SAR 20#2

THE
WALTHER
CCP
Addressing the
Timeless Quandary of
Big Bullets
in Little Guns
by Will Dabbs MD
Photos by Sarah Dabbs
The Walther CCP employs an unconventional application
of fairly conventional firearms technology and
in so doing revolutionizes the concept of concealed
carry handguns. By incorporating a reversed gas piston
to retard recoil forces the engineers at Walther designed
a tiny gun that still manages large cartridges
comfortably.
What would happen if you took the chassis
from a lightweight, polymer-framed Walther
P22, arguably the most popular .22 pistol in the
country, and re-chambered it as a direct blowback
9mm? Dislocated fingers? Broken bones?
The resulting gun might even eventually explode.
Who knows, the local Orthopedist might
finally get his boat paid off.
Well what if you took the gas piston from a
Kalashnikov or FN FAL, miniaturized it, flipped
it around backwards, and then pinned it to the
front of the slide? Now you have a 9mm P22
that fits the human hand just about perfectly,
launches serious bullets, shoots sweet, and in a
pinch rides in the front pocket of a pair of jeans.
In short, it is a truly revolutionary concealed carry
pistol.
Carl Walther was a firearms luminary. His
PP and PPK introduced the world to the single
action/double action trigger system used
in most of the world’s autoloading handguns
in the pre-Glock era. These ground breaking
pocket pistols came of age in the 1930’s and
melded the concealability of an autoloader with
the safety and convenience of a double action
revolver. The subsequent P38 was arguably the
most advanced service pistol of World War II.
In the years since the Second World War,
Walther has been a consistent innovator in
modern firearms design. The Walther MPL and
MPK submachine guns represented the state of
the art in the immediate post-war years and their
WWW.SMALLARMSREVIEW.COM 69 SAR Vol. 20, No. 2