A Bigger Bang for The Frugal Propellerhead Buck!

I'm sure some of you could see where all this BB/Pellet gun stuff was leading, right? Yup, after lots of not so subtle hints and months of gun magazines laying around the house, I finally dropped the bomb on my wife this weekend. What happened was that we were doing the family birthdays early since my in-laws are going on an extended "fall foliage" trip to the Northeast starting this week. Mine, my brother-in-law and sister-in-law's birthdays all fall within a couple of week of the end of September and beginning of October. So, my wife has been harrassing me about what I wanted for my birthday, which has always been a bit of a chore anyway since my interest tends toward the esoteric. 

I finally decided to shoot straight (I know, terrible), and tell her I wanted a handgun. No, not the PPK with a suppressor. My love of all things James Bond only goes so far; not that I don't love the PPK! More on this later. Over the course of the whole pellet gun adventure, she had been quizzing me about my interest in guns anyway. And I had filled her in on my long-standing interest in the things going back to when I actually owned a number of them in my younger years before we ever met. I had subsequently sold them when I was working in higher education and living "on campus" where I couldn't have them.  But I've always had an abiding interest in them both from a historical (collecting) standpoint as well as to shoot them....

..... at one point owning a couple of different Ruger Mk II semi-automatics in .22LR and a Ruger Security Six along with a Marlin 995 Semi-auto .22LR and Rossi Model 62 copy of the old Winchester pump .22 design.

Do I wish I would have kept them all those years ago? Probably, but that's water under the bridge now. My interests are less in revolvers and 19th century designs anyway, so on to what's going on now!

At the moment; this is the target. The "Wonder 9s", or more specifically..... modern, polymer-framed, high-capacity, striker-fired, 9mm handguns. There's a lot of them out there, ranging from the rather pedestrian Smith & Wesson M & P (Military & Police) for $350 to $400, to the $800-$900 H&K/Sigs or the ubiquitous Glocks at the middle price-point. features and performance tend to be fairly similar, but the build quality and country of origin. The progression on price/build-quality equation seems to go from import to American made back to import (from Germany, Austria or Switzerland) going from low to high. So, firearms from manufacturers like Taurus, Star, etc. from places like Spain and Brazil tend to be lower. Then we get American manufacturers such as Smith & Wesson in the middle, followed of course, but the Glocks, H&Ks and Sig Sauer being the most expensive. 

Then you have a few "out-lyers" in the market such as this Canik made in Turkey which is a copy of the Walther P99 and of excellent quality according to virtually all reviews as well as..

the well-known and well-thought of CZ offering such as the above CZ-75 made in the Czech Republic. So, what am I interested in?

This is the one. The Walther PPQ M1. Why not the Bond-esque P99? Yes, it's a fine pistol, but here's my reasoning. 

• The main-line Walther grips feel great in my smallish hands, whether that be the P99 or the PPQ and indeed the compact CCP as well.
• The PPQ is often referred to as the updated and improved P99 with a better double-action trigger system.
• The PPQ has the standard M1913 Picatinny rail that makes it easier to mount laser and such on to.
• The P99 has been out of production for several years and the "first version" (which I like best) tends to be difficult to find and when found tends to be at least $100 (or more), more expensive than the PPQ. This is probably the deciding factor.

However, there's a couple of other possibilities as well.

One is the Canik which of course is a Walther copy, but barring finding a PPQ/P99 at an affordable price, there's also a "dark horse"; the Magnum Research MR9 Eagle. It's a Walther P99 polymer frame, with a Magnum Research stainless slide mounted. This German-American cooperative effort came in two flavors, with the one you see here as half and inch longer than the 4" version. Most critically, they aren't well known and as a result sometimes sell for substantially less than either the P99 or PPQ. No you know. I'll update you guys when I've locked onto a target!