The Taurus Spectrum: Surprisingly Average

“Holy crap, it doesn’t suck!” That was my impression after putting 200 rounds through my little Taurus Spectrum. Okay, more accurately, it was “Oh, it didn’t suck as much as I thought it would.” Two hundred rounds isn’t a lot, but that’s all I brought cause I assumed the gun would choke and I wouldn’t even get that far with the .380 pocket gun. Yet it chugged along, running and gunning. 

I remember that a lot of the early reviews of the Spectrum weren’t good, so I was surprised. Then I remembered how I got this gun. My local gun store owner had it in the back forever, set aside in the dust bin because Taurus had somehow shipped it without a guide rod or recoil spring. So can a gun really not suck if it came from the factory without all the necessary parts? 

Taurus replaced it for the dealer and never asked for the old Spectrum back. He forgot about it until he ran across it and wanted it gone. I offered a case of Pepsi. He agreed. Galloway Precision had captured recoil assemblies for sale, so I snatched one up. Maybe the Galloway Precision captured recoil spring was the reason the gun works so well.. 

Galloway Precision lists their spring as 10% stronger than the one that came from the factory. The original Spectrum didn’t have a captured guide rod either, and from what I’ve read, it was a pain to reassemble. So the Taurus Spectrum doesn’t suck when using an aftermarket captured recoil assembly. 

Spectrum – What’s In a Name? 

Taurus saw Ruger’s ill-fated Hard R line and decided they could one-up them. That’s my headcanon anyway. In reality, they called it the Spectrum because it came in a Spectrum of colors. I probably have the lamest version with the black frame and FDE overmolded inserts. 

Taurus offered some neat color combos. The black-and-white model has a Stormtrooper vibe. Teal, white, and stainless looked like those ubiquitous Jazz cups from the 1990s. In between, they had red, blue, teal, and some weird green shade that only women shopping for paint recognize. 

Taurus produced the Spectrum to replace the TCP .380, in what I assume was an attempt to break into the ladies’ market. The pocket .380 replaced the snub nose as the gun the industry decided to advertise to women some time around 2014. Taurus made it colorful, another way the industry apparently thought women will pick guns. 

In reality, this probably appealed more to idiots like me. I really want that Jazz cup design. Like way too much. 

Smooth Operator 

Beyond the colors, this is a good-looking gun. Everything’s curved and smooth with no sharp edges. The TCP was seemingly all sharp edges, but the Spectrum’s design allows for a snag-free draw. Remember the P365 SAS? Well, Taurus did it first with the Spectrum. 

They trimmed everything except the sights. The takedown lever was replaced with a small flathead socket to disassemble the pistol. The slide lock technically exists, but it’s incredibly small and difficult to press downward. The design seems to exist purely to lock the slide open manually. 

The magazine release is small, but usable. The Spectrum has this weird quirk where the magazine takes a serious amount of force to lock into place. It slides in, you get the clicky noise you expect, but the magazine isn’t always seated. 

You have to slap the crap out of this thing to get it to lock into place, even when it’s empty. When you load the magazine and try to insert it against a closed slide, you’re gonna have to treat it like a red-headed middle child and slap it even harder. Your best bet is to only load the gun with a slide open. 

I love the looks of this gun. The smooth contours and lines look great. Almost like a baby Vektor CP-1. The magazine baseplate has a pinky extension and is also rounded, giving the gun a unique overall look. 

At the Range 

Internally, the Spectrum uses a tilt-barrel short-recoil operation. No simple blowback here. The magazine holds seven rounds with the rounded pinky extension and there’s also a flush-fitting six-round magazine available. 

I only have the one magazine and prefer the pinky extension to get a little more control over the gun. Like any pocket .380, the Spectrum is a little snappy, but it’s nowhere near as bad as I expected. It snapped and popped, but wasn’t painful to the wrist and hand like an LCP or P3AT. I could shoot it all day and not feel fatigued. 

The double-action trigger pull is long and spongy. It’s not great, but it’s fine. The reset is predictably long and it’s a true double-action design that uses a striker. If it fails to fire, you can pull the trigger again and again and again. That’s great for dry-fire practice, but if you want smooth and light, this ain’t it. This is more in the staple gun category. 

About fifty rounds in, I became accustomed to the snappiness and long trigger pull. Enough so that I could shoot quick double-taps and failure-to-stop drills. The trick I found was to just run my trigger finger all the way out to the trigger guard to make sure the trigger fully reset. 

Pedal To The Floor

The Spectrum doesn’t bounce around in your hand. Those overmolded rubber portions grip your hand nicely and likely provide a little cushion against the recoil generated by a 10-ounce .380 going bang. The scalloped slide with rubber insert also makes racking the gun super-easy. 

The sights are…there. They’re larger than those on something like the KelTec P32, but still quite small and all-black and they can’t be swapped or adjusted. It’s fine, but a paint pen on the front sight would probably do wonders for visibility. 

At 15 yards, I could put every round inside an A-zone. At 25 yards I could hit C-zone steel if I took my time. The long trigger doesn’t do you any favors. It can feel tough at times to press the long trigger without messing with your sight picture. 

At pocket gun ranges, which I define as within 10 yards, the Spectrum is perfectly adequate. Surprisingly so, actually. I didn’t expect much, so I was impressed. In fact, I was impressed by my entire experience with the little pistol. 

A Good Gun? 

I would hesitate to call a gun that arrived missing necessary parts good. It just wasn’t as bad as I expected. If I was broke and only had a case of Pepsi to trade for one, then yeah I’d carry the Spectrum. At least this Spectrum. A look across the internet reveals that a lot of people had a lot of problems with these guns. 

The Spectrum was dropped from Taurus’ catalog in 2021. It never really got much traction. Taurus unveiled the gun in 2017 and started shipping in 2018. Then the SIG P365 came around and the entire market changed. Pocket .380s and single-stack nines were decimated by SIG’s stack-and-a-half design. 

The Spectrum didn’t have much of a chance. However, I enjoy shooting it more than any of the other original pocket .380s like the LCP, Bodyguard 1.0, and P3AT. If it had come out maybe three years earlier and the QC was better, it might have been a serious contender. These days it’s mostly retired to meme status thanks to its name.