Handguns

Smith & Wesson’s new M&P Shield is a slim, concealable, lightweight, striker-fired polymer pistol. Available in 9mm and .40 S&W, the new M&P Shield has an easily concealed 1-inch profile and an optimized 18-degree grip angle.

Alex Zimmerman has a great idea. Gun Tests magazine first experienced it in a review of one of his Guncrafter Industries’ 50-caliber 1911s, which they found to be a well-made handgun, if a bit on the costly side. Zimmerman’s idea is to give the shooter something more without the cost of broken hands. Rather than a bang-up, hot and heavy blaster, the 50 GI is a throwback to older times when big bullets traveled at low velocities and got the job done at least as well as any small-caliber, high-velocity round.

In any case, the available calibers are not the only things I like about the EMP from Springfield, Inc. It's no larger than a compact 9mm. It's a Series-70 M1911A1, so it's not cluttered internally with a collection of additional parts dreamed up to put a firing-pin block in a pistol that can't fire unless it is gripped firmly in the hand. As this is written, the EMP is being produced in 9mm using a hard-coat aluminum-alloy frame. When it comes out in .40 S&W and .45 GAP, the frame will be of steel. Those initials behind the ".45" stand for Glock Automatic Pistol, a round developed in cooperation between the Austrian pistol maker and Speer.

The market for 22s that feel like big-bore guns continues to grow as shooters seek to cut ammo cuts but maintain proficiency. One of the guns in this segment is a triple-named semiauto listed in Featured Auction #10989722 by “JacktheDog.”

A member of the New Black Panther Party -- a felon -- who went on national television to offer a reward for the capture of George Zimmerman was arrested in Gwinnett County, Georgia, and charged with possession of a firearm.

FPS Russia has a lot of fun with a fully-automatic Glock 17 and a 100-round drum magazine. There’s also some incendiary ammo that goes hot too soon.

The AF2011-A1 Double Barrel Pistol is the first industrial double-barrel semiautomatic pistol that the GunReports.com staff can recall. The original idea came to Swiss armourer Vivian Mueller about ten years back, who at the time cut and welded together multiple parts of the famous Sig P210. The result was a long slide, double barrel 9mm, highly decorated collector piece, which indeed shot very well.

Manufacturers like S&W, Ruger, Charter Arms, and Taurus all think combining a late 19th century design — a revolver — with a relatively modern laser sight is a great idea. We think it can be a good pairing, too. Last year we tested the S&W Bodyguard, which comes from the factory with an Insight laser sight installed, and gave the combo a high grade. For those of us who already carry 38 Special revolvers, we wanted to compare options to retrofit our snubnose five-shooters with a laser sight. Knowing many CCW permit holders drop their J-frames in a pants or coat pocket unholstered or carry them in a holster, we wanted to see how the Crimson Trace (CTC) and LaserMax (LM) would perform in a variety of day-to-day carry scenarios as well as at the range.

The CTC and LM laser sights, like all laser sights, are regulated by the FDA as Class IIIa devices. They are not toys. Laser-sight manufacturers instruct buyers to attach a tiny warning label on their firearm after installing the laser sight unit, since laser light can damage the retina of the eyes. You will note that ordinary laser pointers also carry a tiny warning label, too.

Our retrofit candidate was a Model 637 Chief's Special Airweight, which has been in production off and on since 1991. It has an exposed hammer and is chambered in .38 Special +P. The 637 is light weight and has a soft rubber grip.

Our testing consisted of five phases: ease of installation, a drop test from a height of 36 inches onto a piece of plywood on a concrete floor, freezing the lasers to -4F, fitting with different holster types, and finally live-fire testing. We dispensed with our usual water-immersion test since the lasers are labeled only to be water resistant. Drop the laser sight in water or get caught in a rain shower, and you will need to resort to Plan B and use the revolver's iron sights.

Suffice to say all three laser sights passed the drop test without losing zero. The cold has a way of negatively impacting mechanisms, but buttons on all three laser units functioned even after being placed in freezer. We also tested the lasers with an unloaded revolver in dark and brightly lit environments. Users should also be aware that we are surrounded by reflective surfaces outside and inside our homes — glass, vehicle bodies, TV and computer screens, mirrors — that will reflect a laser back and could disorient you. There is also no visible beam per se, unless the beam has something to reflect off, such as smoke or fog. Across a bedroom in the darkness, all three lasers projected a red spot on a potential target. In the dark, the aiming spot is easy to see unless aimed on a reflective surface when one dot can look like many dots. In bright sunlight the aiming dots were much harder to see, and at times our shooters needed to resort to using iron sights to find the dot. Holding the 637 in a two-handed grip at belt buckle height, we were able to easily hit the center circle of an IDPA-style target at 12 yards with all three laser sights. Here's what else our retrofit test determined.

In a February 2006 test of four handguns, our Idaho staff called the Walther P22 22 LR No. WAP22003, $301, an "Our Pick." The test team said, "We liked this little .22 pistol immensely. It was completely reliable in our limited shooting, and shot very well, with many five-shot groups going around an inch at 15 yards. The impact could be fine-tuned as necessary by changing the front sight. The windage was slick and handy, we found, and adjusted with relative ease.… We think anyone in need of a fine little .22 pistol that works every time and doesn't bust the bank need look no farther than the short-barrel P22. We thought it was an ideal fun gun, one we'd take in the backpack and not even know it's there." Then, in the May 2010 issue, we wrote, "Our Team Said: The unanimous decision was that the P22 was the top performer in our tests.…"

This is a difficult trick to manage for any handgun, because differing ammo selections, test conditions, individual pistol variations, and matchups can magnify the flaws found in any product, making it hard to get a top grade again and again.

But when a gun does that well over time, it can serve as a benchmark against which to test newer products, which in this case is the Ruger SR22PB Model 03600, $399. Like the Walther P22 WAP22003, now $379, Ruger's SR22 is full of angles and bumps and slots, but not so many serrations. The top of its anodized slide was smooth and semi-gloss, instead of the Walther's dead-flat black with longitudinal serrations. What would have impressed us mightily is if Ruger (or Walther) had attempted to copy the original Walther PPK for the 22LR, and brought it off nicely at a good sale price. No one makes that gun today, so far as we know. (If Ruger or Walther decided to do it, we suspect a great many fans of James Bond would buy the guns just for the fact that they look like the famous PPK. And if this hypothetical gun were far more accurate than either of these two test guns, we'd beat a path to the maker's door and buy one for ourselves.) But that veers off our current topic, which is pitting the two similar 22 autoloading pistols head to head.

We acquired a new Ruger and borrowed a locally owned, new-condition P22 for this test. We tested with five types of ammunition. These were CCI Green Tag Competition, Eley's Match EPS, CCI Mini Mag solids, Winchester Power Point HP, and Federal Classic High-Velocity. How does the new Ruger stack up against the Walther P22? Let's take a look feature by feature:

Gun Tests Contributing Editor Roger Eckstine gets a rundown on new pistol models available from CZ this year.

Gun Tests Contributing Editor Roger Eckstine takes a quick look at Magnum Research’s Micro Desert Eagle.

The Brady Campaign gave its best score on the group's 2011 State Gun Control Scorecard to California, where the total violent crime, murder, robbery, and aggravated assault rates were higher than national rates in 2010, the most recent full year reported by the FBI.