SIG P365 hors d’oeuvres. Now I want one even more.

I’ve long been impressed by the SIG P365 in the hand at the fun shop, as a true masterpiece of pistol ergonomics, but have not live-fired one until today. More recently, I have also coveted SIG’s P365 BB gun (at Pyramyd Air here, with useful blog reviews from Tom Gaylord and Dennis Adler) as a feature-faithful training variant of the type I’ve written of before. (I hadn’t even seen one of these outside of blister-pack yet, much less fired one.) And my assessment of the P365’s virtues seems to have been ringing true in the field, as nearly everyone seems to agree it runs dependably and reliably, with little fuss and even at reasonable cost.

Anyway, as part of a successful “range day” for my daughters’ Kendo program (which I hope to have more on later), I got to live-fire both the 9x19mm firearm in its basic trim, and the BB gun as well. Just a couple of shots each, but enough to make an impression. Of course the way to really wring out a design for yourself is to take it to gun school and run it for 3-5 days, but for now I’m still happy to say that the impression very much seemed to validate what I thought it would be like.

The BB gun, using a CO2 powerplant (12g capsule in the magazine), is an engineering marvel, even aside from the outstanding exterior hand ergonomics. How they got that mechanism into the wee P365 envelope I do not know, but they did what had not been done before, and it seems to work! As expected, slide travel is slight, and the recoil impulse (“blowback”) is very slight, but it’s enough to disturb your sight picture, and that is what we need for training multiple shots in an autoloader. Yes, based on this experience, I think this BB gun, paired with the 9x19mm firearm, would be an excellent strategy for someone who really wishes to train. (Now, to organize the funds to make it happen….which is easier said than done, even priced as reasonably as the P365 is. Sometimes I secretly wish I were not already so well served by my existing armory, so that I could justify the new acquisition more easily…)

Anyway, personally, I love the manual safety that the BB gun comes with, and the fact that it is both ergonomic and ambidextrous by design is all win for training. I seriously look forward to more time with this piece.

Now…the BB gun would be of little use, if the firearm it copies was not worth having on its own, right? But I’m happy to say that the firearm’s firing experience was pretty much just exactly what I was hoping it would be. Stipulated, we were shooting standard pressure plinking ammo, but still, it’s a small gun and light in weight…and yet recoil was downright pleasant. The P365 is one of the smallest 9x19s out there, and it’s a testament to the ergonomics that the firing cycle could be that comfortable.

Interestingly, the slide did not lock open on the empty magazine after my string, whereas it did for others, and it did lock open for me when I administratively opened the slide for transfer. I don’t yet know whether to make anything of that or not; it could certainly be that my standard two-hand hold placed my thumb on the slide stop and kept it depressed. (This P365 firearm does not have the manual safety that the BB gun does, so my thumbs may well have indexed lower than they would if riding on top of a manual safety.) Again, more reps would reveal whether this was a fluke (and thus handle-able with my unified response to any stoppage) or whether it was repeatable (in which case I could almost certainly train around it with minimum fuss).

But I do think the assessment of the P365 as a winner got validated today. Operation was smooth and positive, notwithstanding the failure to lock open, since that could have been me. Trigger felt very manageable; I didn’t get to test riding the reset, but in the fun shop the P365’s reset has always struck me as favorably short and positive. Recoil and recovery is beautifully manageable, and I’d not expect any undue hardship shooting spicier +P and even +P+ loads in terms of recoil.

Like the BB gun, now I want one even more. Make mine with manual safety, of course, but even without it as per the original design, if I’m going to pack a 9x19mm instead of something bigger, I think the P365 is the number one choice in my book.