Dan Wesson DWX 9mm

Origin Story

Back during the Cold War, the Czech CZ75 was a fistful of protest. Like the Borg of Star Trek, the Soviet Union gobbled up everything it touched, assimilating entire cultures into the overarching communist collective. However, here and there you could still find the stubborn flicker of independence. Sometimes the very expression of individuality was a protest against totalitarianism. The gleaming example was Czechoslovakia.

Building guns has always been a big part of the Czech ethos. Shooting is their third-most popular sport right behind football — the European sort — and ice hockey. Their reputation for innovation, industry and quality is well-deserved. In the interwar years, the Czechs brought us the ZB vz. 26 that eventually became the British Bren Light Machinegun. During WWII, the Czechs were forced to make armaments for the Axis. Their repurposed Bf-109 Messerschmitt fighter plane clones helped the Israelis win independence in 1948. However, the same year a communist coup d’état toppled the representative government in Czechoslovakia and ushered in four decades of authoritarian rule.

These subjugated nations typically adopted Soviet weapons and tactics. Licensed factories were constructed in most satellite countries to produce AK assault rifles. The standardization of weapons throughout the Pact made logistical and military sense. However, the Czechs simply refused to play along.

With literally half the world awash in Kalashnikov rifles, the Czechs clung dogmatically to their domestically designed Vz.58. The Vz.58 was a curious striker-fired rifle using a tilting-block locking system philosophically similar to the Walther P38 pistol. The Vz.58 fired the Combloc standard M43 7.62x39mm round and was lighter than the AK while remaining comparably reliable. It was arguably the better gun.

In 1975 the Warsaw Pact was up to its vodka-addled ears in Makarov handguns. The Makarov was a fairly uninspired 9x18mm unlocked blowback pistol, the design of which was clearly pirated from the German Walther PP. As combat handguns go, it was pure unfiltered milquetoast. Predictably, the Czechs followed a different path.

In the same year, Czech gun designer František Koucký came out of retirement with the mandate to design a new combat pistol. He eschewed both the Combloc standard 7.62x25mm and 9x18mm rounds in favor of the 9mm Parabellum. The resulting CZ75 was a supernova of innovation amidst an otherwise drab backdrop of Iron Curtain sameness.

For starters, the frame on the CZ75 rode outside the slide. This is backwards from basically every other combat pistol on the planet. This does decrease the amount of surface area you have to grab when racking the slide manually. However, it also maximizes slide-to-frame contact for optimized stability, repeatability and accuracy. The CZ75 also just felt great in the hand. The rest of the world took note.

Because of the curious antipathy defining the Cold War, František Koucký was unable to patent his innovative design outside of Czechoslovakia. Arms makers around the globe therefore enthusiastically pirated the salient innovations defining his radical gun. My first high-capacity 9mm was an inexpensive Italian-made copy of the CZ75 purchased back in the 1980s.

Normally, guns made in Eastern Europe during the Cold War stayed in Eastern Europe. However, U.S. servicemen could privately purchase the CZ75 through their Rod and Gun Clubs in Europe and legally bring them home. As this was the only way to land a genuine CZ75 back before the wall came down, it made those guns incredibly valuable. Combine their relative rarity with truly superlative design and they became the golden ring back in the day. The design retains a rabid following even now.

Throughout it all, old John Browning’s 1911 soldiered on in U.S. military service. Generations of American veterans left the military with an unbounded affection for the weapon. The single-action trigger and general mastery of human ergonomics turned the 1911 into “America’s gun.” Pistolsmiths customized the heck out of the thing, transforming a basic GI defensive tool into the embodiment of tactical art — which brings us to today.