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…
Competition
Desert 2-Gun: 108 Fahrenheit With a WWSD Commando
In may last full-match opportunity to practice for Finnish Brutality, I brought my WWSD Commando (10.5″ barrel) and an Arex Delta out (my guns for Finland are already on their way across the Atlantic). The […]
Semiauto Rifles
Innovative and Interesting: Tinck Arms Perun X16
Don’t miss Bloke of the Range’s video of the X-16: The Tinck Arms Perun X-16 (distributed in the US by AEA Arms) is a much more interesting rifle than I expected from an initial glance. […]
Select-fire Rifles
Slovenia’s Specialized Bullpup: the F2000S
When the Slovenian Army decided to adopt a new infantry rifle in the mid-2000s, the Arex Defense company decided to submit the F-2000 into the trials. The H&K G36 was widely expected to be the […]
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…
Kirk, I sometimes wonder if all this, in last 2 decades, insane killings brutality that drug “cartels” practice, has something to do with culture and tradition of that local Mejis (pun to S.King BS books, lool) people, stemming back to Aztecs and human sacrifices times…
One could argue for cultural continuity through various regimes, but… I think it comes down less to genetics/culture and more to “shitty governance”.
You go back and look, and the levels of violence and sheer ‘effing horror in Medieval Europe weren’t all that much better. You can contrast the Aztec habits of tearing people’s hearts out of their chests with the Romans, who basically exterminated a lot of different animals around the Mediterranean for their “games” that were more masturbatory (literally, in some reports…) festivals of violence and destruction.
We’re all capable of it. The real question is whether or not we rise above our animalistic drives and “live better” instead of reverting to instinctual type.
The levels of violence observable in El Salvador not all that long ago? Truly ridiculous, those were: Today, under the guy running the place these days, who had the will to put an end to it? Much, much lower.
Mexico is Mexico not because the Mexicans are inherently bad people, but because they keep choosing poorly when it comes to leadership. They’re also way, way too tolerant of their “bad guys”; when your most popular entertainments are termed “narcocorrida” you’ve got an attitude and a cultural problem. Which could arguably be linked to culture and genetics, but I think it’s rather more linked, as I say, to bad governance.
Mexico will eventually reform, or it will be reformed from outside. Your guess is as good as mine as to which. See “El Salvador” for what happens when Jose Average gets tired of the BS.
@ Kirk
Mexico is Mexico because it’s organized crime organizations are comparatively enormously better funded than US ones, because it has a far bigger and richer neighbour that would buy drugs from them at any price.
Argentina is a country that keeps on doing bad leadership decisions, but has not that problem, so it’s not Mexico (1/3 murder rate, same GDP per capita despite not bordering with the continent’s richest market).
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.
This concept was illustrated in the Emberverse series of science fiction novels. Since the next enemy that you fight will be from another tribe, they will not use familiar techniques. So a wise warrior trains against as many DIFFERENT opponents as he can. This variety of training allows him to quickly adapt to a new fighting style.
Historically, in many battles, the guys in armor voluntarily dismounted from the horses and made dead meat of the guys with axes and mauls.
Armor and training to fight in armor were a HUGE advantage on the battlefield. Men in armor dispatching men not in armor in a 4/1 ratio was pretty much what anyone expected from them.
In the hundred years war, English knights almost always fought dismounted, but they never took off their armors.
Agincourt had been mainly a battle between heavily armored men on foot. When the English archers intervened with mallets and hatchets, they do so to aid the English man-at-arms line that held until them, and attacked the, by then, overly fatigued French equivalents. It was common kknowledge at the time that, in a battle between men-at-arms, the ones attacking (the French in that case) were at extreme disadvantage vs. the ones keeping the position.
Your answer is absolutely correct. But you are arguing against guys indocrinated to believe that “hereditary nnobility” is a synonym for incompetent fops. The kind of guys who believe in the literal word-for- word inerrancy of old Walt Disney flicks where Nobel birth meant “can’t find his dick in the dark”
@ Martin Tyrsegg
That kind of nobles became prevalent with Louis XIV, that turned the French nobles in courtesans that he could better control.
But, until then, at the question “what the son of a nobleman does” The answer was: “hunts, rides, trains to fight, plays tournaments, if there’s a war he puts the armor on and fights”. To be a noble and to be the only guy around that trained for war since childhood were synonyms. The others didn’t have time and energy for that.
Society For Creative Anachronism? Then it’s gotta be so.
I choose the gentlemen.
First of all, at that time, there was a sensible and visible physical difference between him and the bumptious asshole. In close fight, with or without blades, size and strength matter.
Then, he trained to use his blade to fight for his life (because that’s why he practiced fencing) much more than the other actually used his own.
Third, he has a better weapon.
The issue isn’t “bumptious asshole vs. “gentleman”” (whatever the hell that might be…) but “actual professional fighting man vs. effete aristo dilettante”. Which is the far more likely pairing; then, as now, the usual sort of person that winds up as the scion of the elite and who then spends his time “training” for things like duels is horribly ill-equipped to actually deal with the professionals at the art of violence.
Of course, the usual ruck of the “bumptious” don’t do much better, either.
I think your categorization is flawed, based on pure romanticism. There were elite aristocrats who were deadly with a blade, but the general run of them were not going to do very well against professional killers.
For examples, see how well the Cavaliers did against the Roundheads. Hardass, experienced killers will always outfight the foppish poseur.
Which isn’t to say that those don’t occur across the socio-economic spectrum, either. I just wouldn’t bet on anyone based on how they dressed.
I think your categorization is flawed, based on pure modernism. You think of people then like versions in costume of people now, sprinkled with a good measure of romantic vision of the “gritty working class fighter” vs. the “aristocrat stuck-up peacock”.
First of all, those “actual professional fighting men”, saved some elite mercenary formation, were not that professional, and didn’t fight that much. Those that did, like the Landsknechts IE, tended to be very well armed and dressed, because they were well paid (the Landsknechts in particular were much more fancy dressed than the nobles they served).
Then, those “actual professional fighting men” knew how to use the weapon they used in combat. A pikeman knew how to use a pike. An arquebusier knew how to use an arquebus. They didn’t become miraculously skilled in using a secondary weapon, figures one they didn’t use at all. A Doppelsöldner, veteran of a dozen battles, a god of war when wielding his Zweihänder, in a alley, a cutlass in hand, vs. someone that trained all his life to use a rapier? My money is on the rapier. It’s like “fighter pilot VS. IPSC athlete” with a pistol and with the IPSC athlete having a better pistol.
Third. The rapier became the go-to weapon for civilian defence because it was the most effective weapon for that use. Modern HEMA fighters, like Matt Easton of Scholagladiatoria IE, can testify how hard is to fight a rapier with any weapon that’s not a rapier (and he’s a sabre enthusiast). The bodyguards of those aristocrats (the “bravi” IE, usually assassins that sought the protection of that lord to escape the gallows), used rapiers as well.
Fourth. Fencing, practice, at that time, was done with the purpose to train men to survive duels and street ambushes. It was not a sport. The success of a certain school was measured in its students surviving deadly encounters.
Finally, “Cavaliers vs. Roundheads” were not “peacocks vs. experienced killers”. They were mostly the same people on the two sides.
“For example, see how well the Cavaliers did against the Roundheads.”
Not exactly the example to choose. To quote Macaulay:
“Charles, however, had one advantage, which, if he had used it well, would have more than compensated for the want of stores and money, and which, notwithstanding his mismanagement, gave him, during some months, a superiority in the war. His troops at first fought much better than those of the Parliament. Both armies, it is true, were almost entirely composed of men who had never seen a field of battle. Nevertheless, the difference was great. The Parliamentary ranks were filled with hirelings whom want and idleness had induced to enlist. Hampden’s regiment was regarded as one of the best; and even Hampden’s regiment was described by Cromwell as a mere rabble of tapsters and serving men out of place. The royal army, on the other hand, consisted in great part of gentlemen, high spirited, ardent, accustomed to consider dishonour as more terrible than death, accustomed to fencing, to the use of fire arms, to bold riding, and to manly and perilous sport, which has been well called the image of war. Such gentlemen, mounted on their favourite horses, and commanding little bands composed of their younger brothers, grooms, gamekeepers, and huntsmen, were, from the very first day on which they took the field, qualified to play their part with credit in a skirmish. The steadiness, the prompt obedience, the mechanical precision of movement, which are characteristic of the regular soldier, these gallant volunteers never attained. But they were at first opposed to enemies as undisciplined as themselves, and far less active, athletic, and daring. For a time, therefore, the Cavaliers were successful in almost every encounter.”
Eventually, yes:
“Cromwell made haste to organise the whole army on the same principles on which he had organised his own regiment. As soon as this process was complete, the event of the war was decided. The Cavaliers had now to encounter natural courage equal to their own, enthusiasm stronger than their own, and discipline such as was utterly wanting to them. It soon became a proverb that the soldiers of Fairfax and Cromwell were men of a different breed from the soldiers of Essex. At Naseby took place the first great encounter between the Royalists and the remodelled army of the Houses. The victory of the Roundheads was complete and decisive. It was followed by other triumphs in rapid succession. In a few months the authority of the Parliament was fully established over the whole kingdom.”
The near-intentional obtusity on display here is truly awe-inspiring.
You project onto what I’m saying a whole bunch of things that simply are not there. The real dichotomy here is the same one on display when you start speaking of “warrior” vs. “soldier”.
Warriors fight for individual glory and their own aggrandizement; soldiers fight in a disciplined manner for something else, a cause or a specific leader. You had, for example, very experienced leaders on the side of King Charles (who he mostly ignored…) that had fought as mercenaries on the Continent. They strove to impose discipline and order on the volunteer ranks of his forces, and never quite managed the feat.
Which was why he lost.
Cromwell, on the other hand, had some of the same sorts of people, mostly not of the nobility, but who’d also had experience on the Continent, and they managed to somehow achieve the things that eventually cost King Charles his head; order, discipline, fieldcraft, and all the rest.
The difference is that you don’t necessarily automatically acquire the necessities of knowledge and self-discipline in the salle or dojo; you have to have exposure to real-world consequences and the uncertainty of what takes place outside the confines of drill and kata. The enemy doesn’t know either one, and is going to do something entirely unexpected.
I once had the misfortune to be involved in breaking up a really, really stupid confrontation between some very childish, arrogant, and immature KATUSA soldiers and their US equivalents. The KATUSA bunch of idiots were apparently enamored of the typical cartoon-fantasy bullshit about fighting with all the “KI” and “Hadouken” BS. They had their Tae Kwon Do stuff down to a science, but when they decided to take on about a quarter their number of GI’s over something really stupid (access to the gym basketball courts…), those GI’s basically turned the encounter into a rout. You decide to take your exquisitely honed balletically graceful Tae Kwon Do moves up against a couple of guys who grew up on the streets of Detroit and Compton…?
You’re gonna have a really bad day. As in, the KATUSA element involved here all received a severe pummeling, and the majority of the GI’s who were at the back of this little confrontation in front of the gym never even knew there was a fight until it was over and someone told them.
The point that I’m trying to get across here is that the sad reality is that there’s no substitution for actual real-world experience, and that your training techniques need to be salted heavily with “actual enemy who won’t do what your drills predict”, or you’re going to get your ass handed to you. Hard.
The problem with real-world experience in fighting is that it’s so costly in terms of death and injury. That’s why so many of the Oriental martial arts are so stylized and limited: so the participants don’t end up crippled. But that means forbidding some of the most effective techniques; “hitting below the belt” is proverbially a foul, but in a desperate fight it’s a good option.
Consider how much experience a civilian gets doing a job every day for decades. A soldier would need to be damn lucky to get even a tenth of that amount of combat experience without being dead or crippled. So a lot of what you’re ascribing to “experience”, Kirk, is really collective knowledge, the distilled experience of others. In terms of man-years in combat, after a year both Cavaliers and Roundheads had plenty of experience. But experience in a poorly-organized army isn’t the same thing as experience in an outfit that really knows what it’s doing, which is why veterans from the continent indeed still had much to teach them. Hell, even in civilian jobs, what people often learn from their much greater amount of job experience is how to do crappy work and get away with it.
Anyway, nobody’s questioning the existence of poseurs who think that buying fancy equipment is all they need to do. We’re just quibbling over historical details of who exactly the poseurs were in the distant past.
@ Kirk
It seems vague.
“enamored of the typical cartoon-fantasy bullshit about fighting with all the ‘KI’ and ‘Hadouken’ BS” and “They had their Tae Kwon Do stuff down to a science” is mutually exclusive. Who really trains (not in a mcdojo) in any martial art is not “enamored of the typical cartoon-fantasy bullshit about fighting with all the ‘KI’ and ‘Hadouken’ BS”, because he knows how much physical fatigue it really costs any advancement, and that’s true for tae kwon do, boxe, muay thai, etc. The guys you described, as you described them, seemed more like cosplayers.
Then. Any combat sport gym / dojo (and those are currently normally intended to train people for sport, in the past they were intended to train people for actual life/death fighting) is routinely visited by guys that claim to be “street fighters”, looking for troubles, that are regularly ridiculed even by the novices.
Obviously, most of them are just childish, arrogant, and immature idiots, but let’s get real. How many fistfights a guy who grew up on the streets of Detroit and Compton really fought? And how many of his opponents knew at least how to dodge a punch? Hand-to-hand combat is a question of motor memory, and motor memory needs a movement to be repeated hundreds of times to form and thousands to refine.
They fear the rich fops will also be able to shoot exceeding well. Typical plebian phobia: the guy at the top of the socioeconomic heap might be there for a reason. ‘Curses! A lifetime of petty resentment squandered in vain!’
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.
As I understand it, the glock conversion backplate started life in a Hollywood propshop armory, since they had a FFL/SOT but didn’t want to go to the bother of sourcing actual G18s, especially since nobody outside of here or IMFDB watching will notice the difference, and from there leaked out to the “you can’t tell me what to do”/garage-shop autosear community, and from there some criminals saw the potential for a payday and started selling and producing the goddamn things en masse
Regardless of the original idea source, the fact remains that the Chinese have very controlling and restrictive government oversight over damn near everything that goes on in that country. Ain’t nobody manufacturing and shipping weapons parts or assemblies overseas without someone in the CCP knowing and authorizing that activity. That’s just the way it is; the presence of those switches on our streets did not happen by accident, nor was it something that just “leaked” out of a Hollywood prop house. Those are precision mass-produced items that got tested and proofed as working somewhere; you don’t just get the bright idea for that and then cobble up something in your garage workshop overnight. You have to figure out the tolerances and what exact mechanical interface you need to have, and then you can go to mass production.
The fact that these things are drop-in for just about every Glock generation out there argues for someone that knows what they’re doing managing it behind the scenes. The guys making them had to have had access to a lot of different Glocks from different years of production in order to make the whole thing work as well as it has, and the fact that they’re in China? Where do you suppose they’re getting access to a collection of Glocks?
I think you’re a little too trusting and naive.
Oh, it’s well beyond dispute that the criminal manufacturing of the things in China is deliberately ignored if not actively sponsored by the red government, like a lot of things. I was just giving what I know relating to the origin point of the things; I saw the plans bundled in with things like CAD files for AR and HK DIAS, old Paladin Press conversion books and the like *years* before they hit the streets in meaningful numbers and co-starred in every rap song and trafficking arrest. The different types took time to develop, too, they didn’t appear all at once. So from what I’ve seen I’d call them a western group effort that China saw and decided to steal for their own ends. Not exactly the first story like that
There used to be a bunch of stuff like the Glock switches running around, drop-in auto sear plans and the like… Which often had the same sort of sponsorship that the Anarchist’s Cookbook had, namely government entities looking to ensure that any idjit-class wannabe terrorist types self-identified. Much of it didn’t work, and deliberately so; I remember talking to a friend of mine who was doing some legal work for a client that got caught up in some of that stuff, and what he found when he had a licensed and legal third party actually evaluate the so-called “drop-in auto sear”, the part sets only created jams and simply did not work. I think a lot of the early Glock switches fabricated here in the US were exactly like that, which is what I was hearing through the grapevine, that they didn’t work. It was usually something some genius working out of his mother’s basement threw together on a 3D printer or some half-ass CNC.
Those facts are why I think all of the working drop-in “fit everything” switches are likely Chinese government-sponsored affairs. They work a little too well, and on everything. That argues for extensive development and sponsorship, in my view. I could be wrong, but… The history of the drop-in auto sear “industry” that I’m aware of does not argue for some set of garage-based knuckleheads getting everything “just right” to make those damn things work as well as they do.
I can believe in and accept that Chinese manufacturers can get a hell of a lot of stuff dead-on, and be very high-quality, but something that would require actual testing on real handguns, and a fairly extensive range of them? WTF? In China?
Chinese manufacturers with government tie-ins 关系 import foreign weapons for R&D. There are even public shooting ranges near bigger cities featuring both domestic and foreign guns. Though, yeah, it’s scarcely state of the art gear.
Just how likely is it that some group of random Chinese manufacturers just got it into their heads to make these things, tested them out, and nobody in the Chinese government was aware?
Odds are, not very. Also, the idea that said manufacturers would take the risks of making actual firearms parts, without government consent and approval? That’s a recipe for meeting up with one of the CCP execution vans.
Just like the fentanyl; this is not accidental nor is it the result of “something just happened”.
Has all the hallmarks of a destabilization op, so until I see some definitive proof that I’m not going to get, I’m going with “intel op”.
Access to a collection of Glocks? Block markets it’s stuff pretty much everywhere. Chinese government was probably the buyer. Selected industries work closely with the government. Pretty standard practice worldwide and nothing James Bond about it
The Prodynamic II looks a lot like a Pardini, although the grip angle seems different. You can see it here: https://pardini.it/en/category/practical-shooting-conversions/
and also here: https://www.pardiniguns.com/store/product_info.php?cPath=99_1_9&sort=1a&products_id=14