From the Vault: The UZI Pistol

Brownells Gun Tech™ Keith Ford shows us his rare Uzi Pistol. No, not the Uzi submachine gun or the Uzi Micro machine pistol, but the semi-auto Uzi PISTOL. Set your wayback machine to the early 1980s, when Action Arms was importing into the U.S. the Uzi Carbine, a semi-auto, 16" barreled version of the renowned IMI Uzi submachine gun. AA wanted to get into the handgun market and asked IMI to build a pistol variant, which entailed far more engineering than just shrinking the subgun. Keith field-strips his pistol to show us what's under the hood and how it works. His gun is chambered in .45 ACP, but caliber conversion kits were available, and Keith shows us how easy it is to switch his Uzi pistol to 9mm Luger.

In 1986, IMI decided to adapt the Uzi pistol for full-auto operation, and after adding a stock and some other accoutrements, the result is the select-fire Uzi Micro. Remember: Micro = select fire, Pistol = semi-auto. About 4,000 Uzi pistols were produced from 1984 to 1993. Much larger than most standard pistols and decidedly ungainly, the Uzi pistol wasn't a huge success. It's still one heckuva cool looking gun! Chuck Norris boosted his already substantial Badass Factor by carrying a pair of them in the 1985 movie "Invasion USA" (hint: do an image search for the movie's poster).

Want to learn a lot more about the Uzi and other classic guns? Check out our friend Richard Hoffman's BWE Firearms channel.