Received my Girsan Regard MC R9 today. It came packaged in a nice plastic blow-moulded box along with a second mag, a cleaning brush and rod, a bottle of oil and a user manual as well as a cable lock. The mags are marked as being made by MecGar for Girsan and offer viewing ports to allow round count to be established by looking at the exterior of the mag.
Upon initial inspection it looked to me like machining quality in this pistol is excellent. In fact I found nothing that immediately jumped out at me as anything other than a quality finish.
To confirm, the pistol features a DA/SA trigger system, NOT Single Action as stated on Tenda's website - that clearly is an error as the DA/SA status is also confirmed in the user manual. The safety is a full decocker. From either half- or full #### hammer position, moving the safety downward to the "safe" position causes the hammer to fall against the hammer blocker and the trigger to be disconnected. DA activation only occurs if the safety is moved upward to the fire position.
A trip to the range ensued with about 80 rounds fired through the pistol, with 70 rounds of that ammo being Wolf lead, and a single five round mag of each of SynTech and XMetal were fired to verify functioning. The pistol experienced one failure to feed with the Wolf lead ammo, failing to close fully into battery on the third shot of a 10 round mag. That was the only time I loaded 10 rounds as our club is very bullseye-oriented with 5 rounds per mag the common loading methodology.
The sights on this pistol are good, but not terrific if one is shooting at paper targets. Front sight width almost completely visually fills the rear sight notch, leaving only a small sliver of light visible on either side of the front sight. This situation allows for undetected lateral displacement of the front sight. I also found the white dot on the front sight to be very large, large enough to permit the muzzle to drop without visual detection. The sights appear to be very robust. With the Wolf lead ammo the initial point of impact was about a foot low and six inches left at 20 yards.
The pistol is quite pleasant to shoot, far more so than expected. Grip stippling is just about perfectly suited to my taste. I found the mag release to be small and to require my hand to be rotated on the grip in order for my stubby thumb to be able to fully actuate the mag release button. For me to use this pistol in an "action" shooting game an oversize/extended mag release would be required. Those with slightly larger hands or longer thumbs would likely not have any problems with the stock mag release.
Trigger pull is stout, and DA trigger pull for those of us with smaller hands is a challenge. The trigger break is reasonably good but there is a lot of overtravel following the break. At least 1/8" of overtravel could be removed by an overtravel stop without any effect on reliability of trigger function. The trigger reset is positive and reasonably short. Consistency of trigger pull is excellent. I had an opportunity to shoot a CZ SP02 side by side with the Girsan. While the CZ DA trigger is lighter and perhaps a little shorter, the SA trigger of the Girsan gets my vote hands down over that of the CZ. The CZ simply was not consistent in length of draw and it was also rough and gritty. The Girsan features a consistent draw length and a smooth draw to a clean break. Changing the trigger-related springs will no doubt improve the Girsan trigger feel although many owners will be happy with it as it comes straight from the box.
Overall I would say that I can't see why I would buy a Beretta when the Girsan product functions every bit as well as the Beretta while providing significant cost savings. I have the impression this pistol will see lots of use and likely will soldier on with no problems. I'm not at all displeased with this purchase. Just don't get me going on the 10 weeks it took to get this pistol into my hot little hands, thanks to our CFO moving so slowly.
