(Via Guns.com)
The Kel-Tec PF9 has been my everyday carry gun for some time now. It’s solid yet unpretentious, and it has the cardinal attribute of all good carry guns–it goes “BANG!” every time I shoot it. It’s inexpensive, enough so that you can afford two or three for the price of some its pricier (although quite nice) competition.
It’s drawback, like every other small 9mm pistol, is that it is unpleasant to shoot if you shoot more than 50-75 rounds at a time. All of these guns are really meant to be “carried a lot and shot a little”.
Apparently some Kel-Tec engineers decided to remedy that by producing a .22 conversion kit for the PF9. My sole issue, being the cheap-ass I can be at times, is that the kit is $200, and an extra mag takes it to $235. Given that this is roughly what I can buy a PF9 for, I’m really having a hard time justifying the purchase–especially since I’ve bought a lot of gunnie stuff in the past couple of months.
So help a brother out–give me some good rationalizations I can use on myself. 🙂
I am not an active shooter but an avid carrier so my P3AT suits me just fine. I'm comfortable with the fact that I will never be highly accurate with my carry gun because I know the odds tell me that I'll never need it at medium or long range. Not to mention, let's face the facts, the Kel-Tec pistols do not have good sights so trying to chase high levels of accuracy is sort of silly anyhow.
But if you're someone who wants to practice regularly with your subcompact and actually expect to see decent results on targets, this may not be the gun for you.
I simply wanted a cheap, reliable and extremely concealable weapon that would put bad guys down at very short range. I work on rental homes in low income areas and am faced with criminals on a regular basis. I am RARELY confronted with someone who wants to start something at over 15'. Frankly, they usually try to get more guys in the area first of all, but when they notice that you won't take your hand out of one pocket while they're around they usually lose interest. But there's no way to deter those who are already high and that's the day I really fear, when some dumb bastard is too high to notice that I'm posturing like an armed man. Because then I'm going to have to pull.
My experience with conversions is that you should expect a lot of misfires due to rimfire requiring a harder hammer strike than centerfire primers, and possibly a preference for a particular type of ammunition. They're usually not worth the hassel of constantly changing your pistol over.
I practice with a full size 9mm,then at the end of the shooting session, I fire three magazines through my PF9 for muscle memory.
oh, I did forget one thing. I do practice my draw fairly often. I had a tendency to hit the magazine release during draw and then only get one shot off before figuring out what happened. I've trained around that, but I do practice it often.