A neighboring couple has come to me because they know I'm into guns, and the lady of the family has decided to carry. We bring her to the range with a selection of handguns suitable for her intended purpose. She's particularly taken with the new Kahr PM9, a polymer-framed subcompact semiautomatic pistol which holds seven rounds of the hottest 9mm Parabellum ammo you can get, which is frankly a bit beyond the best .38 Special revolver ammo you can get.
"I guess I got into this at the right time," she says. "If this is the newest, it has to be the most advanced, right?"
I open my mouth to answer – and close it just as fast. This may indeed be the best handgun for her needs – but the concept isn't exactly the newest.
A Century of Pocket Autos
Colt introduced their classic Pocket Model in 1903, chambered for the "Calibre .32 Rimless Smokeless." This flat, sleek, pistol had an internal hammer that being out of sight was obviously out of mind because the gun instantly became known as a "hammerless." It was radical, it was streamlined, and above all it was modern! Modern always seems to sell, and it seems to sell even better at times when centuries are turning or shortly thereafter.
Five years later, Colt brought out a more potent version, caliber (excuse me, calibre) .380. Identical in appearance to one another, the Colt Pocket Models would eventually define the shape of the generic "automatic" to the public in everything from movies to cartoons (remember the early Dick Tracy?). People accustomed to the old paradigms laughed and said, "That new-fangled thing will never catch on! It's just a flash in the pan!"
Famous last words.
There would be other pocket autos, of course. Colt's own Browning-designed .25 became known to the cognoscenti as a "vest pocket pistol" to distinguish it from the .32 and .380 "pocket pistols." In the late 1920s, Carl Walther changed the paradigm again with a double action first shot pocket auto, the PP (Polizei Pistole) and its smaller "Detective Special" version, the PPK (Polizei Pistole Kriminale).
In the first half of the 20th Century, CZ pioneered the double action only pocket auto pistol. The postwar years brought a flood of scaled down 1911s in .32 and .380, mostly from Spain, a concept that didn't catch on until Colt brought out their .380 Government Model in 1985. That gun was followed by the smaller Mustang, and the even nicer Pocketlite with aluminum frame that brought weight down to 15 ounces – Airweight revolver territory. If you covered the hammer and grip tang area of a Colt Government .380 with your thumb, it looked remarkably similar to a 1903 Pocket Model.
Seecamp produced a .32 the size of a .25 with a DAO mechanism that appeared to have been inspired by the old CZ, and with Louis Seecamp's own ingenious double captive recoil spring. The Seecamp .32 became so much in demand as a hideout gun that it brought scalper's prices in the marketplace, and still does.
This was not a helluva lot of progress. In 90 years, the best the industry could do was to come full circle to the original 1903 model, albeit with an internal firing pin safety and an external hammer instead of a concealed one. However, there was still a decade before the Pocket Model turned 100 years old. There was time for a renaissance.
That renaissance would be built on one thing more than anything else: power. The vest-pocket .25s and the pocket size .32s and .380s were certainly convenient to carry, but they weren't manstoppers. Conventional wisdom was that you might have to bring to a gunfight. And the industry was listening to that advice.
| Bevy of pocket autos from the turn of the century onward: The PM9 is more potent, yet compares size-wise with all but the Beretta .25 and TP-70 .22. Others shown are Colt 1908, Browning 1910 and Walther PP. (J.G. Photo) |
 |
 |
Pocket Auto Renaissance
The great leap forward in pocket auto design came in the mid-1990s. Three companies were the key players: Glock, Kahr Arms, and Kel-Tec. They brought us a new wave of pocket pistols as short and light as many of the old .32s and .380s, but chambered for cartridges powerful enough to stop lethal fight with some degree of reliability.
From Kel-Tec came a small 9mm with a polymer frame so soft you could flex parts of it with your hands, using an external hammer, double action only design with second strike capability. It held 11 rounds using a truncated copy of the S&W Model 59 magazine, and it would work with any series 5900 or 6900 mag as well. Price was dirt cheap, and the gun weighed only 14.5 ounces. After spring problems were sorted out in the first production run, the Kel-Tec worked. Its unusually long and heavy trigger pull turned off some serious shooters, but that was nothing a good pistol-smith couldn't fix up.
Kel-Tec found that this design did not translate well to the .40 S&W, and after a brief run that caliber was discontinued by the company. They were much more successful with their fabulous P32, a .32 ACP the size of most .25 automatics and weighing an incredible 6.6 ounces. Like its big brother, the P32 was really cheap and it really worked, and therefore it was really successful, quickly outselling the bigger gun. Remember, however, that this size pistol is more "vest pocket gun" than "pocket gun."
Glock made a huge sales with their "baby Glocks," basically the standard pistols radically chopped at both butt and muzzle. In a gun the overall size of a Colt Detective Special and lighter, albeit more square, the 9mm Glock 26 held a total of 11 rounds. That equaled the in-gun firepower of a six-shot Dick Special and a five-shot S&W J-frame snubby put together.
In caliber .40 S&W (Glock 27) or .357 SIG (Glock 33), the same size pistol held 10 rounds when fully loaded. These little Glocks are remarkably accurate. My personal best is a 1.5-inch five-shot group with a G27 and Winchester 155-grain .40 Silvertip at 25 yards. The baby Glock were such groundbreakers that their style has essentially been copied by two more series of mini-service pistols, one from Springfield Armory in their Croatian-made XD, and one from S&W in the SW99 line, the Smith/Walther collaboration.
Kahr Arms introduced a neat little all-steel double action-only 9mm auto in the mid-‘90s. It instantly captured the fancy of the shooting public. It soon passed the demanding standards to allow NYPD to approve it for off duty carry.
Gun writers universally sang the Kahr's praises. Its double action trigger pull was light and sweet, the gun had excellent accuracy potential, and its efficient size made it easy to carry. There were a few problems. Having tight chambers, they fed only factory ammo and the very best handloads. They were so tightly fitted you about needed a rubber mallet to take them apart. Being all-steel, a Kahr felt as if it was too heavy for the size of the package.
Justin Moon and his team at Kahr Arms listened to the complaints and acted upon them. Soon they had come out with polymer framed version, which brought the weight down considerably. The latest evolution of the concept is their PM9 pistol.
The PM9
The Kahr PM9 (P for Polymer frame, M for Micro size, 9 for 9mm Parabellum chambering) pretty much describes itself once you translate the code for its model designation. It is just under a pound, still putting it in the weight class of a J-frame S&W Airweight but a bit more than an AirLite made with Titanium or Scandium. The PM9 is only 5.3 inches in overall length. That's smaller than a baby Glock or a Kel-Tec P-11 9mm, shorter than a snub-nose J-frame revolver by about an inch, and shorter than a Walther PPK .380. MSRP runs from $660 to $790.
The PM9 comes with two magazines. One fits almost flush with the butt of the short grip frame, holding six rounds to augment the seventh in the chamber. This gives maximum concealment but leaves the little finger of the firing hand "floating." The second mag holds seven rounds, bringing you up to eight shots total and leaving a plastic-covered extension below the butt to allow all fingers of the firing hand to take a useful purchase.
It is flatter than the other 9mm autos mentioned, slimmer than the little revolvers against which it competes. When you actually carry your pocket auto in your trouser pocket, that makes a huge amount of difference. All these striker-fired autos have a rear slide structure that hangs out over the backstrap of the grip, and can snag on the top edge of the pocket opening. They are squarer than the old Colt Pocket Model in this area.
In capacious pocket like those of BDU’s or Dockers, you can get a fatter compact auto like a baby Glock to not only conceal, but draw reasonably fast. However, for the penalty in cartridge capacity, the slimmer PM9 will conceal even better and draw even faster. As the trouser pockets get tighter, you reach the point where you would need your tactical folder to cut your mini-Glock loose, but the PM9 can still be drawn, albeit with more difficulty than a "hammerless" or spurless hammer small-frame revolver. It's proportional.
It's A Size Thing
During unseasonably hot days this past spring, wearing shorts and an untucked tee-shirt around town, I found myself carrying a Glock 27 inside my waistband in a Ted Blocker holster, and slipping the Kahr PM9 into a Kramer left side pocket holster for backup. Most of my shorts just aren't cut baggy enough to hide even the smallest Glock effectively in the side pocket.
The flatness of the PM9 also makes it the most comfortable of the currently available breed of tiny 9mm to hide in a belly band holster, or an underarm holster attached to a ballistic vest beneath a tailored uniform shirt. It's this greater concealability from the gun's thinness for which you are paying a three or four round penalty in cartridge capacity when you choose the PM9 over one of the other modern pocket autos in this category.
The PM9 fires like a revolver: point gun, performing long trigger pull, do same again. Reliability is quite high. The only malfunction in many hundreds of rounds of testing was a single failure to go into battery when loading a first round into the chamber. A light pressure on the back of the slide fixed the problem instantly.
The big advantage of these little pocket autos of today is that they are shootable. All have pretty good inherent accuracy. The Kahr's long, light double action trigger is easier than most. It is conducive to a surprise trigger break.
The gun is very controllable. Recoil is mild, even with +P or +P+ ammo. It's at least as easy to shoot as the Glock 26, which is very easy indeed. By comparison, an Airweight revolver of the same heft hurts to shoot with +P ammo, and an 11-ounce Titanium revolver with +P approaches torture when fired intensively in the kind of practice you need to make a last ditch hideout gun do what it must.
Accuracy? The first time I tested a PM9 for a gun magazine, my best five-shot group measured 2 1/4 inches from 25 yards, with the best three of those shots in an inch and five-sixteenths. The ammo was blue-box, remanufactured 115-grain FMJ from Black Hills. I noticed that, like many autos in general and most Kahrs in particular, the PM9 was prone to "4+1" syndrome. That is, the first handcycled round would go to a different point of impact than the rest of the five shots, which had subsequently been automatically cycled into battery.
To allow for that, I fired six-shot groups and took three different measurements. The first was the total of six shots, to give a true picture of what the user could expect when he opened fire. For clarity in the following charts, let's call this group "A." The second (group "B"), was a measurement of shots two through six, a five-shot group in which all rounds had been fed into the chamber the same way. The third measurement was the best three of those last five.
The "best three" measurement practice helps to factor out human error and give a truer picture of the gun's inherent mechanical accuracy when you don't have a machine rest available. Six different loads, encompassing the three most popular bullet weights in the 9x19, were tried. All firing was hand-held from a rest at 25 yards. For the results see chart on page 53.
No, this probably isn't the pistol you would want to take to the national bullseye championships at Camp Perry, but for a pistol that fits nicely in your pocket, it's not bad. For perspective, the Pro-Load would have kept all six rounds including the slightly errant first shot in not just the head but the center head box of an IPSC target. The head box measures 2 inches high by 4 inches wide; the Pro-Load group measured one and one-eighth inch high by three and a quarter inches wide. For a gun this tiny, I'll take that.
| ACCURACY RESULTS |
| MAKE |
LOAD |
GRP "A" |
GRP "B" |
BEST 3 SHOTS |
| Black Hills |
115-gr. JHP |
6 1/8" |
4" |
3" |
| Pro-Load |
115-gr. JHP |
3 1/4" |
2 1/4" |
1 1/16" |
| Remington |
115-gr. JHP +P |
5" |
4 1/4" |
1 7/8" |
| Samson IMI |
115-gr. JHP +P |
4 7/8" |
2 5/8" |
1 1/16" |
| Winchester |
124-gr. BEB ball |
5 7/8" |
5 1/8" |
1 3/4" |
| Winchester |
147-gr. JHP subsonic |
3 15/16" |
2 5/8" |
1 5/8" |
|
Subjectively Speaking
Like some other things we hide in our pants, pocket guns can be intensely personal. A lot of it depends on the styles of the day and the wearer's tastes. The baggy trousers of the first half of the 20th Century are back in style with Dockers and whatnot. If your tastes run to Armani suits or jeans so tight they appear to be spray-painted on, pocket carry of a 9mm semiautomatic pistol is probably not for you.
In days of yore, Elmer Keith and some other gun writers spoke of guns the size of the Colt Commander .45 auto as pocket pistols. I always wondered where they bought their clothes. They must have had pockets deeper than an insurance company's. Even with today's gun-forgiving men's fashions, I suspect that more PM9s will wind up inside waistbands and in fanny packs than in trouser pockets, and certainly more baby Glocks will.
I strongly recommend you use a proper pocket holster if you go for trouser pocket carry. Safety demands it: leather or Kydex now safely covers the trigger guard area. The modern 9mm-class pocket guns are "drop-safe" and proper to carry with a round in the chamber. You want a pocket holster of the type made by Kramer, Ky-Tac, or Mark Miller. These have a pronounced upper flange at the front, which catches on the pocket edge and helps guarantee that the holster doesn't come out with the pistol.
One place where the pocket auto loses against a revolver of the same size is speed of draw from a pants pocket. The reason is that the thumb seems to have nowhere to go but around the grip frame in firing position, in essence creating a fist. A fist is much harder to pull out of your pocket than a flat hand. With the snub revolver, you put your thumb on the hammer spur area, which streamlines the hand shape and allows a much faster draw.
With a striker-fired subcompact auto, putting your thumb on the back of the slide compromises your two-finger grasp of the short grip frame. With one of the above-mentioned pocket holsters, you put your thumb on the flange and push. This helps break the gun free, keeps the hand in a streamlined configuration, and allows the thumb to close down into firing position as your little auto clears your pocket.
Personal History
Pocket pistols have saved many lives. They've been used by all four generations of my family in this country. Not terribly long after he first came to the U.S., my grandfather bought a Colt 1903, which was the high-tech "Glock" of its time. He wound up having to shoot an armed robber with it. He gave that gun to my dad, who one night used it to frighten off a burglary suspect who was staring in through the bedroom window. That the little .32 had scared the guy was evident not only from the footprints in the snow heading away, but the fecal matter left in the footprints.
While I never used that particular .32 for anything serious, the day came when I was with some NYPD officers who responded to an armed robbery in progress by multiple suspects armed with sawed-off shotguns. I was not carrying. The backup gun I was graciously handed by one of the uniformed guys was a Walther PPK loaded with .380 FMJ.
Now, quite apart from that gun being totally against NYPD regs then and now, being issued a .380 is something Jeff Cooper probably has nightmares about. However, going from nothing at all to a .380 makes the little gun feel like the thunderbolt of Zeus. The perps were gone when we got there, but the little gun was comforting.
Later, the time came when my oldest daughter, licensed to carry at 18, had to draw a compact 9mm auto to back off two large male rape suspects. The pistol she used was a Model 3913 S&W, a tad large to call a pocket gun, but it was in the spirit of the concept. My younger daughter has shot her great grandfather's Colt .32 auto and enjoyed the nostalgia, but is more likely to reach for a 9mm when there's trouble. Her generation, after all, has the heritage of a century of experience and development in these things.
The Kahr PM9 is an excellent pocket pistol of the new breed, and for many will prove to be the best possible choice. It may well represent the peak of development of an honorable American tradition.
|
