It's slim, it's trim, it's the Police Selfloading Pistol

I think I still remember the first actual for-real gun magazine I ever bought. Oh, I'd thumbed through Field and Stream before, but this was a GUN MAGAZINE. I was still at the stage in school where you got to cut out pictures and make collages. (Back in the day, this stopped around second grade, today it's probably PhD work, but that's no nevermind.)

There were three guns that caught my eye. This blurb is about one of them, and the other two were the 2" Colt Agent .38 Special and the Compact Offduty Police (COP) .357 Magnum four barrel derringer. (Yeah, I know. The COP was a stupid idea, but it looked cool.)

And the other pistol was this funky looking Kraut 9mm. Whee! For some reason, I really thought it looked cool, and this was back before video games made everyone love the HK brand.

Yep, I'm talking about a PSP, or P7.

Just in case you didn't know, the West German police, after the Munich Olympics terrorist incident, decided that they needed new pistols, and they cut a Request For Proposal for a smallish single stack 9mm. Today we've got 9mms that are a lot smaller (Kahr, Rohrbaugh, etc.) but the West German "P-series" police pistols were pretty revolutionary for their time.

Three pistols were approved: the P5, P6 and P7. Walther's P5 was a compact reimagining of the P38---with the ejection port on the LEFT side. (Funky.) SIG-Sauer's P6 was essentially a P220 cut down, using a braided recoil spring and a stamped slide with a breechblock insert. (Funky.) Heckler and Koch gave us the P7, which took funk from funky all the way to FONKY.

Like many pistols today, the P7 is striker-fired. That wasn't really so common thirty years ago. Like many pistols today, the P7 doesn't have a whole lot of levers, buttons, knobs or dials to spin or turn. Like many pistols today, the P7 gives you the same trigger pull every time.

Today we think of the Glock series as having been pretty revolutionary, but if you squint at a Glock you see a modern engineer's reworking of the basic Browning barrel lockup. (Not like that's a bad thing, mind you!) The P7, well, it went a little further than that.

The P7 uses a fixed barrel with a gas delayed blowback action. As the moniker "squeeze cocker" might imply, you squeeze the frontstrap to cock the pistol. If you've got a P7 at slidelock, you also squeeze the frontstrap to drop the slide. It's got a very low bore axis. The magazine is almost vertical and feeds ammunition into the chamber in as close to a straight line feed as I've ever seen. (This also gives the P7 a little extra barrel length for it's OAL.)

Oh yeah, and Hans Gruber used one in Die Hard.

Well, recently those German police pistols have hit the surplus market, and you can get your hands on a P7 for a good bit less than used to be the case, if you don't mind a used LEO gun (and I don't).

Mine dates to '84, and was ordered from CDNN. I'd always wanted one, and I figured that now was the time. So, what do I think, now that it's finally in my hot little hands?

WOWZA! I like it.

As I said above, by modern standards it's not really that small for a 9mm. It's about the size of a Glock 19, but with an old school magazine capacity of 8+1. Not only is the bore axis low, but the slide itself is trim and rounded. Squeezing the frontstrap is virtually silent, but releasing it gives you a loud "click."

Due to the gas-system, the pistol warms up when you shoot it. By the time I'd put a box through it (and not in any way rapid fire), the dust cover was hot hot hot. Combine that with the heel of the butt magazine release, and you don't have an IPSC pistol, or a military pistol either (in my view).

So it heats up, is slow to reload and doesn't hold a ton of bullets. Other than that, I love everything about it. Although it took me a few minutes to adapt to the trigger, I really like the trigger pull. It's not breaking a glass rod, but a short straight progression to release. Calling it "mushy" seems like an injustice, but I suppose you could.

I was shooting at seven yards, switching hands (supported) between each magazine. I started off scattering a few shots but just kept tightening up the groups as I went along. Finally I got all cocky and decided to pretend I was Mike Cumpston, and shot it ONE HANDED!

Yowza yowza woof woof!

Using a mongrelized hybrid of Weaver and bullseye stances (really, a Weaver with my weak hand tucked into my belt at the small of my back), I shot four five round groups, each going into about 3". (Hey, for me, three inches one handed at seven yards is really good shooting.)

The P7 is, without a doubt in my mind, the easiest pistol to shoot one handed I have ever fired. It's not the be-all and end-all of 9mms, but it's an enormously interesting artifact and another confirmation that Germans just love engineering.

I'm glad I finally got one.