Proarmis is a Slovenian pistol manufacturer that has introduced a new high-end competition pistol (priced at approximately €4000). The first example has arrived in the US, and I had the chance to borrow it for some filming. The gun handles very well, and has a really remarkably adjustable trigger – the user can adjust basically every aspect of weight, travel, and over travel as either a single-stage or 2-stage setup. It’s a pleasure to shoot, but the quality is more than I can fully exploit myself. A commercial batch of Prodynamic II should be arriving in the US shortly…
Semiauto Rifles
Slovenian Modularity: Perun X16 “PDW” in .300 Blackout
I was first introduced to the Tinck Arms Perun X16 at Lynx Brutality 2022 in Slovenia, and it is an interesting system emphasizing modularity and simple disassembly. I opted to use one (a 5.56mm carbine) […]
Q&A
Q&A 61: Talking Guns with Polenar Tactical
Get 10% off anything in Polenar’s web store with code “NOTEASTERNEUROPE” https://polenartactical.com/shop/ 00:00:32 – What is the “elevator pitch” for Polenar Tactical? 00:02:26 – How did you get your channel name? 00:04:49 – What are […]
Tour
Tour of the AREX Defense Factory in Slovenia
During my visit to Slovenia, I had a chance to tour the AREX Defense factory in Šentjernej. I came away really impressed by the quality and the breadth of operations that the factory performs in-house. […]
I’m seeing an even more overpriced SiG P226 X5 Competition. Yes, it’s a nice basis for a high-end race gun, and probably nice for 3-gun matches, but I don’t see it being $4,645.20 worth of “nice”.
I think Ian overlooked the most obvious market for it. Highly-paid bodyguards for Euro VIPs who imagine themselves to be Cyberpunk 2020 RPG “Eurosolos”. The kind for whom $2000 combat-customized SiGs are just too “plebian”.
Note that if Ian “isn’t a good enough shot” to get any real advantage from this one, then neither are 99% of shooters overall. The Eurosolo wannabees certainly aren’t; practicing isn’t in their cockpit at all.
But they’ll figure they can’t possibly miss with this super-gun, so of course practice won’t be necessary. Every one of them will want one, and their bosses will just smile and indulge them by footing the bill.
They better watch it, though. The corners on this thing might ruin the hang of their bespoke sports jackets.
clear ether
eon
As an art object? I like it. Love it, even.
As a combat tool, or a training tool? LOL… Fuhgeddaboudit.
There are practical limitations on these things: You get so far out over the tips of your skis that your hyperspecialized and “trick” weapon is necessary to your technique? You’ve got a problem.
The reality is on display with that Turkish guy during the last Olympics: He shows up, shoots in shirtsleeves, and wins the medals. Meanwhile, his competitors have all this fancy gear, tricked-out pistols… And do worse. Man, not the equipment.
This is an expression of the same trope that shows up in all too much fiction: The magical or “named” ultra-special weapon that makes everyone automatically victorious in every engagement. Whether it’s the protagonist or the antagonist, that’s all so much bullshit. It might apply if you’re some Bronze-Age type coming up against good iron or steel, but as we saw in the wars in Mexico between the Conquistadores and the Aztecs, even a stone-tipped chunk of wood can win against steel, in the hands of the right man.
As I understand it, the two main things about the Conquistadores that helped them defeat the Aztecs were;
1. Horses. Nobody in the New World had seen one since Eohippus went extinct about 35 million years ago. (I.e., not even “race memory”, and the little guys were only three hands at the shoulder full-grown anyway.)
The Aztecs saw men riding these strange cantankerous beasts, and freaked.
2. Religion. The Aztecs ruled an empire consisting of subjugated tribes, and took those tribes’ young, comely boys and maidens for sacrifices to their “sun god”. The Conquistadores told those subjugated tribes
“We intend to conquer and rule, but we will be better rulers over you than the Aztecs are. Among other things, we will put an end to the sacrifices. Our God does not approve of that sort of thing.”
The Aztecs in the end got curb-stomped by a mass revolt of their “client states”.
That’s also why nobody else kicked about the Conquistadores looting the gold and etc. The other tribes figured, “Well, Hell, they robbed us to begin with” and “To the victors belong the spoils”.
In short, the Aztecs lost because pretty much everybody who was supposed to be on “their side” hated their guts. The Conquistadores won mostly due to psychology, not “technical superiority”.
Moral; Never try to run an empire like your own personal playground. Given a viable alternative, the “children” might just decide to stop playing nice.
And you could end up on the wrong end of a hostile takeover.
clear ether
eon
(sigh)
The point I was making was that the macuahuitl was a shockingly (especially for the Conquistadores…) effective weapon. There were accounts made of horses being beheaded by them, and unarmored men being literally disarmed.
If you’re good enough, you can do some damage with even a rock-studded stick. I’m no swordsman, and I am pretty sure that you give me the finest Toledo blade, one borne by a legit winner-conqueror of Mexico…? I’d be so much dead meat.
It is always, always the man, not the tool.
Huh. Somewhere, a sentence vanished into the aether, one where I said that were I to be faced with a macuahuitl-wielding Aztec warrior, and I had the finest sword? I’d be hamburger in short order.
Note to self: Proof-read after getting up to do something AFK…
Uh…actually the conquistadores won.Playing on local politics and maybe smallpox helped, still Cortes force of scarcely 500 held up their end of the fighting. Read Bernal Dias’ first-hand account. As for fictional superweapons, the ubiquitous trope is that the superweapon falters or fizzles and Captain Bodacious has to save the day with chewing gum and gumption.
Opting for the overpriced specialized gear is one thing; being cripplingly dependent on it is another. I am guessing the trained bodyguard with the Pyrodynamic piece could, in a pinch, make do with the Glock or Hi- Power he just scooped up off the ground. A guy who chooses to drive a Porsche is not for that simple reason baffled into immobility when all that’s on offer is a Vespa scooter.
This is only a half clone of the Pardini PC, with a less angled handle for CZ magazines and with a trigger adjustable only after disassembly, when the screws to adjust the Pardini’s trigger are all external.
I propose an experiment: Select a statistically significant number of shooters to determine what difference the uber-Waffen make, and have one group given the uber-Waffen and whatever ammo they can afford for themselves. Give the equivalent value in ammo to another group, and have them practice with it using whatever they were shooting before. You’d also need a control group, but that’s just plain common-sense experimentation.
My money is on the group that gets that money put into ammunition for practice. Odds are good that the folks who do the “magick pistol” thing are not going to put in the tuition, and will be unable to effectively use said uber-waffe effectively, or at all up to its potential.
I look at this thing and I see basically a SiG P210 Carry, the modern version, with extra bells and whistles. I’m not sure that any amount of ammunition expended in practice is going to make any shooter with this do noticeably better than anybody with a decent, production-line pistol of any other brand that puts in the same or greater amount of practice.
There are some double-stack 9mm 1911s on the market today that come to mind. For that matter, an updated Wz.35 “Radom” with similar improvements, or a similarly tricked Star Super B, could probably do it.
I did notice that the P-II’s takedown latch works suspiciously like that of the Star Super A/B. I actually approve of that; it’s one of the most sensible features of that design, that overall was really fifty years ahead of its time.
cheers
eon
C’mon guys, are you really making up a completely imaginary customer just so that you can backslap over being smarter than this nonexistent money-to-burn euro-elite-but-also-pleb?
More like, the manufacturer probably had some consulting firm (1) do an expensive study of “who can legally own a pistol in post-modern, enlightened Europe?” and then (2) designed a high-end-of-market piece of merchandise that would appeal to exactly that sort of customer.
Whether such a customer really existed outside of the “study” or not.
It wouldn’t be the first time, although that sort of “going wrong with confidence” sort of marketing is more often seen in the automobile industry. For examples, see “New Beetle”, “Pontiac Aztek”, “Chevy Lumina Minivan (original)”, etc.
It could be argued that the entire EV silly season began the same way.
As the old saying goes, “‘expertmanship’ is mainly a way of going badly wrong with supreme confidence”.
cheers
eon
I think there’s a certain division, here: On the one hand, you have the sort of bespoke high-value weapon like one of the fancy swords that the Spanish Hidalgos so loved… Jewel-encrusted hilts; Toledo blades; fancy scabbards; exquisite presentation-grade stuff made by masters of the art.
And, you have the other sort of thing, the nasty brutish naval cutlass, churned out by the thousands. Likely by apprentices; wielded by bloody-handed knuckle-dragging sorts who haven’t the slightest hint of refinement or gentlemanly arts about them.
It is the difference between Judo, the sport, and Ju-jitsu, the full-contact martial art taught to soldiers and men who mean business. The sort of men who carry commodity-grade Glock pistols, perhaps with metallic night sights, and who don’t pay the slightest heed to the pretty-pretty pretensions of the gentlemanly types.
In most encounters between the two sorts, put your money down on the bumptious assholes, not the refined sort of gentlemen.
As a friend of mine, long-standing member of the Society for Creative Anachronism and U.S. Army E-5 once observed, on an actual battlefield, once the guy in armor with the fancy sword was unhorsed, he was dead meat for the guy with an axe or a maul.
Neither one has to penetrate mail or even plate armor to turn the guy inside it into steak tartare.
And yes, that is how the English actually won at Agincourt on 24 Oct 1415. In fact, what they did to the French knights after taking their horses out from under them would be defined today as a war crime.
clear ether
eon
Yeah, there’s a lot of shared mindspace with the sort of idjit-class individuals who name weapons and focus on things like fancy swords and the ones who buy these things.
I’ve a friend who used to shoot PPC, which was (for the unknowing) Police Pistol Combat or Precision Pistol Competition. He did it strictly with his duty weapon, the one they gave him, duty ammunition, and his duty gear. Everyone else?LOL… They gamified the living f*ck out of that shit. The pistols his competitors would show up with looked about like Olympic precision bullseye pistols, and the funny thing was? He usually won whatever matches he showed up for, while the guys who pursued the chimeric “uber-pistol” and other stuff to help them “win” did not.
His commentary on all of that was acerbic and amusing; one of the matches I went to as an observer (wanted to know if I could learn anything, there…), he was ‘effing merciless on all the guys with all the gear. The other, more junior cops who showed up with their duty gear, he was solicitous of, encouraging, and giving them tips about what to do.
He was really pissed at the way he saw the whole PPC thing going, and eventually left it and went strictly to IPSC with all of its oddities. He was really the first person to point out and articulate the whole “gamification” thing to me, and what we see here with this pistol is a symptom of the same syndrome.
Honestly, I feel like if it were back in the days of the sword, I’d be a huge advocate of doing training with random, non-“special” weapons, and include whatever improvised things could be found on the scene. If it were I, as swordmaster? I’d take my pupils out of the salle or dojo, and into the real world. Walk around until a suitable alley was found, and then tell them to have at it… Use whatever is there, do whatever you need to do.
Oddly, I can find no mention of training techniques like this ever being used, back in the day. It’s all rarefied “in a place of arms” stuff, someone’s specialized playground. If anyone knows different, please say so and provide cites.
Anything short of doing your training out in the real world is simply silly-ass games.
PPC (Practical Pistol Course) is the most misnamed training program there is. Even back when I was a student in the late Seventies it was becoming the domain of uber-specialized “race guns” that you would never, ever carry on duty;
https://americancop.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/20240722_154737.jpg
Note the super-heavyweight barrel, spurless hammer (trigger-cocking only; most PPC revolvers have even had the SA notch ground off to ensure the Ultimate Smooth Double-Action Pull) and speedloaders; you can’t have enough simultaneous loaders in PPC, in fact a belt carrying half a dozen or more is typical.
All designed to get to that magic 200 Possible.
Skeet and trap shooters are about as gadget obsessed. As one article in the 1976 Gun Digest related, one guy showed up for a meet with a wet sponge hanging from an elastic cord tied to his Perazzi O/U. Why? He used it to wipe the top rib after every pair, supposedly to kill heat mirage.
After lunch that day, every other shooter had a wet sponge tied to his shotgun.
I scandalized skeet and trap shooters by using a Savage 20-gauge field gun and scoring reasonably well.
I was considered a blasphemer on the PPC course for using a 6″ Colt Police Positive Special .38 with no modifications whatsoever. And averaging 183.
Sometimes there’s a point to being an impoverished college student.
There’s really no point in being a “Speed Racer”. At least not in the real world.
clear ether
eon
I was once witness to a skeet shoot wherein the winner, out of a field full of pricey custom skeet shotguns, was a guy shooting a Benelli M1 in riot-shotgun mode, right down to the pistol grip.
He was making a point.
I think eon got it right. In Europe, due to legistlation, tend to own a limited number of handguns strictly for a certain shooting discipline. Therefore there’s a market for race guns, either in 9 mm or olympic .32 or .22.
Oh my! Another new frufru pistol for the snobs who have beaucoup bucks to show off at the range with or competitive shooters who think that the sexy new offering will make them champions.
But has there been any recent releases of new designs that actually improve the armament landscape for actual, down in the dirt, do or die combat? Kirk’s and eon’s knuckle-draggers also deserve a new toy.
Honestly? Until there’s another incremental “push” to the technological envelope, that “cutlass and boarding pike” space has been filled by Glock and all the other Glock-alikes out there.
I’ve no idea what that “push” might look like, or what direction it’s going to go, but until it manifests itself? Glockamole, baby…
Whoever in Hollywood concocted the “Glock Switch” for filming, that escaped onto the net and into rapid prototyping, so that now every ganger and drug dealer has a full-auto Glock, will burn in Hell forever for making any and all Glocks potential machine pistols by the plug-in method.
As for me, looking at the alternatives, my choice would be the Walther PDP-F compact 9mm. Yes, it’s intended as a “ladies’ gun”, and yes it looks like a refugee from a Klingon armory, but it’s reliable and can’t be “MP’d” just by switching in a part. Being cheaper than similar Glocks doesn’t hurt my feelings, either.
And whoever thought we’d see the day that a freakin’ Walther would be the “mid-priced car” of the market?
cheers
eon
Y’know… I think you have this issue very wrong-handed. I don’t think it was necessarily “Hollywood” that came up with the “Glock switch”. Most of them are too ‘effing stupid, and don’t know enough about firearms.
My money is on the whole thing, from start to finish, having been a Chinese intelligence operation, intended to destabilize the United States and add fuel to the fire for gun control.
Which is absolutely something they would do, and if you notice, all of their client governments in the West, like New Zealand and Canada? They’re all doing exactly what the Chinese would do, were they actually governing those territories after successfully taking them over.
Which they did, only without troops or any overt invasion.
So I assert, and I challenge anyone to refute me.