This gun literally only exists because the Nazis invaded France. Seriously.

In WW2 the Nazis needed pistols. The Germans made many fine pistols, and they used them but let’s face it; if you have the choice of putting a rifle in a soldier’s hands or a tank in the field that’s far more militarily important than making a pistol. So every time they invaded someone they took over their pistol production and handed them out like candy. This allowed them to focus their own production on weapons that would have a greater effect on the war effort. But it was still hard to keep up.

Buying them from neutral countries had it’s issues too, like getting the guns past those pesky Allied navies. But when they took over France they had a land connection to Spain, and Spain made a lot of pistols, like the Astra 400.

The Astra was a large, straight-blowback service pistol chambered in 9mm Largo (9x23mm.) They were robust, reliable and well-made. Spain had no issue selling them to the Nazis, who after all had provided them with significant aid during the fascist revolution. The Germans bought them, but they did have one little problem with them…

They were in the wrong 9mm. The Germans used 9x19mm (9mm Parabellum.) So they sent some engineers to Astra to see if they could make a version in that cartridge. This would simplify logistics and be all-around a good thing. As it happens the folks at Astra could make a 9mm version, and went one better. While you might expect them to slap a 9x19mm barrel and an adapted magazine in a 400 they designed a whole new gun scaled down slightly for the shorter cartridge- the Astra 600. The Germans liked them so much they bought them… twice. I’ll get back to that.

In 1943 the Nazis ordered and paid for 50,000 guns, and deliveries started in 1944. But then they ran into a little snag; the Allies invaded France and cut the land-route to Spain. Only 10,500 pistols had been delivered, but there was no safe way to get the rest of the guns to the customer. Well, the guns were paid for, so they might as well finish building the order. They just couldn’t deliver them. What to do, what to do…

Well, sell them on the civilian market, of course, and get paid twice! It’s not like the Nazis were going to complain; they had bigger problems and a war to lose, which in time they did. They sold small lots to few countries and more were bought in 1951 to equip German police. Yep, it’s a gun so good the Germans paid for them twice. In the 1960s Interarms bought the remaining stocks and imported them into the US.

Damn you Pinto’s!

My favorite Local gun shop, Pinto’s Guns, gets a lot of estate guns, and early this year I heard they were getting in a bunch of old semi-auto pistols on consignment. I dutifully stayed away for a couple of months, assuming they would all be sold before I darkened their doorstep once again. Nope.

I hemmed and hawed, selected a few guns from my collection I could part with and sold them. I left Pinto’s after my next visit with this Astra 600 and another gun, which I’ll be writing about in another post.

Pinto’s, by the way, sells a T-shirt with their name on the front and the slogan ‘Damn you Pinto’s!’ on the back. They’ve heard that phrase a lot.

My Astra

My gun is a bit of an oddity; it does not bear the Waffenampt stamp of Nazi service, markings from any other country or any German police markings. It doesn’t even have Interarms import marks. It most likely was a civilian sale, and was imported to the US by an individual.

I got to handle this gun side-by-side with a pair of Astra 400’s, and the 600 is a more svelte, more elegant package. I found the grips of the 400s to be a bit large, and I have big hands. The 600 was much better feeling.

It’s not at all a lightweight gun, but then you really wouldn’t want a straight-blow-back 9mm to be light, would you? The gun’s unloaded weight is 38oz. It has a single-action trigger and a manual safety located on the left side of the gun that can also be used to lock the slide to the rear for disassembly. This does not act as a slide-stop or slide release; while the gun locks back on an empty magazine it does so with an internal stop, and the slide is released by pulling it slightly to the rear and letting go.

The release for the 8-round single-stack magazine is a bit unusual but works well. There is a button on the bottom-left of the grip, and pushing it straight in causes it to eject the magazine with reasonable enthusiasm. There is a protrusion from the opposite side if the magazine’s floor-plate that can be used to pull it out if it gets sticky.

The gun has a shrouded hammer concealed in the frame, and there is no way to manually cock the gun other than by racking the slide. Field-stripping the gun is simple, and along traditional browning lines where you rotate the barrel to disengage it from the frame and slide it off the front of the gun. There are a number of video tutorials on this process on Youtube, so I won’t go into detail about it here.

Ergonomically the grip angle isn’t ideal, and despite having large hands it’s a bit of a stretch to reach the safety with my thumb. Not obnoxiously so, but for some it could be a real problem. The thumb release for the magazine is better than a heel release, but not as good as having it behind the trigger. The trigger is neither particularly good nor tragically bad; certainly it’s acceptable for a service pistol, but you’re not going to want to try shooting a bullseye match with it.

Shooting the Astra

I had some 124gr and 115gr Xtreme Bullets copper-plated hollow-points and went to Champion Arms indoor range for a test-drive. The sights are not bad for a WW2-vintage service pistol, and even on first acquaintance it was easy to achieve combat-level accuracy. The trigger neither significantly impedes or contributes to accuracy. The slide is heavy enough that it slams forward with enough force to cause the muzzle to drop. Double-taps are not this gun’s strong suit; the second shot almost always hits significantly lower. It does rapid-fire well, and took very little getting used to the gun to see a marked improvement in my performance.

Recoil is odd; soft but snappy is the best way to describe it. It’s not worse than a locked-breech pistol, just different and not at all unpleasant.

I’ll let the pics tell the story. OK, the pics and their captions.

All told I put about a hundred rounds through the gun and had no malfunctions. I would have happily shot it more, but ammo is scarce and I had other guns to test.

Tinker’s New EDC?

Ummm, no. It’s a nice gun and I like it quite a bit, but I have better, more modern options. That being said if I were forced to defend myself with it I would do so with confidence. As WW2 service pistols go I’d have to give it high marks. It’s not overly heavy or bulky, it’s very well made, simple, robust and a good shooter. I’m glad I got it, and I expect to be shooting it quite a bit. Decent quality magazines can be had for $40-$50, so I’ll be picking one or two of those up.

Michael Tinker Pearce, 8 April 2021

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First and foremost I do not consider myself a gunfighter of any sort. I have been around the block a time or two, shot some combat-style matches, was a LEO for a bit and put more than a few rounds downrange. Enough to know good advice when I see it from folks that have ‘been there and done that.’

Now, Wyatt Earp was and is a controversial fellow. He was at various times a Lawman, a Gambler, a pimp and who knows what all else; it seems he was sometimes the good guy and sometimes the bad guy. But even his harshest critics will generally concede he’d been in more than a few gunfights, and knew a great many gunfighters. His peers considered him among the most accurate and deadly of gunfighters, despite the fact that he was by no means a ‘fast-draw.’ Late in his life he shared his thoughts on the subject in an interview, which makes for very interesting reading.

“The most important lesson I learned from those proficient gunfighters was the winner of a gunplay usually was the man who took his time.”

History has shown this to be true; there are innumerable accounts of police and others standing in the face of overwhelming firepower and carrying the day with determination and accurate fire.

When I was shooting a combat-style match back in the mid-1980s I got top score on a stage despite being a middle-to-low ranked shooter. I did not experience an uncharacteristic burst of speed, I wasn’t having an exceptionally good day and it wasn’t luck, either. Some sadistic stage designer had put the stop plate at fifty yards. This is an 8″ round steel plate, and until you knock it over the clock keeps running.

I watched better, faster shooters than me completely blow this. Since time is factored into your score the faster you finish the more points you get, and these folks were in a hurry to hit the plate and stop the time. They missed, got flustered and then hurried even more and kept missing. Many of them had to reload, and one fellow reloaded twice. I took a lesson from this. I shot at my usual pace with my usual accuracy, and when I got to that fifty-yard stop plate I took the time to aim carefully and knocked it over with the first shot. This added maybe a second to my time, but firing one careful shot was enough to win the stage.

Earp was also known to tell people they needed to “learn to take your time in a hurry.” Great advice, but how the hell do you do it? The answer is simple: practice. Of course not just practice, but how you practice is important.

We’ll go back a bit further in time to Fior De Battaglia, written by Fiore in 1403. This work describes training for both armed and unarmed combat as well as a great deal of useful advice. Among that advice was the instruction to ‘Practice slow; in the fight anger will give you speed.’ It’s important to note this is translated from medieval Italian; ‘anger’ in this context refers to the excitement and jolt of adrenaline that hits you when the fight starts.

Further reading makes it plain that he means you to perform the techniques only as fast as you can do them correctly, and this is excellent advice.

Drawing From the Holster

It’s pretty simple, right? Unload your gun, maybe chamber a snap-cap, put it in the holster you carry it in and repeatedly draw it as fast as you can. What could go wrong? Well, you could push too fast, fumble the draw and fling the gun through your TV screen. You might laugh but I know a fellow it happened to, and wasn’t his wife just thrilled? Worse, you’ll actually teach yourself bad habits that will compromise your ability to defend yourself.

So, the basics. The way to train to draw fast is to not draw fast. Learn to draw right and it will be fast when you need it. Start by placing your hand on the grip. Focus on getting a correct grip that you will not need to shift when the gun comes out. If your holster has a thumb-snap build releasing that into this phase of the draw. Practice this a lot; everything else flows from this. If this is hard to do experiment with holster placement and even different holsters until you find one that works. Once you can grip the pistol naturally and correctly without thinking about it you are ready to move on.

Now draw the gun slowly and smoothly. Try to minimize the motion needed; think about what’s happening, where your elbow goes etc. and try to eliminate any unneeded motion. As the gun clears the holster make sure your trigger-finger is on the frame above the trigger, not on it. Bring the gun to eye level, again focusing on removing unnecessary motions. As the gun comes up pick up the front sight as it comes into view and center it in the rear sight as the gun moves into the firing position. Don’t do this any faster than you can do it right.

It helps to have some sort of target to aim at; I cut a small IPSC silhouette out of cardboard and used that. When all of this is working and feeling good then you may elect to dry fire after a pause, and of course the goal is to keep the sights steady and on target through the trigger-pull. The pause is important; in a stressful situation you will do as you trained. You may need to draw the gun and find you don’t need to shoot instantly, and the conscious pause may keep you from shooting automatically when you don’t need to, or worse yet shouldn’t.

OK, got it? Good. Now repeat several thousand times. No, I’m not kidding; you need to drill this until the motions are automatic. In a self-defense situation you’ve got more important things to be paying attention to than your draw. You will need to continually reassess the situation, check your backstop, keep an eye on other people, innocents and bad guys alike, and you may also need to move, take cover etc. Making the draw automatic frees you up to give all these things the attention they need.

You can do this at the range too, if they let you work from the holster. Mix it up; draw and fire one shot, then three, then two, then five etc. The idea is to not train yourself to fire one shot and stop, or for that matter any set number of shots. Again, don’t try to shoot fast, shoot right. Put the bullets where they need to go.

Another simple thing you can try is firing at the blank back of targets. After all unless you are shooting at an inept super-villain they wont have a convenient bullseye on their chest.

How effective is this sort of training? Look, people are different and we all have our own ‘speed limit,’ but properly done when the excrement hits the fan you’ll draw as fast as your body allows. After practicing this extensively in my youth I could draw faster than a man could click the button on a stopwatch. You might not be that fast… or you might be faster. More important than absolute speed is getting accurate hits on the target.

Next?

Once you have the basic draw on autopilot then practice it sitting, crouching, lying down and any other way you can think of. Your not likely to find yourself in a western-movie style shootout, after all. If people start shooting your first priority might be to get behind cover. Practice one-handed draws and firing too, and shooting with your weak hand.

What Else?

Even when not drawing from a holster practice raising the gun so that the front sight is the first part you see, and focus on that as you bring the gun to bear just as you do practicing the draw. Do it the same each time, and do it no faster than you can do it correctly. Train to have a proper sight picture for each shot, and don’t fire faster than you can do this and exercise proper trigger control. Yes, rapid-fire is fun, and I usually use it when evaluating a gun. No reason you can’t also, but don’t focus on it; it’s extremely easy to train yourself in bad habits this way.

What you are trying to do here is train ‘muscle memory,’ for several reasons. One reason is because you will fight as you train; if you train to do it right the odds are that in extremis you will also do it right.

Another reason is that so you won’t be thinking about it when you need it; you’ll have attention free for other matters as mentioned at the beginning of this article. I trained this way, and when I needed to draw a gun in the course of duty I usually became aware that I had done so when the sights intruded on my line of sight; my brain was occupied with analyzing the situation. In at least one case this saved a very stupid person’s life.

Last but not least this trains you to point the gun very close to your point-of-aim. In an actual shootout, which might happen too close and too fast for a sight picture, you’ll pretty much be on-target.

You should also train to do reloads and to clear jams. These suck if you are using a revolver, since clearing them generally requires tools and perhaps a trip to a gunsmith. You can always chuck it at the baddie, I suppose. I mean, even Superman ducked when they threw a gun at him… (if you’re old enough to remember that congratulations on making it this far.)

Combat-style competition is also useful, but that may be too committed for many folks. It’s usefulness is primarily that matches are stressful, and learning to operate under that stress will help if things ever get so bad you have to use a gun.

If you plan to carry (and why else would you be practicing your draw from the holster?) invest in a good gun-belt. These are thicker and stiffer than normal belts, and they sometimes contain inserts to give the holster additional support. As I’ve said before having a good gun belt is a life-changing experience. They come in leather, synthetics of different kinds and a wide variety of styles so you can get one that matches your normal style of dress.

Holsters are another place where it really pays to not ‘go cheap.’ Do some research and experiment to find what works for you. You may want more than one option for higher or lower levels of discretion and different seasons. There’s one thing to pay careful attention to, especially with leather holsters. Whether it’s inside the waistband or out, make sure the mouth of the holster is stiff enough that no part of it is likely to fold in and actuate the trigger when holstering the gun.

There’s a lot you can do if you care to; training for armed self-defense can become a lifestyle. Classes, seminars, gadgets… it goes on and on. Bear this in mind, though; history is full of people who have, with no training at all, managed to successfully employ a firearm for self defense. Criminals by and large want easy pickings, and no person with a firearm fits that category. So you get can safety training, learn to shoot and practice the manual of arms for your weapon and odds are you’ll be fine. Or you can take the red pill and see how deep the rabbit-hole goes.

Michael Tinker Pearce, 4 April 2021

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Last trip to the range I determined that the front sight I made for the Colt Police Positive Special .32-20 was… well, it sucked. It’s too wide, and the colored insert shows up poorly in the shallow rear sight. This made it difficult to obtain a sight picture quickly, and when I did it wasn’t good.

OK, honestly a civilian self-defense handgun really doesn’t need to be a tack driver, but I want to be able to eek out some decent accuracy from the gun. A change was needed, but what change specifically? Obviously the point-of-impact needed to come up and the sight should be narrower. So should I shorten and thin out the blade of the existing sight? Replace it? Mount some kind of rear sight because I can’t really make the fixed sight channel any larger?

All of those options made some sort of sense so, being me, I did something else entirely.

I’m investigating big-dot sights and will be testing them on my 1911 soon. I got to thinking that maybe such a thing might work for the PPS too. I decided to find out, but rather than spend a bunch on money I’d try a home-spun solution.

I cut the sight down slightly, then carefully filed a groove in the top and silver-soldered a short piece of 1/8″ brass rod in, with the rear surface angled to be non-snag and to catch overhead light. This produced an interesting effect; if the sight is a vertical oval you’re aiming too high, and if it’s a horizontal oval you’re aiming too low. If it’s round you’re dead on, and if it’s round and sitting in the sight groove you’re going to hit what it’s pointed at.

This gives a different sight picture than I’m used to; I’ve always uses a conventional sight picture with the top of the front sight level with the to of the rear sight. This doesn’t work that way. Here’s an illustration:

Of course when I am aiming the front sight is sharp and the rear is a bit out of focus. To be sure, these are not the sights you want for Bullseye competition, but for self-defense it should provide adequate accuracy. A bit of testing at the range had the bullet hitting dead-on to the front sight. After that I did some draw-and-fires at five yards, where I started with the gun securely holstered, drew and fired a single shot, then rinse and repeat for a total of five shots. How did it work out?

I’m gonna go with pretty damn good. The sight is very easy to pick up and at five yards is basically the same size as the bullseye in the ten ring. The learning-curve is not much; put the dot on the target and fire. The angled surface picks up ambient light well, too; even in dusky conditions it’s reasonably visible.

Not only has this been a serious upgrade to this little Colt’s sights, but it’s really got me looking forward to the ones I’ll be trying out on the 1911. I will, of course, keep you posted when that happens.

Take care and stay safe out there!

Michael Tinker Pearce, 2 April 2021

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