Walther CCP 9mm

“Pixie n’ Dixie Approved”

One selling point of the CCP is that its slide is particularly easy to operate, for petite females and others who don’t have “Sergeant Rock” level upper body strength. I didn’t find it that much easier than other striker-fired pistols, whose slides are generically easier to run than hammer-fired pistols due to design reasons. So, I turned it over to a couple of five-foot-tall females I nicknamed “Pixie and Dixie” (because one of them has a strong Southern accent). Both are former state champion IDPA shooters: one is a current two-state regional women’s champion in IDPA, and the other has held a national champion title in silhouette shooting. Both carry striker-fired pistols daily and compete with them regularly, and both agreed that the Walther CCP’s slide was easier to work by far than other such pistols of the same dimensions that they had shot. Live and learn.

Perks and Quirks

Good news: while our test CCP shot to the left with everything, that’s nothing a simple sight push couldn’t fix, and for its purpose I was happy with the CCP’s accuracy. In concealed carry with a Remora holster, the only discomfort was mild skin abrasion when carried long term inside the waistband due to the rough finish of the grip against bare skin. With a shirt or tee-shirt between gun and body, no sharp edges or roughness presented at all.

Very early CCPs were reported on WaltherForum.com to have reliability problems. With several hundred rounds through ours in multiple hands, we experienced no extraction failures, feed failures or other stoppages, though once every six magazines or so the slide would fail to lock back when empty. Apparently, by the time our sample gun left the factory, initial problems had been squared away.

On the down side, the trigger pull gave me the creeps, literally. “Trigger creep” means that as the trigger is drawn back, internal contact surfaces present snags. Though measured from the center of the trigger our Lyman digital gauge rounded off to an average of 6.4 pounds, which is fine: I’ve won the Pocket Glock event at a GSSF shoot with a Glock 42 whose pull weight was in the seven-pound range. What bothered all who shot the test CCP was the scraping, dragging effect of its trigger creep. You could dry-fire the empty CCP next to your ear and hear it, like a door creaking ominously open in a haunted house movie. All that said, though, it was much less noticeable when shooting at full speed.

THE CCP IN CCP

A corollary test we just couldn’t resist.

Concealed carry proved comfortable in this remora holster worn inside the waistband
Concealed carry proved comfortable in this remora holster worn inside the waistband

For Walther, CCP stands for Concealed Carry Pistol. What a coincidence: the same acronym stands for the same thing in a new gun category of IDPA, the International Defensive Pistol Association. Geared on the dimensions of the popular Glock 19, with a limit of eight rounds in each magazine, the new division seemed an ideal test bed for the new Walther. We test drove it on a Classifier Day at the ProArms shooting range in Live Oak, Florida.

The IDPA Classifier is a 90-shot, revolver-neutral course involving one-hand-only shooting with each hand, both body and head shots, shooting while moving forward and back, turning to fire, and shooting from high and low barricades. Distances are 7 to 20 yards, all timed; every point down from perfect adds half a second to the shooter’s time, resulting in final score.

I had no problems off-safing the single action Walther. After months with double-stack pistols with tapered magazines and large mag wells, getting the little single-stack mag into the CCP’s smaller well led to some time-gobbling fumbles. I managed to get through the 30 shots at 7 yards, including the head shots, only one point down, but found center-zone accuracy harder to maintain as distances increased. The gun had been grouping left at the 25 yard bench, and I apparently over-compensated with too much Kentucky windage at 20 yards, with a few shots going to the right. I felt like I was fighting that creepy trigger the whole way through.

Still managed to finish with an Expert level score, though. Some judicious trigger polish and a drifting of the rear sight to starboard would be my first actions if the test Walther CCP belonged to me, which would make it easier for this inexpensive little 9mm carry gun to take its owner into Master class in IDPA CCP.

Bottom Line

The manual thumb safety, slide stop and reversible magazine catch are all easy to reach without breaking a firing grip
The manual thumb safety, slide stop and reversible magazine catch are all easy to reach without breaking a firing grip

With this economy-grade Walther CCP, you’re getting the Walther name and, if your CCP tests like ours, the reliability you’d expect from such a respected brand. If you want a trigger to brag about, you’ll have to turn a page in the Walther catalog and order the more expensive PPQ series, whose trigger pull is being raved about positively all over the Internet, and if you want the workmanship that made Walther an iconic name in the world of guns, well, you have the whole rest of the Walther catalog.

With its $469 price point, the CCP is definitely worth a look. See it at your gun shop, or contact Walther Arms, Inc., Dept OT; Tel.: (479) 242-8500; Web: www.waltherarms.com