Light and modern defined: the Kahr TP45 .45ACP

Guns Magazine, May, 2008 by Massad Ayoob

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With a trigger pull like a fine double-action revolver, this flat 8-shot .45 auto may just out-Commander the legendary Colt. Going on 60-years ago, Colt introduced the first significant size and weight change in their legendary Government Model .45 auto. They shortened its barrel from 5" to 4-1/4", stubbed off the slide proportionally, and made the frame out of high-grade aluminum alloy.

Called the Commander, it weighed 26.5 ounces instead of its predecessor's 39.5, but held the same payload of seven .45 ACP rounds in the magazine and an eighth in the firing chamber. Later renamed the Lightweight (LW, for short) Commander to distinguish it from subsequent all steel models in the 4.25" barrel configuration, this gun would become de rigueur for concealed carry by serious firearms professionals.

It was reasonably light. It was combat accurate. It was fiat and easy to conceal, especially inside the waistband. It held a third more ammo than a sixgun, and powerful ammo at that, and the spare magazines were fast to reload and also fiat and convenient to carry. Colt Commanders were cool. They still are.

But, over the years, the paradigm changed. The KISS principle--Keep It Simple, Stupid!--migrated from military training to police training and then to the armed citizen side of the house. It was suddenly presumed the cocked and locked .45 that had served competent handgunners since 1911 was too complicated for people of today. The demand arose for a "slick-slide" .45 auto as slim and light as an LW Commander, but needing no manual safety, relying instead upon the double action "point gun, pull trigger" principle for every shot, proven so relatively safe with revolvers since the 19th Century.

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Enter the Kahr Arms TP45. Roughly the size of a Commander, its distinctly lighter thanks to its polymer frame. It's slick, revolver-like double-action-only trigger pull has won a lot of friends over the years in Kahr's smaller caliber models. It's a mild-kicking compact .45 both reasonably accurate and fun to shoot.

This pistol proved very consistent on the 25-yard line. I tried it with three name-brand loads in the three most popular .45 ACP bullet weights. The gun was supported on an MTM gun rest on the bench, in a two-hand hold. Each group of five shots was measured overall to determine practical accuracy in steady hands with no stress, and again for the best five shots. A good shortcut with an experienced shooter who has "called no flyers," this will roughly approximate a 5-shot group with the same gun and load from a machine rest, because it greatly factors out unnoticed human error. Each measurement was taken center-to-center, farthest shot to farthest, and measured to the nearest .05".

The lightest bullet weight tested was 185 grains, using Federal's famously accurate 45C load, a conventional jacketed hollowpoint from their Classic line. All five shots ran 3.45", and the best three were in a more promising 2.05" cluster. This round has light recoil, and was one of the best standard-pressure JHP manstoppers in its weight range back when 185-grain loads were popular in police .45s.

The middleweight was the 200-grain semiwadcutter, all lead, in the Hensley & Gibbs No. 68 so popular among handloaders. This batch was factory loaded by Black Hills. A smoky round, but certainly an accurate one, it delivered five shots into 2.75" with the three tightest measuring 1.40".

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The heavyweight was the perennially super-popular 230-grain, and since the Kahr TP45's barrel measures exactly 4" from the back edge of the chamber hood to the muzzle, I chose the new Short Barrel .45 ACP Gold Dot load ramrodded by Speer's gifted engineer, Ernest Durham. It drilled a quintet of bullet holes 2.95" apart, four of them in a 1.45" cluster and the best three only 1.20" apart. This load shows great potential in the little Kahr.

The gun shot very consistently. All precision aiming was done with a conventional post-in-notch sight picture, and every load shot just a little bit low and left. The three dots of the test TP45's Trijicon night sights sit just below the top edges of the sights, closer to the bore. This meant sighting with the three dots, while faster but coarser, would raise the point of impact to spot-on elevation.

In most 9mm and .40 Kahrs of my acquaintance, there has been a strong "4 1 syndrome." That is, the first hand-chambered round will send its bullet to a point of impact slightly away from where the automatically-cycled follow-up shots will cluster. This did not occur with any of the loads run through the TP45 for this test. In every group, the most outlying shot came somewhere in the middle of the string of fire. (And, bear in mind, each of those distant shots might have been unnoticed human error. That's why the "best three" measurement is taken along with the total group measurement.)

Scene opens in the coolness of early evening on my range, still enough light to see by, but the most comfortable part of a hot July day. My friend Herman Gunter III, a consummate firearms instructor, is completing his initial lesson with a lovely schoolteacher named Toni Greenberg, who is firing a handgun tonight for the first time. She is amazed at how well he has taught her to hit with a handy 9mm Glock. I offer them the Kahr TP45. Herman explains this is a .45, and it will kick a little bit more than what she's just been shooting.