The Raven MP-25 exists because America’s gun control industry thought it could disarm the poor simply by banning the importation of small, often affordable, firearms. The Gun Control Act of 1968 cut off the flow of cheap, small-caliber firearms that were brought in from countries like Germany and Spain.
A serial entrepreneur named George Jennings saw the hole in the market created by the GCA and decided to fill it. He started Raven Arms and first began producing the Raven P-25, which evolved into the Raven MP-25, a little blaster that was as simple and cheap as it got.
The gun was made from Zamak, a zinc alloy, and was produced by die casting. Assembly lines could crank out a gun together every three minutes. The Raven MP-25 uses a direct-blowback design with very few parts. They retailed for anywhere from $35 to $50. It’s tough to nail down an actual price, so I’m relying on anecdotal stories.
I recently paid $80 for a pair of MP-25s, which is a great deal these days. The little guns have slowly crept into the collectors space, and go for anywhere from $75 to $150 on the used market these days. Intrinsically, there’s nothing all that great about these guns, nothing that would seem to make them collectible.
Nothing aside from their infamous reputation, that is.
The Raven MP-25 – Achieving Infamy
George Jennings and Raven sold a ton of guns. They were cheap and popular, and the gun business would become a family business with over a dozen companies producing cheap model all tied to the Jennings family. The story is too long to tell here.
The short version is that Raven would be the first company in the much-maligned Ring of Fire companies. The Raven MP-25 would become the blueprint for the vast majority of the Ring of Fire semi-automatic pistols. The little gun chambered the meek, but reliable little .25 ACP cartridge from the time the company started to the time the factory literally burned to the ground.
Their low price made them an affordable option for someone who was cash-strapped. The Second Amendment applies to everyone, and if you can’t afford a Colt or a Smith, then the Raven MP-25 was probably more your speed. These days there’s a glut of affordable firearms out there that are very solid options. Back then, not so much.
In the 1970 and 80s, the budget market was pretty slim pickings. The market had been owned by the overseas firms, and it was dried up by the time the Raven pistols hit the market. It wasn’t much of a pistol, but it was better than harsh language.
Unfortunately, a new cheap pistol that flew in the face of the 1968 GCA attracted attention. Anti-gunners sought to label the gun, and all Ring of Fire pistols, as guns for criminals. According to a paper released by the Police Foundation, this wasn’t true.
The National Institute of Justice released a policy report that stated about 14% of criminals used a firearm they would classify as a Saturday Night Special. They certainly didn’t live up to the reputation assigned to them by anti-gunners. However, that reputation makes them an interesting collectible.
The MP-25 At The Range
Oddly, one of the guns I regret selling years ago was a Raven MP-25. I can’t remember it being anything but reliable, but to be fair, I didn’t fire it all that much. With a pair of Raven MP-25s and a couple boxes of .25 ACP, I hit the range to see if my memories deceived me.
The answer is yessish. One of the guns has a lot of problems going into battery. Every other round required me to push the slide forward ever so slightly. The other gun ran mostly fine; I had a failure to extract once in the fifty rounds I fired.
The MP-25 might be a direct blowback pistol, but it has hardly any recoil. The little .25 ACP is a fun little round and does well in direct blowback pistols. It was designed to give pocket pistols an ultra-small cartridge with centerfire reliability. You can dump cartridges into the target with one hand, a poor grip, or with aged and inexperienced hands, and it doesn’t get away from you.
It’s not particularly accurate. The gun technically has sights. They are molded into the slide and micro-sized. Because they share the same finish as the slide, they don’t exactly catch the eye. At ten yards, I can keep all six rounds inside an eight-inch circle.
The Bird Flies
Big hands and a small grip aren’t a good combination. If my hand goes too high, I get a little kiss from the slide. I can barely fit two fingers on the grip, and trying to avoid slide bite doesn’t give us the best grip, and I need a good grip to shoot straight.
The trigger is a little hefty, but not enough to degrade accuracy. It’s fine at close range, and you can be accurate enough to make a whole punch of noise and poke a few holes in a human-sized target. Beyond 15 yards, it’s a bit of guesswork on targets any smaller than 8 inches.
The little thumb safety is certainly something. It’s not easy to use quickly or efficiently. If I were forced to carry one of these pistols, I would probably go condition 3. The gun isn’t drop safe, and I don’t have much faith in the cheapest sear ever produced.
The firing pins on these guns also tend to break fairly often. It’s probably the most common problem cited with these guns. There is even a cottage industry producing stainless steel replacements, a testament to the fact that three million of these guns were produced and some demand still exists.
The End of Raven
The Raven factory caught fire in 1990, shuttering the business. In a clever naming move, the company started again, kind of, but going by the name Phoenix. George Jennings retired, leaving the company to be owned by various family members.
They produced the Phoenix series of handguns, but Phoenix closed in 2025, ending the Jennings connection to handgun production.
Yet there are plenty of Ravens still there roaming around, waiting to find homes with people like me who are simply interested in the gun’s history…and relative infamy.
They ran
Sometimes on their own.