The Shooting Hunting and Outdoor Trade show is the premier gathering of the firearms industry to display new products for the year. Official opening day of the show is Tuesday the 23rd, but today is when the firearms and outdoor writer press actually get to shoot the new guns.  I couldn’t be there this year due to scheduling conflict, so Backwoods Home’s eyes and ears for 2018 belong to my good friend Jim Fitzpatrick, who is representing the magazine there.

Here’s Jim’s report from today:

From “SIG Day”:

M17 with a new to market RMR, very sweet shooting pistol.

MPX chambered in 9mm was awesome.

 

The 300 Blackout suppressed was my favorite of the day, I was able to hit a hostage rescue target @50meters standing over and over. Very impressed indeed.

 

Most accurate was the P210 Target, great trigger, dead on sights.

 

The highly anticipated P365, everyone was ready to get their hands on this pistol. Fortunately for me, I got first crack at it.

 

 

 

My thoughts are as follows.

 

The P365 is just a touch smaller than a Glock 43 in slide length and height, what impressed me the most is the trigger. The trigger is nice and smooth with a crisp break. Grip is what you would expect of a pistol this size. This is a very shootable pistol with great concealability and capacity. 

 

Overall impressions, this is going to be a very hot item for 2018. I think it will be a game changer for concealed carry.

The motif on these two SIGs get a thumbs-up from Our Man At SHOT, Jim Fitzpatrick.

 

 

More to come as the SHOT Show unfolds.

6 COMMENTS

  3. Can’t wait to give the P365 a try myself. A smart and snappy review of those Sig guns and it looked like your man had a blast on the firing line.

  4. It is always interesting to see new models introduced. However, I often hesitate to buy brand new models since they are often buggy.

    Take the Remington R-51 for instance. I was intrigued when Remington introduced it in January 2014. It uses the Pedersen locking system which is quite different from the usual Browning tilting-barrel design. I also liked it’s alloy frame which is different from the flood of plastic frames currently on the market. Plus, I liked its sleek design.

    However, since it was new, I waited to buy one. Sure enough, it was so buggy that Remington had to re-call it. Then, in late 2016, Remington placed it on the market again while saying they had fixed the problems. Thinking that the bugs had been worked out, I purchased one of these Version 2.0 models.

    I have found that my R-51 is still ammo sensitive. I believe that the magazine design still has a bug in it. The top front of the magazines all have a bent in tab. I think that the idea of this tab is that it will act as a pre-ramp and help push cartridges up to feed into the barrel. This works OK if the 9 mm rounds don’t exceed about 1.15 inches in length and if they do not have too open of a hollow-point nose. For example, the Hornady Critical Defense 9 mm round is only about 1.082 inches long and it has a narrow, tapered nose profile with a FTX plug in the hollow-point. They feed great. However, some of the 9 mm hollow-points with a big, open cavity get hung up on the pre-ramp magazine tab which gives a FTF malfunction. Even hard-ball FMJ ammo can hang up on this tab if the OAL of the round exceeds about 1.15 inches. I have some FMJ ammo that is 1.14 OAL and it feeds great. I have another brand that is 1.16 OAL and it gives FTF problems. It hangs on that tab despite being FMJ round-nose ammo.

    In summary, my R-51 feeds great with ammo that it likes but gives FTF problems with ammo that it doesn’t like. That Remington magazine still has that buggy tab in it’s design.

    Wonder how many bugs all these new SHOT Show models will have?

  5. Though I’m looking forward to the P365, I don’t believe it’s quite the innovation that SIG touts. A little company called Kel-Tec has been making a 10-shot 9mm, that is just a hair smaller than the P365, for over 20 years. It’s called the P11. 😉

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