COLT'S DEEP COVER 9mm

American Handgunner, Nov-Dec, 1999 by Massad Ayoob

Parabellum power in a .380-sized pistol, the new Pocket Nine comes with special tactical features.

You've heard of Sleepless in Seattle? Colt's Mfg. Co., for most of the latter half of the 20th century, was Clueless In Connecticut. A Harvard Business School case study could be made of its myriad mistakes. Here was a company that finished World War II as the leader in its field, its famous brand a generic byword for its product. In 1945, Colt was the most popular handgun among police, target shooters, private citizens and was, of course, the nation's military sidearm.

It all dribbled through their fingers. There were flashes of brilliance- the first aluminum frame handgun, the Lightweight Commander; the penultimate revolver, the Python; and, of course, the landmark AR-15.

But the markets Colt had once ruled were swept away. Barbarians like the Springfield 191lAl were coursing through the gates and sacking what was once exclusive Colt territory. Like Nero, Colt fiddled as the market it had built with the legendary .45 Automatic Colt Pistol burned away before the fires of more aggressive competitors better in tune with the commercial markets and individual customers' changing needs.

In the late-1990s, in a sudden and wonderful flash of lucidity, management hired a savvy handson shooter, an ex-cop and gun retailer named Joe Cartabona. He brought much-needed fresh perspective, and he brought dispatches from the marketing front that management behind the lines had so long ignored.

For the first time, someone who knew what was going on managed to explain to the decision-makers what their ultimate consumers actually wanted.

Cartabona ramrodded the Defender, the shortened Officers ACP which became the best subcompact .45 Colt had ever built, being more accurate and reliable than its predecessors.

Cartabona kent rolling the quality control ball. From the economy grade 1991 A1 pistols to the top of the line Gold Cup, workmanship, fit and function were improved dramatically. The little SF-VJ, soon refined into the DS-II and Magnum Carry, heralded the smoothest and lightest actions ever to grace the ergonomic D-frame six-shooters.

Colt's little PocketLite 380s, the cocked-and-locked Mustang and the DA-only Pony, were hits with the shooting public. They were tiny, they worked and- if you had an action job done on the Pony-they were controllable.

It occurred to Cartabona, who heads new product development and marketing in the Colt think tank, that the little Pony could be chambered for a full power 9mm and made to work. It would be smaller than a Walther PPK, the definitive small .380 for more than half a century. And it would chamber the 9x19 round instead of the diminutive 9x17.

"Yeah, right," we all said. "They'll never do it."

"Even if they tried," we all said, "it probably wouldn't work."

But "we all" were wrong on both counts.

Dreams And Realities

The dream had been the tiny Pony PocketLite in 9mm Parabellum instead of .380. The design team, in the end, had to sigh, "Dream on."

Cartabona explained to me that when prototypes were built and torture tested, they started breaking at around 2,500 rounds. The parts were simply too small to stand the buffeting that the more powerful load delivered.

Parts were beefed up where necessary. These guns passed 15,000 round torture tests without breakage, notes Cartabona. Bear in mind that, while this is a drop in the bucket for today's hardcore competitive shooters, 10,000 rounds was for many years considered the standard life span of a semiautomatic service pistol.

And, in the real world of pocket-size handguns, there aren't a whole lot of folks who shoot 10,000 rounds through their alloy-frame .380 auto or snub-nosed .38 revolver. A quarterly police-style qualification of 60 shots adds up to only 2,400 rounds over a decade.

The gun was bigger than the Pony. That was the bad news. The good news? The gun was exactly the same size as the Walther PPK .380, including thickness.

This makes it the smallest 9mm carry auto on the market. Only the "micro-Kahr," the MK9, can touch it for length and height dimension, and even that gun at 0.9" is a tad thicker.

The Colt Pocket Nine weighs only 17 ozs. unloaded, due to the aircraft grade aluminum in its frame. This makes it 6 ozs. lighter than an all-steel PPK .380.

The reality was at least close to the dream. It reminds one of the old adage, "If you aim for the stars, you'll at least hit the moon."

Velocity Sensitive

The standard model Pocket Nine in matte stainless surprised all who shot it. Recoil was amazingly light. Aware that some of the most finely manufactured .380s, like the SIG and the Walther, had a tendency to gash the proximal knuckle of the thumb with their sharp, low mounted slides, the Colt designers put a long, wide grip tang in place to protect the shooter's hand.

It worked on the Pony and it works on the Pocket Nine. I find it literally more pleasant to shoot than the .380s mentioned above.

Amazingly, Colt warrants this gun with hot ammo in the P range, i.e., 115 gr. 9mm at around 1,300 fps. I found the gun to handle it well, and the accelerated recoil wasn't objectionable or difficult to manage.