laststandonzombieisland

George Lars Kellgren’s first .380 pistol was an innovative and curious design. This gun even nearly three decades later still holds the record for the largest capacity in that caliber in a 14-ounce pistol and it did it by the use of a rather 19th century loading method.

Fresh from moving on from the old Miami-based company that took over production of the TEC-9 (which Kellgren had brought to the country from Sweden as the much better made KG-9), he set up shop in Rockledge, Florida with his Grendel company. While pursuing a number of forward thinking designs for rifles and shotguns, he first came up with the notion of a polymer pocket pistol chambered for the long-classic .380ACP (9x17mm Browning).

In 1988 Kellgren’s new gun, the P10, was one of the few polymer-framed firearms on the market. With the exception of the Austrian Glock 17 that had only begun to wash up on the country’s shores (which was still two years away from its infamous screen debut in Die Hard II as a “plastic gun”), it was largely a unique piece of combat Tupperware.

The five-component blowback action pistol (barrel, slide, frame, grip, trigger/hammer pack) used a 3-inch SAE 4140 ordnance steel barrel contained in a milled steel slide for added strength. The interior of the grip, rather than have a traditional magwell, consisted instead of a polymer-composite internal magazine that was fed through the open chamber by a stripper clip from a locked back slide.

Making it the first and only polymer-framed, top-fed, semi-auto pistol on the market…

Read the rest in my column at the KTOG