Looking for a 9mm pistol

Having found my little .22 plinkster gun, it was time to look for a 9mm pistol. I had around $300 to $350 to look for my next pistol. I searched out a lot of vendors and joined a lot of forums to learn about what might be good or bad. In the end, I had narrowed my search down to 7 guns. The ones I was looking at were the:

Taurus PT92
Taurus PT809
Sig Sauer SP2022
CZ 75B
Cougar 8000
Bersa Thunder
Ruger P95


Those marked in red were just too expensive for me (found out too late that I had some more money coming in and could have gotten any of them, oh well). Those marked in green I was able to find multiples of them in my price range in either blue or stainless. Each had their positives and negatives and eventually I settled on the Taurus PT809.

 I had found several online reviews of the PT809 on youtube.com and found positive reviews on taurusarmed.net. Pretty much the only exception was the early model 809's which had metal shavings in the firing channel, but that was the first year of production and had been cleaned up. The other thing I liked about the 809 was that Taurus was working on a .22 conversion kit. Basically replace the slide, barrel, and the magazine and you have the same gun shooting the really cheap .22lr ammo. The 809 also came with a "second strike" capability. What this means is that sometimes, the firing pin doesn't strike the primer hard enough to cause the primer to fire. The "second strike" capability means the gun would go back into double action and you can pull the trigger again and try to fire the round. This had a reported 99% success rate and could be instrumental in IDPA or real life situations.

Finally, I found a couple shops who had the 809 in stock so I could view the weapon, and get a feel for it. The gun had a good grip with 3 different back-straps for adjusting the size of the hand grip. It normally comes with medium installed and it fit my hand pretty well. The 809 comes with ambidextrous controls at the slide release, magazine release, and safety/de-cocker. All the controls were well sized and easy to reach. The magazine release was very tight though. Difficult to get a magazine to drop. This supposedly gets better as it gets lubricated and worked out. I also liked the indents on each side of the frame by the trigger guard. This is a natural location for your index finger to land when drawing and pointing the weapon. The trigger pull wasn't terrible in double action. Single action was much better and very crisp. You could really feel when the trigger reset traveling back.

My next post will be around how the gun shot (good) and Taurus repairs (not so good).