can see highlighted in so many entertainment productions where the “expert” has to tell someone that the pistol they’re pointing at someone still has the safety engaged…
Which is precisely the sort of issue which ought to be “designed out” of any mature system, just like the entire concept of “You should not be able to put this together in such a manner that it is seemingly correct, yet is actually nonfunctional…”
M60 designers, I’m looking at you…
DA/SA is, flatly put, an insane idea. I don’t know what the hell the Germans were thinking when they came up with it for a military pistol, but I am pretty sure that they were not considering the actual state of things down on the firing line with totally inexperienced shooters. If they were, they’d have designed a different interface…
Kirk, DA/SA may be indeed an insane idea, particularly with inexperecend shooters. But it was designed when -we are talking about Europe- only pistols with free floating firing pins and diminuitive safety levers existed.
The idea to not carry the pistol cocked, but having it decocked all the time and fire the first shot like having a revolver (no!!! fumbling with a safety lever) does not really seem insane to me.
Czechoslovak Alois Tomishka created the Little Tom DAO pistol.
Fritz Walther took this idea two steps further. Only the first shot required a heavy DA trigger pull (again, without fumbling with a safety or operating the slide) and any follow-on shots could be precisely aimed due to the SA trigger mode. His other idea was an automatic safety that prevented the hammer from reaching the firing pin, unless the trigger was pulled.
In the P38 this was improved to blocking the firing pin, unless the hammer was cocked.
Again, Czechoslovaks (Jan and Jaroslav Kratochvil) took this a step further in 1950 by blocking the firing pin until the trigger was actually pulled.
I fail to see insanity in the above ideas. I share your view that the perspective and ability of the inexperienced user was forgotten by the Europeans.
On the other hand, the M1911A1, still much worshiped outside inexperienced user circles, does not seem a sane solution to us Europeans.
@JPeelen,
The DA/SA thing is an acceptable solution, so long as you’re not trying to field the abortion to a broad spectrum of inexperienced shooters. If you want to spend the time and money for the proper amount of training, which is a lot, then the transition between “heavy first trigger pull/super-light second trigger pull” can be managed. A lot of cops have done that; the average military shooter I dealt with manifestly did not.
I’d argue that the whole idea of DA/SA wasn’t thought through very well, at all: The Germans were coming off of the Luger system, which was a striker-fired consistent-for-every-shot concept. Why did they think the P-38 should be different, and why did they create a whole new issue of “different trigger pulls”?
In my mind, it’s a perfect example of a military cultural system failing utterly to be at all consistent with systemic approaches to things. The Germans absolutely did that, with the whole MG34/42 family of machineguns, and all of the systems leading into those. Why didn’t they do the same with regards to the pistol?
The Austrians finally figured it out, with what Gaston Glock did. The entire Glock paradigm is an outstanding example of thinking things through from first principles, and correctly analyzing what sort of mechanism suits the needs of the average soldier best.
The M1911 and the rest of its family of pistols has to be looked at from the standpoint of “Cavalry weapon”, rather than “Defensive tool”. As such, its design features are what they are, and reflect the things that they thought they needed for that “space” in the small arms continuum of the time. Personally, while I find the M1911 suitable for a lot of things, I don’t own one or carry one.
What’s interesting is that all of the Glock features were available and doable, back during the 1930s. You could have done a Glock before there ever was one, because it borrowed so heavily from earlier designs. It was just thought through better, and carefully designed in accordance with that thinking.
The P-38 and all of its “Wundernine” successors just leave me wondering what the hell those people were thinking, because if you ever spent one day trying to transition people with no handgun shooting experience over that hump in between “heavy first pull” and “much lighter second pull”, you’ll either figure it out or be diagnosable with brain damage…
“The Austrians finally figured it out, with what Gaston Glock did. … What’s interesting is that all of the Glock features were available and doable, back during the 1930s.”
Indeed as far back as 1907 the Austro-Hungarian Empire adopted the Roth Steyr pistol which featured a striker that was held at half-cock after loading. Operating the trigger then pulled the striker back far enough to be released with sufficient energy to fire the pistol. No applied safety was required since releasing the trigger before firing returned the action to its semi-cocked condition.
The thing that’s always struck me with regards to that whole Roth-Steyr design idea is how long it languished on the periphery, and just how little notice it actually got. In terms of “Ideal mechanism”, it’s pretty high up in the hierarchy, in terms of “Is this appropriate for widespread issue to shooters with limited handgun skills?”
But, that’s the way it goes; the ideal is only visible in the rear-view mirror, after someone else takes the basic concept and popularizes it. The Austrians were not successful at war, so all of their designs were denigrated. Had they won their wars using the Roth-Steyr, odds are that more people would have paid more attention, and maybe we’d have seen something Glock-like before the Glock came along.
If I were to hypothesize an ideal pre-Glock before there was Glock, I’d love to see the principles of the Roth-Steyr applied to the Browning Hi-Power, doing away with that pistol’s totally schizoid trigger system. It could have been done; why it was not is simply down to the idjit types who were specifying the design requirements that FN and Browning were trying to satisfy.
One of the interesting things about the whole of small arms design is the bizarre way that nobody ever seems to really think through the “How will we train these firearms to people unfamiliar with guns…?” and “How can we best administer these weapons in storage, issue, and use…?”
I mean, OK… Serial numbers. Ya gotta have them, for tracking, but why the hell are they made to be so freakin’ obscure? Ever tried to do a serial number check with your squad, and there are badly stamped serial numbers in tiny little fonts you have trouble reading in low light? I had a “situation” one time in one of my squads, wherein we suddenly discovered that Soldier “A” had had Soldier “B”‘s weapon in his possession for several days, and because of the way the damn serial numbers were, I honestly can’t blame the poor squad leader for the mistake; I’d done a 100% inventory in that Arms Room myself, and gotten those two rifles mixed up, because of a combination of poor lighting, bad stampings, and being in a hurry. I could easily see where he’d misread the numbers for a couple of days, being as we were requiring them to do their 100% checks before we rolled out in the morning, which was always in the dark. It wasn’t until the day we were sitting around doing in-field recovery before returning to base that we figured out that the two soldiers had mixed their weapons up, and Soldier “B” had taken rifle “A” back with him when he went for a medical appointment…
So much crap that’s an utter waste of time revolves around that. I don’t know how many man-hours I wasted because you have to remove the M16-series rifles from their racks, in order to see the serial numbers… Insanity. You also can’t just check a racked weapon for its number; you have to have the keys to the rack, which opens up a whole other category of issues when you’re doing accountability.
Little or none of this is ever considered by the arsehole idjit types that do the decision-making about procurement. I can about guarantee you that there wasn’t the slightest hint of consultation with any unit-level armorer when they made the design choices on the M7…
I remember Jeff Cooper once suggested a tactic whereby the shooter viewed the first shot from a DA/SA pistol as a “throwaway shot” that was mainly used to get to the next shot in single action mode. He might have called it “shot-cocking”. I don’t know if he was being facetious or serious. It doesn’t sound safe for the non-expert shooter.
What I observed with tyro pistol shooters was that they usually screwed up the first, second, third, and generally the fourth shot, before getting used to the trigger pull. On the next stage of the qualification, they’d reset their flinch, and do it again.
What got me the most angry about the whole thing was a.) there were precisely zero concessions made to the idea of trying to train in counters to this problem (it was totally ignored…), and b.) they never, ever provided enough ammo to really be able to really be effective at fixing the set of problems it created.
Whenever I had “problem shooters”, I’d offer to do some private training during off-duty hours. I’d either take them out to the Personally Owned Weapon range on the weekends, or out to one of the local indoor ranges. With a Glock. That, invariably, they mastered within a couple of magazines due to the consistency of it all. Having gained some confidence, and understanding pistols better, they’d usually qualify. The transition between DA/SA still created problems, but it was usually lessened. Couple of my problem children took to cocking the M9 manually to get around the transition problem, but on some tables of the qualification, you weren’t allowed to do that…
I honestly doubt that very many of the idjit-class morons that decided on DA/SA pistols ever had the experience of trying to train totally new and inexperienced shooters on a handgun. If they did, they were very much not paying attention to it all…
Like I have said before, if you’ve got the time and the ammunition money for it, you can absolutely make DA/SA work in most settings. You don’t have the time or the money…? It’s just making life difficult for all involved. You want to cheap out on training, then buy the damn pistol design that will support that.