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The Walther P 38, caliber 9mm, was one of the most important handguns of World War II and became among the most influential pistols of the twentieth century. It earned a reputation for accuracy superior to most service pistols, and the P 38’s takedown lever made field maintenance and cleaning simple compared to any other service pistol. The 9mm cartridge does not have the smash of our own .45 ACP cartridge, but the 9mm shoots flat over a distance and penetrates web gear in a superior fashion. The P 38 is reliable, a great shooter and a good recreational handgun. The postwar P 38 and the slightly modified P 1 use an aluminum frame. These handguns are well made with good material, lighter than the steel frame P 38, and reliable. Parts from the original generally interchange with the P 1.

The DoubleTap Tactical Pocket Pistol is an over/under break action derringer capable of delivering two rounds of 9 mm or .45ACP as fast as you can pull the trigger. It is sold as a simple and rugged option for deep concealment or backup. Make no mistake, this is not a range gun or plinker. It’s designed for one purpose and one purpose only – saving your life. We first saw the DoubleTap almost two years at SHOT Show 2012, but after some hiccups with manufacturing contracts and parts suppliers, the DoubleTap pistol is just now finding its way into the market. Our big question, and yours most likely, is the street practicality of the DoubleTap. The .45ACP is no kitten when it comes to recoil, and even though your followup shots are limited to one in the two shot pistol, an “ouch that hurts” after the first shot wouldn’t be the ideal in a concealed carry pistol. There are a lot of perfectly good pocket pistols on the market, and this gun has several red flags, as well as some outright user discomfort. At an MSRP starting at $499 for a two shot derringer, do we really need the DoubleTap?

There are a lot of guns in the market that gun nuts take for granted. They are basically good guns that have been around for a long time and sell a ton, yet they are really nothing special. But with all of the new shooters coming into the market, particularly women shooters, some old and extremely average guns are developing a dedicated following because they work, they fit great, and they are not expensive. Never one for big headlines, the Taurus TCP, also known as the Model 738, is a 10.2 ounce .380 6+1 that is carried by thousands of people every day, yet you rarely if ever see an interesting review or article on the gun. It is the lightest Taurus ever made, and since the arrival at Taurus of Mark Kresser and a new focus on consistency and quality control, the Taurus TCP deserves a fresh look. We asked our resident girl guru Carrie Lightfoot from The Well Armed Womanto take the gun for a spell, and have her whole crew shoot it and let us know what they think. Overall the gun did really well in the eyes of these very critical ladies, and they felt that the TCP was designed to be “just right” for the woman shooter. Here is Carrie’s overview:

Any new gun in the market should face extreme scrutiny. This is particularly true of a new design, and even more so of a new concept, engineered into a new design. Back in 2011 we got our first look at a bullpup 15 round pump shotgun in the form of the Kel-Tec KSG. At the time, most gunwriters who got one were elated with the gun, including us. But part of that elation was that this entirely new concept had come from Kel-Tec, an American company that had already pulled off groundbreaking products like the PMR-30 and another bullpup, the .308 caliber RFB rifle. Nothing about the KSG was a disappointment. The engineering made sense, and the gun worked fabulously. This year a new 15 round bullpup came into the market called the UTS-15 from UTAS-USA. It has the magazine tubes on the top instead of the bottom like the KSG. It has a built in flashlight/laser combo, and it is made in Turkey. We were finally able to get our hands on one this week, and like any other newly designed mechanical device, there are positives and negatives to the gun. Overall it worked well, but we did have some light strikes and mis-feeds. Understanding the differences between the UTS-15 and the KSG will be a big part of deciding which gun to try to buy. The KSG is still extremely backordered, selling for up to twice MRSP, while the UTS-15, MSRP $1200, is currently available in the market at close to that price. The UTS-15 is a lot of gun for the money, and if a 15 round shotgun is in your future, this may be the superior gun. Is it a KSG killer? No. But is it a viable option? Possibly yes.

What is the best 22LR rifle? Every gun nut gets that question several times a year, and the answer always is a question. “Do you want a semi-auto or a bolt action?” If the answer is semi-auto, most people will suggest the Ruger 10/22. But until now, if they answered a bolt action, very few if any people would suggest a Ruger. Their 77/22 is a little known rifle and carries a price of about $700. Today Ruger changed that by releasing what is arguably the coolest and most investment worthy rimfire bolt action in the world. It is called the Ruger American Rimfire, and we got to shoot and test it extensively over the last couple weeks. It features a unique system to change the comb height and length of pull on the gun, and the receiver has both a machined rail for 3/8” rimfire rings as well as being drilled and tapped for regular rings. All this rides on Ruger’s patent pending Power Bedding (R) system, where the polymer stock has metal fittings embedded in it, just like a polymer pistol. This makes the rifle as solid as a rock for accuracy, and our testing of the .22LR model showed that the rifle has great potential to be a tack driver. It takes 10/22 mags, and the suggested retail price all four of the 4 models coming out now in both .22LR and .22WMR are $329. Your local gunshop will either have them on the shelf this week, or can order them through their distributors.

The amazing new rimfire we have all been gushing about since January’s SHOT Show has finally come to fruition. Winchester Ammunition, teamed up with Savage Arms, has introduced a new .17 caliber cartridge called the .17 Winchester Super Magnum that is capable of firing a 20 grain bullet at just better than 3,000 feet per second. That makes it the fastest rimfire ever created, and puts it in a class pretty much by itself for long range rimfire competition and varmint hunting. The problem until now has been that the only reviews out there were from print writers who all shot the exact same prototype rifle that was made for a print writers roundup, so it had very little relationship to the actual gun that you would later find in a store. Add to that the fact that the ammo was simply not available, period. Savage sent us this test rifle over two months ago, but we had no ammo, so like everyone else, we waited. Finally, as you can see from these tests, the ammo has started to trickle out. Several of our dealers have reported that they have gotten 40 box orders in (and quickly out) the door, and this ammo you see here was purchased retail at Bass Pro in Hollywood, Florida. We were only able to get the 2600fps. 25 grain load, but it is still a rip roaring monster for a rimfire, and the accuracy is acceptable, (though not fabulous for a Savage). The Savage “B-Mag” rifle is currently the only gun for the cartridge, and it carries an MSRP of $349. As a first effort on a new and revolutionary rimfire, the B-Mag performed well, and the cartridge looks to have great potential.

For years there has been something of a Glock Unicorn. It’s been called a hybrid Glock .45 ACP pistol made from the thin slide of a Glock 36 and the wide body frame of a Glock 30. According to the Internet forum mavens, you end up with a high capacity Glock (10 rounds) with the thinner slide of a the subcompact (and only 6 round) G36, making it lighter and easier to carry. But unlike Unicorns, this wasn’t a myth. People actually did it. They bought two guns and cobbled them together since, just because they could. Glock fanatics have wailed and begged for such a gun to be made in production, but Glock seemed to not hear the call.

Then, at the 2013 SHOT Show, I saw a Unicorn, uh, I mean a Glock 30S – the very gun that consumers wanted. I wanted to know the “why” behind this, and after talking to LAPD Staff, Glock Representatives, and people in the industry I found out how an internet forum phenomenon became a regular production pistol.

If you have already attempted to buy “high capacity” magazines at a gun show, you already know that all magazines are not created alike. If you haven’t, let us save you the trouble. If you don’t see big, reputable, American companies selling magazines other than standard capacity, for example, 7 rounds in a 1911, 30 rounds in an AR-15, or 20 rounds in an M1A, FAL or AR-10, STAY AWAY. Standard capacity mags are standard capacity for a reason. It is difficult to get more bullets of that caliber to reliably function in a magazine meant for that weapon. It isn’t like anyone ever said, “eh, I think 30 rounds is enough for an AR-15. It was simply the closest round number to get the mags to work as expected, and in the case of the AR-15, even those mags didn’t originally work so good.

In the aftermarket high capacity magazine market there are very few companies that have gotten it right, and that are sold by mainstream firearm retailers next to the guns themselves. X-Products, according to the website was “Formed by four gun loving Hillbilly’s with college educations.” They make a 50 round drum magazine in the USA for not only the AR-15, but also nearly every major battle rifle in the Western world. For the AR-15 you may say big deal. The 60 round Surefire mag is Made in USA, as is the original double drum 100 round Beta C-Mag, but the X-Products mag is an entirely different animal, and if you happen to own an M1A, FAL, HK91/CETME, or an Armalite AR-10, or other .308 AR-15, you have probably never used an actual working magazine that held more than 20 rounds. We were able to test both the AR-15 and M1A versions of the X-Products mags and they work great. There is nothing like them in the market. At $239-$280, the X-Products mags aren’t cheap, but as a one time investment, you couldn’t ask for a better mag to take into battle.

This has been a crazy year for guns. Back in November of 2012, the gun world was riding high on a tide of mainstream popularity, and you could buy just about anything you wanted for a reasonable price. By SHOT Show in January though, everything got flipped on its head as the anti-gunners didn’t let the tragedy of Sandy Hook go to waste, and they blamed it all on the guns. We escaped the legislation, for now, but a bi-product of this craziness is that a lot of guns we should have seen this year never materialized as the demand for any and every gun reached unprecedented levels. One of the tidbits we saw at SHOT Show was that Colt was coming out with a whole new line of “Hydro-dipped” AR-15s, and finally we have some in hand. Supply has finally caught up with demand on most guns at this point, so you should be able to find these nifty new gun toys at your local dealers now, or they could possibly order them for you. We were able to score both the “carbon fiber” and “Muddy Girl” patterns, and not only are they really sweet looking, we found them to be much more durable than other dipped guns we have tested over the years. We didn’t get an MSRP on these new dipped guns, but expect them to be a least a couple hundred dollars over normal Colt pricing. Both of our test guns are model 6920s, and they behaved just has honorably as our first test of these new consumer Colts that we did last year.