Natural selection: Kahr's PM9: for a century, Americans have enjoyed a love affair with the pocket auto, and this downsized roscoe just may be the highest evolution of the breed

Guns Magazine, Nov, 2003 by Massad Ayoob

A neighboring couple has come to me because they know I'm into guns, and the lady of the family has decided to carry. We bring her to the range with a selection of handguns suitable for her intended purpose. She's particularly taken with the new Kahr PM9, a polymer-framed subcompact semiautomatic pistol which holds seven rounds of the hottest 9mm Parabellum ammo you can get, which is frankly a bit beyond the best .38 Special revolver ammo you can get.

"I guess I got into this at the right time," she says. "If this is the newest, it has to be the most advanced, right?"

I open my mouth to answer--and close it just as fast. This may indeed be the best handgun for her needs--but the concept isn't exactly the newest.

A Century of Pocket Autos

Colt introduced their classic Pocket Model in 1903, chambered for the "Calibre .32 Rimless Smokeless." This flat, sleek, pistol had an internal hammer that being out of sight was obviously out of mind because the gun instantly became known as a "hammerless." It was radical, it was streamlined, and above all it was modern! Modern always seems to sell, and it seems to sell even better at times when centuries are turning or shortly thereafter.

Five years later, Colt brought out a more potent version, caliber (excuse me, calibre) .380. Identical in appearance to one another, the Colt Pocket Models would eventually define the shape of the generic "automatic" to the public in everything from movies to cartoons (remember the early Dick Tracy?). People accustomed to the old paradigms laughed and said, "That new-fangled thing will never catch on! It's just a flash in the pan!"

Famous last words.

There would be other pocket autos, of course. Colt's own Browning-designed .25 became known to the cognoscenti as a "vest pocket pistol" to distinguish it from the .32 and .380 "pocket pistols." In the late 1920s, Carl Walther changed the paradigm again with a double action first shot pocket auto, the PP (Polizei Pistole) and its smaller "Detective Special" version, the PPK (Polizei Pistole Kriminale).

In the first half of the 20th Century, CZ pioneered the double action only pocket auto pistol. The postwar years brought a flood of scaled down 1911s in .32 and .380, mostly from Spain, a concept that didn't catch on until Colt brought out their .380 Government Model in 1985. That gun was followed by the smaller Mustang, and the even nicer Pocketlite with aluminum frame that brought weight down to 15 ounces--Airweight revolver territory. If you covered the hammer and grip tang area of a Colt Government .380 with your thumb, it looked remarkably similar to a 1903 Pocket Model.

Seecamp produced a .32 the size of a .25 with a DAO mechanism that appeared to have been inspired by the old CZ, and with Louis Seecamp's own ingenious double captive recoil spring. The Seecamp .32 became so much in demand as a hideout gun that it brought scalper's prices in the marketplace, and still does.

This was not a helluva lot of progress. In 90 years, the best the industry could do was to come full circle to the original 1903 model, albeit with an internal firing pin safety and an external hammer instead of a concealed one. However, there was still a decade before the Pocket Model turned 100 years old. There was time for a renaissance.

That renaissance would be built on one thing more than anything else: power. The vest-pocket .25s and the pocket size .32s and .380s were certainly convenient to carry, but they weren't manstoppers. Conventional wisdom was that you needed at least 9mm Parabellum in a pistol you might have to bring to a gunfight. And the industry was listening to that advice.

Pocket Auto Renaissance

The great leap forward in pocket auto design came in the mid-1990s. Three companies were the key players: Glock, Kahr Arms, and Kel-Tec. They brought us a new wave of pocket pistols as short and light as many of the old .32s and .380s, but chambered for cartridges powerful enough to stop lethal fights with some degree of reliability.

From Kel-Tec came a small 9mm with a polymer frame so soft you could flex parts of it with your hands, using an external hammer, double action only design with second strike capability. It held 11 rounds using a truncated copy of the S&W Model 59 magazine, and it would work with any series 5900 or 6900 mag as well. Price was dirt cheap, and the gun weighed only 14.5 ounces. After spring problems were sorted out in the first production run, the Kel-Tec worked. Its unusually long and heavy trigger pull turned off some serious shooters, but that was nothing a good pistolsmith couldn't fix up.

Kel-Tec found that this design did not translate well to the .40 S&W, and after a brief run that caliber was discontinued by the company. They were much more successful with their fabulous P32, a .32 ACP the size of most .25 automatics and weighing an incredible 6.6 ounces. Like its big brother, the P32 was really cheap and it really worked, and therefore it was really successful, quickly outselling the bigger gun. Remember, however, that this size pistol is more "vest pocket gun" than "pocket gun."