Kahr Mk40 Micro

Guns Magazine, April, 2000 by Massad Ayoob

The other two malfunctions occurred when I was shooting a qualification course, and I reflexively cleared them. These were failures for the slide to go into battery, that is, to carry the fresh round all the way into the firing chamber. I realized as they happened, on the 10 yard line, that I was focusing so much on sight alignment and trigger control that I had forgotten to lock my wrists. This is a "shooter error" thing.

So long as the grip was firm and the wrists were locked, everything else went through the gun cleanly. In my hands, and in the hands of others.

A Nurpin Moment

You expect very small, very powerful guns to kick hard enough to hurt you. This one did, and it didn't. It was a matter of grasp.

Properly held, the pistol snapped instantly back on target. You knew you were shooting something very potent, but it didn't hurt if you grasped it correctly. I felt the torque of the recoil more in the wrists than in the hands.

I might not recommend it as the gun of choice for the arthritic, but the fact is that I am arthritic, and there was no lingering discomfort after a long shooting session. In the immortal words of the first world champion of the combat pistol, Ray Chapman. "It stops hurting as soon as you stop shooting."

Frankly, it doesn't really hurt when you're shooting. That is, unless you use an improper grasp, and because of that, I want to reach for an engineer's steel ruler and smack somebody at Kahr Arms across the knuckles.

The problem is, this particular gun comes out of the box with a sharp edge on the bottom rear of the slide stop lever. If you take a normal grasp on the pistol with your right hand, this sharp edge will nail you somewhere on your right thumb. I shot it left-handed and it was no problem. Right-handed, I had to transition to John Farnam's signature grasp with both thumbs pointed up to the sky.

This grasp works for Farnam and many of his students. It doesn't work for me in terms of maximum performance, but in this shooting test, Farnam's high-thumb grasp kept me from lacerating my thumbs on that sharp-edged slide stop lever.

Note to Justin Moon and the rest of the Kahr design team: Round off the edge on the MK40's slide lock lever!

Unexpectedly Easy

The smoothness of the DAO trigger stroke, and the fortuitous similarity of the grip shape and angle to that of the Browning Hi-Power, made this gun easier to shoot than you would expect with a subcompact .40 caliber pocket gun.

I've seen DAO pistols in this power range whose triggers were so bad, you couldn't stabilize the gun to assess its mechanical accuracy unless you had a machine rest. In such a case, the resulting data is meaningless unless you have a robot bodyguard to fire the pistol for you.

Testing was done at 25 yards with the pistol held in both hands and rested on a bench, the equivalent of firing over an auto hood or a wall. Five-shot groups were test-fired with half a dozen commercial loads encompassing the four most common bullet weights in caliber .40 S&W.

Most shooters expect to actually deploy a self-defense pistol at seven yards or less, within which distance the MK40 will stay on the deep brain area of a human anatomy target all day long if you do your part. Accuracy, in a combat pistol, is a relative thing.