Th Honor Guard from Honor Defense.
The folks at Honor Defense are serious about their patriotism. When several shooting industry veterans decided to make a new line of handguns for concealed carry, they decided early on to embrace the uniquely American concept of carry for personal defense and optimize their pistols accordingly.
The Honor Guard pistols are not just made in the USA, they’re assembled by veterans. They come in a box that’s literally red, white, and blue. The company logo features those loud and proud red and white stripes, and the American flag is prominently displayed on the box. In fact, the only thing not made in the good old US of A is the gun lock. The folks at Honor Guard told me they tried, to no avail, to source a gun lock domestically, but they’re all made overseas. Feeling terrible about that, the company includes an apology in the product documentation card. Yes, really.
There are many carry pistols on the market, so when I review a new one, I like to identify what’s different, or stated differently, what uniquely makes it stand out from all the others. In my opinion, the Honor Guard is all about balance. As a gun intended for personal protection, it’s designed to be compact enough for easy concealed carry, yet meaty enough to shoot a lot without inflicting undue pain and suffering.
Here’s a closer look.
The Honor Guard comes with two backstraps to adjust grip size to your personal preference.
Weight and Construction
Lots of guns are small, but almost all of them are too light. Sure, they’re easy to carry and they’ll work when you need them to. However, a small light gun is not very pleasant to shoot. The recoil of defensive 9mm ammunition is a constant, and the only thing that will make it feel better is more weight in the gun. Simply put, the heavier a gun is, the more pleasant it is to shoot. But “pleasant feeling” isn’t what’s important. What matters with a defensive gun is your ability to shoot it well under pressure. What improves your ability to do that? Practice. Accordingly, I almost always only carry guns that I like to shoot, because I’ll practice more. The more I practice with any given gun, the better I’ll perform with it.
The Honor Guard comes with both seven and eight round magazines, offering total carry capacity of eight and nine if you keep one in the chamber.
At 23.3 ounces empty with the extended magazine, the Honor Guard not only feels good in the hand, it feels good on the range. With its 3.2-inch barrel, 6.25-inch length, and 4.6-inch height, it’s about the same size as a Glock 43. However, the Glock weighs 18 ounces empty, and that extra five ounces of heft on the Honor Guard makes a noticeable difference. When testing, I shot a variety of 9mm ammo ranging in bullet weight from 115 to 147 grains. This included plenty of practice ammo and a fair bit of high-powered self-defense ammo. With no load was the Honor Guard snappy or unpleasant to fire.
Read the rest at Range365.
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