every once in a while a gun writer will tell the truth.
John Taffin is the only one I know for sure that I would trust but there apparently is one other. He is Clay Martin and here is his write up on the new Remington RP9..
Remington RP9 is a Fugly Piece of S**t....
Once in a great while, something comes along that turns an entire industry on its head. Truly game changing technology that flows together in a way previously unthinkable, and has the competition scrambling to catch up. Something so outside of the box, it forces you to reconsider everything you know about the subject. A paradigm shift, as it were. This is not one of those times.
I did not like the combination of a long and skinny grip paired up with a large and bulky slide.
Remington has not had a stellar run in pistols recently, and they were likely really looking to turn that around with the RP9. A big marketing push and garnering high praise from all manner “experts,” it seems like everyone has lined up to kiss the ring of Big Green. Well, I have bad news for you, folks. The RP9 is probably the worst pistol I have ever seen come to market in a long time—including the R51 in that statement.
Off the Reservation 6 said it best when I brought the box home for this RP9 review. Unprompted, when I pulled the lid off, she said, “ You don’t even have to take it out of the box to know you don’t want it.” We aren’t talking about aesthetics here either. Most modern guns aren’t what you would call pretty. That is kind of how it’s done now: function over form, and I fully support that. I am talking about design flaws you can see from across the room, or probably outer space.
By far the worst part of this gun is how it handles. The slide is gigantic for a 9mm; it actually looks like a Hi-Point straight blowback pistol. Add to this the tiny grip, and you get one of the worst shooting packages I have ever used. It feels like a 10-pound sledgehammer, with a butter knife for a handle. The recoil of all the reciprocating mass of the slide makes this gun very hard to control, in 9mm, for a guy that shoots handguns all the time.
The trigger isn’t bad on this gun, if you don’t mind overtravel. Lots of it. I think they found the overtravel the other polymer guns got rid of in the last two decades, and slapped it right in. Every last drop. This trigger features at least a quarter inch of overtravel, if not more.
Remington made the grip really long to fit the 18-round magazine.
DEVIL’S IN THE DETAILS
It does get worse, though. Some of the other YouTube videos I have now watched bring some other problems to light. Number one, in this “fully ambidextrous pistol,” the left-hand slide release is cosmetic only. Seriously, it doesn’t even pretend to work. If I was a leftie and had purchased this, I would be pissed. It also shows that Remington didn’t even remotely test this feature before they put it on shelves. It’s not 1987 anymore, we have the internet. To think you weren’t going to get taken to task for this is arrogant and foolish. Bad form Remington.
Number two, multiple reviewers got guns that are not reliable. Some guys have had problems with the first magazine, and at least one forced an entire case of ammo through his gun, and still had failures to extract. As I said, I’m not wasting more bullets on a 3rd rate handgun to find out. But this is a very real problem.
All in all, I am calling this the worst product release I have ever seen. Remington needs to recall all of these guns, bury them in the desert like the Atari E.T. game, and go back to something they do well. I have seen a Makarov with a rusty nail for a firing pin that I trust more than this RP9.