The integral front blade was wide enough, but stuck up on 0.030 inch above the surrounding metal. The Rugers was a touch larger and at a different height, so the magazines would not interchange. Both magazine releases were square buttons located on the left side of the frame. The Rugers mag had numbered witness holes on both sides Kel-Tec, right-side holes, and no numbers. The Italian-made magazines (one per gun) held six rounds. The hammer drops only once, after which the slide must be cycled to recock.īoth guns had a trigger movement of one inch, measured at the tip. A long, soft pull on the trigger then brings the hammer all the way back and drops it onto the spring-loaded firing pin. Cycling the slide, as when chambering a round, moves the hammer about half-way back in its travel. Both may be fired with the magazine removed.
Neither gun stays open after the last shot, though the Ruger may be manually locked open. It utilizes a steel slide with locked-breech barrel, and is double-action only. The design features a polymer frame containing an aluminum subframe to which the mechanism is attached. However, I still preferred one gun over the other, and to explain why, Ill discuss the common features first, and then take a look at each gun individually. My finding: The two guns are so nearly identical that the Ruger might have been a clone of the Kel-Tec. For my part, I was curious about how the LCP would match up against the nearly identical Kel-Tec P3AT ($324), and I obtained a P3AT to investigate their similarities, differences, and relative worth.įor this head to head, I tested with Speer Gold-Dot 90-grain HPs, Magtech 95-grain FMJs, and Independence 90-grain FMJs. Beginning on page 11, my colleague Roger Eckstine puts the LCP through its paces in the standard GT comparison format against guns from Walther USA and Taurus. Reports are Ruger received well over 100,000 orders for the gun by the end of that weekend.Ī gun that creates that much stir naturally interests the Gun Tests staff, and we obtained two of the very first issues of the LCP. One of the very newest and hottest of these is the Ruger LCP, a 380 introduced to an eager crowd at the SHOT Show early in 2008. Through the years technology got better, and though pockets got smaller, the concept of a hand-size pistol matured until today we find some remarkably tiny handguns with relatively outstanding power available. In the days of percussion, and even during the 200-odd years of flintlocks, many small handguns were made that were sort-of pocketable, if you had large pockets. The concept of a pocket pistol is as old as handguns.