guilty gun pleasures: the three-eighty.

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When needs are covered, one can safely focus on wants.  That maxim holds especially true when it comes to gun collections. 

The average gun owner’s needs are usually met by a pair of reliable handguns, a good rifle, a shotgun, and a rimfire plinker of sorts.  That said, our economy is not need-based, and covering the wants is what those fun afternoons at the gun show are all about.

I have long had an inexplicable affection for autoloaders in .380ACP.  The Cartridge of a Thousand Names, also known as the 9mm Kurz, 9×17mm, 9mm short, 9mm Browning, 9mm Corto, and 9mm Kratak, is a moderately powerful cartridge that is considered the lower limit of effective self-defense rounds.  It has always been more popular in Europe, where it has been the service caliber of just about every national police force from the 1950 through the 1980s.

There’s no practical reason for this affection other than the fact that there are a lot of neat guns chambered for this round.  These days, there are many guns chambered for more powerful rounds that are smaller and lighter than the old-school .380s, and the caliber itself is now primarily utilized in tiny pocket guns, but there’s still not a thing wrong with a steel-framed Walther PPK, Colt 1908, or Astra Constable, and I’ve never felt underarmed when I’ve relied on an older .380 for protection.  Properly placed, a .380 bullet will switch an attacker’s lights off just as well as anything else out there, and the weight and easy handling of a larger gun make the caliber a lot more pleasant and easy to shoot than the newfangled eight-ounce pocket pistols that have the ergonomics of a credit card with a trigger.

The .380 is considered underpowered by some, but in my experience, it’s a very accurate and mild-shooting round, and the guns that chamber it almost universally operate by the blowback principle, which makes them simple and very reliable.

Here’s one that I keep buying in various iterations, the SIG P232.  It’s flat, reasonably lightweight (16 ounces for the alloy-framed version, 20 for the steel-framed one), very reliable, ergonomic, accurate, and drop-dead gorgeous.  In my opinion, it’s one of the most sleek handgun designs ever brought to market.

The Walther PPK of James Bond fame was the one that started the double-action pocket pistol craze, and it has spawned more copycat designs than most other handguns.  While I prefer the original .32ACP chambering for the little PPK, this particular S&W-made .380 never gave me any trouble, and it was amazingly full-featured for such a small weapon.  The design is a classic, the handgun equivalent of a Mini Cooper.  Plus, James Bond carried one, so that’s a bonus.

This Browning BDA is a stand-in for my second-place favorite .380, which is the Beretta 84/85.  I’ve owned some of each, but I never got around to taking pictures of the Beretta before I unwisely traded it off.  The Browning is basically the same gun (Beretta made them for FN), only with a closed slide in place of the Beretta’s classic open-topped one, and a slide-mounted safety instead of the Beretta’s frame-mounted lever.  The Beretta 84/85 series looks much like a Beretta 92FS someone left in the dryer too long.

Those older .380 designs have kind of fallen by the wayside in the new world of sleek tactical gear, and on paper, they can’t compete with the new breed of subcompact polymer pistols.  They do, however, feel like little works of art, relics from a different and now extinct school of engineering, and I am not ashamed of my preference for them, regardless of what the catchy post slug may say.

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