The Best Pistol Ever Made: The H&K P7

“Design the best gunfighter’s pistol ever made; no restrictions.” I imagine that’s the direction Heckler & Koch gave its most talented engineers back in 1976 when design began on the P7, and it’s the gun that resulted when production kicked off in 1979. Apparently unencumbered by corporate bean counters, those engineers innovated until the H&K P7 became the most expensive production pistol in the world.

It isn’t a competition pistol. It isn’t a range day pistol. The H&K P7 is what James Bond should have carried. It’s a gunfighter’s pistol for a secret agent or a police officer or Hans Gruber or, perhaps, just little ol’ you and me.

Okay, there were some restrictions placed on the P7’s design as Heckler & Koch kicked off the project to bid for a massive German police contract. This new service firearm would replace the Walther PP (chambered in anemic .32 ACP) for effectively all German police officers and it had to fit within certain weight, size, and functionality requirements. Ultimately, it was these basic design and function demands that drove the P7 to become such a fantastic concealed carry, self-defense pistol.

Whatever committee or person came up with the requirements for this proposed new duty gun demanded something eminently safe to carry with a loaded chamber, even if carried in a pocket, yet also instantly ready to fire when drawn. It also needed to be ambidextrous, have a solid service life, and fit a fairly compact footprint and weight maximum for a duty gun.

No shortage of unique features made it into the final design of the HK P7, all of which are highly functional, and many of which were “firsts.” Some became ubiquitous in pistols to this day.

3-Dot Sights

Viewed through a modern lens, that may not seem particularly interesting, but I’m kicking off the list of P7 innovations here because 3-dot sights were invented for the P7. It was the first pistol to ever have them. Shortly thereafter this became — and has remained to this day — the standard for most pistol sights.

Squeeze Cocker

Precisely the opposite of the 3-dot sights, for which the P7 received no notoriety yet the innovation became ubiquitous, the P7’s squeeze cocking mechanism is its most infamous feature and, as far as I’m aware, remains totally unique to the P7.

Squeezing the P7 in a correct firing grip compresses the front strap, which cocks the striker. It takes about 10 to 15 pounds of pressure to compress the cocking lever mechanism and cock the striker, depending on where and how you measure it along the front strap. This is easily achieved in a standard firing grip, whether you’re shooting with one or both hands.

Once compressed, the cocking lever only requires about 1.5 pounds of force to stay compressed. It isn’t noticeable at all in your grip. Once compressed the first time, the shooter can fire through some or all rounds in the magazine without letting go of the squeeze cocker. The cycling of the slide re-cocks the striker as with any other pistol.

Unlike other striker-fired pistols, however, the single-action-only P7 is capable of making repeated strikes on a hard primer by simply releasing then squeezing the cocking lever. That can even be done with the trigger depressed, as the P7 will fire whether you squeeze the squeeze cocker then pull the trigger or reverse that order. This makes it even more foolproof in the heat of a self-defense scenario.

Letting go of the squeeze cocker front strap safely drops the striker down to a fully at-rest, blocked-from-the-primer position. In this manner a chambered P7 can transition from fully cocked and ready-to-fire to fully safe by simply squeezing or releasing the cocking lever. As seen above, the state of the striker is also clearly visible at the rear of the slide.

HK completely eschewed a manual safety and the H&K P7 is faster and more intuitive because of it. At the same time, the pistol is eminently safe. The gun can be loaded, unloaded, carried chambered, holstered, and broken down for cleaning all in a completely safe condition with a dead trigger where it’s physically impossible for a round to be discharged.

While the squeeze cocker is intuitive and simply taking a firm firing grip operates it, its pull weight still makes it near impossible to achieve accidentally.

But wait! There’s more! The squeeze cocker is also the slide release. When the P7 locks back on empty or is locked to the rear manually (there’s a little slide stop lever where a typical, American-style magazine release button would be), squeezing the front strap releases the slide. That makes getting back in action after a magazine swap super fast and efficient. The slide can also be slingshotted, of course.

Gas Retarded Blowback

H&K says the P7 is gas retarded, but I think it’s pretty smart. It was the first pistol to operate this way and was the only one up until H&K released the CCP in ~2015. Well, okay, there was a random South African gun that never got off the ground, but the P7 and CCP are the only production guns with a gas piston delayed blowback system.

A small port in front of the chamber — at the 6:00 position in the barrel — directs gas pressure from the fired 9mm round down below the barrel . . .

. . . and into a gas chamber…for lack of a better term. Given this is a German gun, you’d think just about anything would be a better term, but alas, it is a gas chamber so we’re just going to go with it.

To be fair, HK intelligently called it a gas cylinder.

Into that gas chamber fits a gas piston, seen in the photo above attached via a pivot pin to the bottom, muzzle-end of the slide. Until that 9mm projectile leaves the barrel, the inside of the barrel and the inside of the gas chamber remain pressurized. It’s this gas pressure that prevents the piston from traveling farther into the gas chamber. Once the pressure drops, the piston is free to slide fully into the chamber and the slide is able to cycle with only the recoil spring’s resistance. Thus, the HK P7 operates via a gas retarded blowback mechanism as it’s the very combustion gas and pressure from firing a round that delays the slide’s ability to cycle rearward.

Fluted Chamber

Scroll back up to three photos ago and you’ll see distinct grooves cut into and (slightly) out the front of the P7’s chamber. These flutes channel combustion gas back between the case and the chamber itself. That actually “floats” the empty case out of the chamber. What this means in practical terms is that the HK P7 runs reliably even without an extractor. Yes, it has one, though arguably its main function is to allow manual unloading of a chambered round.

For reloaders, the MP5/G3-style fluted chamber is less than ideal. The flutes leave burn marks and sometimes little stretch lines on the case walls and the oversized diameter of the chamber at the base of the case wall causes it to visibly stretch in that area. It’s all about reliability, folks. The brass is a write-off.

Polygonal Rifling

It’s my understanding that the P7 was the first pistol to feature polygonal rifling rather than your typical lands and grooves. GLOCK has marketed the heck out of this style of rifling and has all the notoriety for it, but H&K did it first here.

I’m not sure I buy into all of the touted benefits of polygonal rifling, but some of them are fairly undeniable. It’s easier to clean, it creates a nominally better gas seal, it lasts an extremely long time, and the barrels have a higher tensile strength. Proponents of polygonal rifling claim better accuracy as well, but I’m dubious of that one.

Grip Angle & Magazine Angle

If you stick your arm out and point at something, apparently your wrist will be at about a 110° angle to your arm. Thus, the P7 has a 110° grip angle. I’ve shot other pistols that point as naturally for me as the P7 but I’ve never shot one that beats it. When I present my P7 it’s already pointing at the bullseye.

At the same time, the P7’s magazine doesn’t follow that grip angle. It inserts more vertically (more perpendicular to the bore axis). Easily overlooked, this is actually a non-trivial, quite functional design feature.

Effectively, any other pistol with such a short amount of barrel and slide out in front of the trigger would have about a 3.6-inch barrel. The HK P7 has a 4.1-inch barrel. In other words, it fits more barrel into a shorter space in part due to that steeper magazine insertion angle, which queues up the rounds farther toward the rear of the gun than it would with a magazine that followed the grip angle, as is the norm.

This design also beautifully stages the on-deck round right in front of the chamber. Though it has one, I don’t think the P7’s feed ramp ever gets touched. This thing eats fat hollow points like nobody’s business.

Low Bore Axis

Nothing beats it. Not today and certainly not back then. When I shoot my P7 I have two little grease marks on the web of my hand, but I never have slide bite. The fixed barrel is low to the frame and the slide is extremely compact in height by modern or historical standard. This is as low as a bore axis gets.

In practical terms that translates to an extremely flat-shooting pistol. Bore height over the shooter’s hand is additional leverage that the recoil impulse has over the shooter’s wrists and arms. A lower bore height means less muzzle flip. The bore of the H&K P7 is in line with the striker. It’s, what, a centimeter above the top of my hand? Less?

Combine that insanely low bore axis with the gas delayed blowback system, the natural grip angle, and the good single action trigger with the nice, wide trigger shoe and the P7 is an incredibly fast and flat and accurate shooter. I own one other 9mm pistol that I can, perhaps, shoot faster than my P7 while maintaining similar accuracy, but it’s far larger and heavier.

Heel Magazine Release

This design never caught on here in the U.S. of A., but it was popular in Europe. I understand the appeal.

That serrated button on the heel of the grip is the magazine release. It’s well shrouded by the frame to prevent accidental activation, but it’s easily hit with the shooter’s off-hand thumb — whichever hand that happens to be — while stripping the magazine out of the gun. Though magazines will drop free out of the P7, the heel release facilitates tactical reloads where the shooter retains the empty or partially-depleted magazine.

H&K advertised that the P7 has no “sitting duck effect,” meaning there’s no magazine safety. The P7 will fire a chambered round whether or not a magazine is inserted.

Modern Touches

The HK P7 was ahead of its time in a few other ways, too.

It sports an oversized (especially for its time), undercut (once you depress that cocking lever) trigger guard with a skinny bottom wall and a front face designed for a support hand finger. Though that style of shooting has gone out of fashion in the last couple of decades, the P7’s entire trigger guard design facilitates a super high grip, which was ahead of its time.

Field stripping the P7 is insanely simple, especially when compared to virtually every pistol that came before it, many of which required removing locking components with tools. That small, “carry melted” round button at the top, to the right of the left-side grip panel is the takedown button. Simply depress it, pull the slide rearward about a half-inch, lift the rear of the slide upward off the frame, then slide it forward off the gun. Reassembly is the reverse, except you don’t even have to push the button.

No trigger pull is necessary. No tools, no removing parts. Simple takedown and assembly is a modern luxury that we don’t even get in all of our modern guns, and here it is in a pistol made in the 1970s.

Sure, the P7 has a few downsides, but this article is about why it’s the best pistol ever made so we’ll leave the downsides for another time. The big one, though? It was expensive and hard to make.

Even after Midwest Gun Works refinished my 1984-manufactured German police trade-in P7 with this gorgeous color case hardening job on the slide, I still carry it fairly regularly. While I have quite a few 9mm pistols to choose from, including smaller, lighter, higher capacity jobs, there’s no carry gun in my safe that I’m more confident with. Not only does the P7 run like a top — it has never choked on me — but it makes me look like a better shooter than I am. There’s no other pistol that I can draw and make hits on target as quickly and as accurately as I can with my P7. It puts up tighter groups at a faster pace than any other concealable pistol I own.

Again, this isn’t a competition gun. It isn’t a target shooting gun. It isn’t a fun-on-the-range gun. This is a self-defense carry pistol through-and-through. It’s a gunfighter’s gun made by a design team that wasn’t held back by the bean counters, sales directors, and marketing folks. It’s an elegant weapon for a more civilized age. It’s James Bond in pistol form.

That’s why the Heckler & Koch P7 is the best pistol ever made.