The first Kahr pistols hit the market almost ten years ago and quickly became a top choice for savvy handgunners. The guns are rugged, reliable and shootable. Their operational system, a modern DAO, is simplicity itself. Small wonder, then, why so many armed professionals use the little Kahrs as backup guns or primary concealed carry handguns. Still, we continue to think of the Kahrs as little guns, best suited for conditions where size and weight saving are prime considerations. It just seems like there's always a qualifying adjective in the sentence when we describe them: "trim, small, feathery-light, compact, etc." By design, this has always been the Kahr market niche. But the times, they are a-changing. Kahr now offers yet another model that fills another niche in the market. The gun is the Kahr T9 and it is the biggest Kahr to date.

GUN DETAILS
The new Kahr T9 is an automatic pistol that retains most of the features of earlier all-steel Kahr models. The major differences are a longer slide and barrel upper, as well as a longer butt. It appears to be of the same thickness as earlier guns. But when you increase the gun's overall length by approximately an inch and lengthen the butt to take an eight-shot single-column magazine, you create a full-size service pistol that's a bit on the skinny side. As we shall presently see, this makes it unique.
T9 stands for Tactical 9. When the gun comes with optional MMC adjustable rear sight, the Kahr folds refer to it as a Target 9. In either case, the pistol is made of stainless steel, except for the wood grip panels. With an empty magazine in place, the T9 weighs 28.1 ounces, which is slightly heavier than a first-generation Colt Commander. The barrel is 4 inches in length and the pistol will drop into a 6.5 inches (length) by 5.5 inches (height) by 1.2 inches (thick) box. I measured the thickness at the widest point in the gun, across the grips. Across the slide, the measurement is a slim 0.9 of an inch. T9s retain the locking system of all other Kahr pistols, which is a variation of the Browning tilt-barrel lockup. On a Kahr, there's a kidney-shaped cam hole in an underbarrel lug, though, which the lateral shaft of the slide lock fits. It moves the rear end of the barrel up as the slide goes forward into battery and pulls it down as the slide and barrel move back after recoil. I guess that someday, someone will figure out a better way to get this locking/unlocking done, but this design has been in use for all of the 20th century and a couple of years of the 21st. It's still going strong.

When designer Justin Moon set out to build a system for compact and concealable pistols, he knew he had to make them flat. He also wanted them to be simple to operate and safe to carry. He choose a striker-fired gun with a DAO (double-action-only) trigger system on which a manual exterior safety is completely superfluous. On a pistol of this sort, handling safety is inherent in the long-arc, dynamic DAO trigger pull. a DAO system usually requires some form of drawbar or pushbar to route the pressure applied by the shooter to the trigger, back to a spring-loaded striker in the slide. The bar itself takes up space in the gun and many competing pistols place that bar outside the receiver and cover it with a plate or the grips. Result? It's usually a thick, hard-to-conceal pistol. As we have already noted, the Kahr design is slim. That's because the drawbar is inside the gun, running along the right inner wall of the frame. THere's plenty of room for it in that location because the feed ramp for the barrel has been offset to the left.
The T9 is simply a continuation of these design principles. Original K9 pistols are virtually the same gun as this latest model. The sole difference is size, in length and height. There are now four basic sizes of Kahr 9mm pistols. The original K9s were the introductory models. Then came the MK9, which is a radically abbreviated pistol with a short butt and slide. By combining the longer barrel and slide of the K9 with the short butt of the MK9, the company came up with a concealable pistol that gave up no ballistic performance. This is the Covert model. Finally, we have the new and larger Tactical 9, which is the subject of this story.
Kahr also makes several kinds of similar pistols in .40 S&W. The intensity of this powerful cartridge requires more slide mass, so Kahr Forties have heavier, thicker slides. Also, their magazines have to be a bit different to accept the slightly larger cartridges. Another caliber is not the only innovation in the Kahr line. The company briefly considered lightweight models made with various alloys and passed them by for molded polymer. Most of the already mentioned variations of 9mm and .40 S&W pistols have polymer counterparts. The best of them seems to be the new PM9, a polymer version of the MK9 and the smallest, lightest Kahr of them all.
But the matter at hand is this new so-called "big" Kahr. Let's take a closer look at the gun from the ground up. The pistols' receiver is milled from premium stainless steel. Since it houses an eight-round, single-column magazine, the receiver is long enough for all three grasping fingers. The butt shape incorporates a high relief under the trigger guard. This gets the hand closer to the axis of the bore and improves recoil control. The most appealing aspect of the receiver on my sample gun is the wooden grips. Made by the Hogue Brothers, the grips are Pau Ferro, a strong tropical hardwood. There's no backstrap on the steel portion of the receiver, so the grips are shaped to wrap around the back. where they come together in a tight seam. A pair of stainless screws holds each grip to the frame. Another shooter amenity is the panel of well-executed checkering on each grip. There's nothing quite as classy as wooden grips, and these are really nice ones.
The only controls on the receiver (other than the trigger) are the magazine catch in the conventional location aft of the triggerguard and the slide lock just above the triggerguard. This becomes a tactical control only on those infrequent but frightening occasions when you have to clear a Class III malfunction, a feedway jam. No safeties or decockers here. This is one slick-side auto.
The slide is likewise smooth. THere are slide cocking serrations at the rear of the slide. Other than company and model names on the left side, the slide is plain. It has a squared blocky contour like all Kahrs, but I notice that this one has a rather pronounced bevel at the front edge of the slide. On the right side there's a typical ejection port and an external extractor. It's the top of the slide that gets my attention. Just as the Kahr people put the best in the way of grips on the bottom end of the gun with Hogue's, they put the best in the way of sights on the top end with Novak's. They are genuine Novak sights, too, not cheap imitations. My sample pistol has Trijicon tritium inserts for a better sight picture in reduced light.

HOW IT SHOOTS
My overall impression of the T9 is very positive. It is a very well-made gun that comes from an excellent design with a number of fine features. I took the gun to the range for an evaluation shoot. This is a 9mm pistol and no 9mm ever strikes me as having particularly difficult recoil. Since this is an all-steel gun, it isn't particularly light. At 28.1 ounces empty, plus the weight of a full load of nine rounds of ammo, the T9 falls in the medium range of weight for a 9mm. As I expected, recoil was minimal even with some heavy bullet +P loads. The less recoil, the greater ease of control, and greater probability of second and subsequent shot hits. Since the 9mm is not the world's most effective fight-stopper, the capability of making closely space multiple hits is important. Ergo, the less recoil, the better. Perceived recoil can also be a function of how the gun performs in the shooter's grasp and this one behaves very well, largely due to the grip shape and position of the bore in relation to the hand. I had excellent results in both accuracy shooting (see table below), informal tin can rolling and dirt clod busting.
You get a nicely written manual in the box with your T9. There's a portion of that manual that says something that all Kahr owners need to understand. Basically, it says the gun needs about 200 rounds of ammo put through it before it goes into active service as a defensive firearm. This is true of all Kahr pistols. In shooting the T9, I had zero malfunctions. In past shoots, I had a few with other new Kahrs. As it is with many custom handguns, Kahrs are tightly fitted pistols that may bind enough to interrupt the operating cycle. This usually goes away when contact surface becomes burnished a bit and smoothes out. It's also important to keep a Kahr properly lubricated at all times. I can't believe this condition gives us any cause to criticize the Kahr system in general or the T9 in particular. The company is simply being honest and professional in writing the admonition into their manual.
I do have a couple of nitpicking points to make about the T9. It is a gun that's meant to be handled and fired under stress, but also meant to be carried habitually. For that reason, I would like to see what amounts to a Novak "Carry Bevel" performed on the gun. This is a gentle radiusing of edges and corners. On the T9, it is particularly necessary in places like the front edge of the slide lock, which is wide enough and square enough to catch on the edge of a holster and impede re-holstering. I also think it would be a good idea to bevel the mouth of the magazine well. This speeds up a magazine change.
The Kahr T9 is a fine new gun. I have no great insight into the machinations going on in that little plant in Worcester, Massachusetts, but certain things are clear. With four different sizes of pistols now in place, there are many paths the line might take in the future. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see a similar gun in .40 S&W. You might have to give up a round in the magazine, but it would be a desirable firearm. Also, I think we might see a lightweight version of the T9, most probably with a molded polymer receiver. The sky is the limit on the way Kahr could take existing components and re-arrange them to create different models. It sure seems to me that there's more to come from Kahr.
For now, the T9 is just fine and fills a niche of sorts in the market. How about the shooter who has small hands and/or stature? Bigger guns are a handling challenge for these people, all of whom deserve a pistol that is sized to fit them. This slim new T9 is nearly ideal for a small hands handgunner. Its only drawback is a reduced magazine capacity that doesn't stack up well against the GLOCKs, Smiths, HKs, SIGs, etc. Since the T9 comes with rather thick wooden grip panels, it appears to be a fairly simple matter to produce much thinner ones and please those shooters with really small hands. There's nothing that can be done about the small number of rounds in the magazine, except practice, practice, practice.

FINAL NOTES
As it presently exists, the Kahr T9 is a decent pistol for concealed carry or open holster carry for those who handle a slightly smaller gun efficiently. It's in a unique size bracket, small enough to carry under any circumstances and big enough to get the most from service ammunition. I have no doubt but that you'll be seeing some of them in police holsters soon. Like all of their other products, this Kahr is an excellent handgun that deserves your attention.