Two full-size pistols depart, two compacts arrive

The new small guys are in the house and the old big guys are almost all gone.

At right is my new-to-me EAA Witness-P Compact .45 ACP, which arrived today. It has a 3.6" barrel with a polymer frame and a set of mahogany grips cut and glued on with something called Gorilla Glue by the previous owner. It's not the neatest glue job I ever saw, but the wood does look nice. And it's definitely better looking than the plastic polymer grips underneath, plus the wood grips fill my hand pretty nicely.

Best of all, it's an EAA so I can buy a .38 Super slide for it and shoot not only .38 Super but 9x23mm in it. I shot both in my briefly owned Lone Wolf G20 "experiential" conversion barrel, that wouldn't feed right. That's another story that didn't end well. But both .38 Super and 9x23mm are improvements over standard 9x19mm and I'm a guy who believes more speed and longer bullets are better than slower, shorter bullets. That's why I love .357 Sig and 10mm as well as .45 ACP and 9mm. IMHO, .357 Sig is a really fast 9mm and 10mm is a really fast .45 ACP. Kinda sorta.

I know 10mm is not a .45, it's really a long .40, or more accurately the current .40 S&W is a short 10mm. But what I'm driving at is that 10mm was initially developed as an alternative to .45 ACP, a larger than 9mm round that had faster ballistics than .45 ACP. The "experts" thought it would replace .45 ACP. Shows how wrong "experts" can be. But I still love 10mm for the same reason I love .357 Sig. It's faster than .45 ACP with close to the same grain weight slugs and the foot-pounds of energy delivered are higher. Same is true with .357 Sig over 9mm, it's faster with same grain weight slugs and the foot-pounds of energy delivered is way higher. Plus both 10mm and .357 Sig are flatter shooting at longer ranges than .45 or 9mm.

And I like .38 Super and 9x23mm for the same reasons, speed and energy.

So I have carry pistols in all my favorite calibers, 9x19mm, .357 Sig, 10mm and .45 ACP and as soon as I can afford a new slide, .38 Super or 9x23mm.

I've got a Lone Wolf barrel in 9x25mm for my G20 and I could get one for my G29 too, but even I gotta admit 9x25 is way too much overkill for a carry pistol. It's so freaking loud I'd be deaf to shoot it in self defense without hearing protection. Walking around with ear muffs ain't an option.

Over at gtalk, one poster reported using 9x25mm on a deer and he said the round literally exploded inside the critter. I can see me sitting on the stand in court trying to explain why I used such a huge overkill round in defense.

So I acquired the EAA .45 ACP/.38 Super/9x23mm as a swap for my formerly owned GKK-45, the next photo. It's a great shooter, but being all steel with a 5" barrel, it's not a good candidate for daily carry unless you're big as Godzilla. I'm a pretty large guy, 6' 3" and 265 lbs., but I ain't big enough to carry that monster around.

Next photo is my new CZ 75 P-07 Duty, showing off its replacement ambi-safety levers. The gun shop guru changed out the decockers for safeties so now I can carry the P-07 cocked and locked, which is my personal preference over using a decocker.

Essentially I purchased the P-07 with the money I got for the sale of my Steyr M357-A1 .357 Sig pistol, but it's more accurately the replacement for my soon-to-be-formerly-owned CZ 75 SP-01 Custom, which is the last photo.

The SP-01 Custom has been sold through gunbroker with payment scheduled to arrive Thursday, upon which I will ship it out. It's a full-size pistol like the GKK-45, with a 4.7" barrel, being replaced by the 3.6" barrel P-07, both being 9mm.

And technically speaking the aforementioned Steyr M357-A1 has already been replaced with another .357 Sig, a Sig Sauer P229 Custom Shop Sig-Anti-Snag Generation 2, next photo.

The Steyr MA1 has a 4" barrel and the Sig P229 has a 3.9" barrel so both are compacts, but the issue here is reliability. As good as my Steyr M357-A1 was and still is for its new owner, it was not 100% reliable. More like 98 or 99%. Not bad until you compare it to 100%.

And that's what my formerly owned Sig P226 .357 Sig was for me and what the new Sig P229 has been so far. The Sig P226 was the first of my full-size pistols to be sold and the CZ SP01 will be the last to leave. And that's what my other two .357 Sig pistols have also been, 100% reliable, a 4.25" barrel S&W M&P and a 3.5" barrel M&P. So that made the Steyr M357-A1 my fourth-most-reliable .357 Sig pistol and it had to go.

So all the swapping and selling is done, or will be done on Thursday when the payment for the SP-01 arrives and it ships out.

So come Saturday, I'll be shooting my new-to-me EAA .45 ACP compact and my brand-new-in-the-box CZ 75 P-01 Duty 9mm. C'mon Saturday!