So time to do some shooting.
Now as was pointed out to me by Karl,
this actually has the handling characteristics, if you close your eyes, of a Kel-Tec P-32. And he is not wrong.
The Kel-Tec is a little shorter in the grip, shorter in the barrel, but this kind of has that same very squarish and very thin profile to it.
Interesting. Beyond that it kind of feels like shooting a .22, because it kind of is a .22.
Got minimal recoil to it.
It is a little bit snappy. Just because it is such a narrow frame, that what recoil
it does have does come straight into a fairly concentrated area. But not unpleasant in any way.
And of course it does lock open when it's empty.
I'll tell you what, I was shooting that first string at least, at a little steel target at about 20 yards.
If this is a really good armour-piercing cartridge, we should see some evidence of that on the target. Let's go take a look.
Alright, so the big hits on here are .45s. These are .45s. These little guys, that's from the PSM.
And this is full metal jacket ammo, standard Russian service ammunition for the PSM.
And there is absolutely no dimpling at all on this target. And this is only a quarter inch thick pistol target.
It is a good pistol target, it's one of HMGs, but this PSM has absolutely no impact on it whatsoever.
So next let's go and take a look at what this does on Kevlar.
I have the front panel here from a soft body armour vest. This is a Level IIIA vest from American Body Armor.
So we're going to step back about 3 yards, put a couple rounds through it. Then we'll also try it with a Tokarev.
- OK - Die CIA pig.
Alright, so we got our entry holes 1, 2, 3, 4 and there's 5 down there. And we got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, nice divots in the wood.
1, 2, 3, 4,
and the fifth bullet we can actually see in this hole. So all 5 rounds went clean through that Level IIIA vest.
Now 3A is in fact the best level of soft only body armour, as is rated by the NIJ.
So what I want to do now is see if a Tokarev will also go through this.
I'm just going to go ahead and use this exact same piece of armour. And let's see if this is better or worse
than the legendary KGB assassins pistol.
Tokarev, Polish surplus ammo, pretty standard stuff, FMJ.
Alright, let's see what we got here.
... I went ahead and circled the PSM hits. So in addition to those, we have 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.
And of those four of them went through, we now have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
complete penetrations ... through the wood. Which meant 4 out of 5
of the Tokarev rounds went through, 4 out of 5 of the PSM rounds went through.
The only difference ... well there are two differences. One of the PSM rounds embedded in the wood,
one of the Tokarev rounds dented the wood, but stayed in the vest in here somewhere.
Not sure where it is.
The other interesting thing to me, and I don't know how well this comes through on the camera,
but the Tokarev really kind of messed this vest up worse than the PSM. The PSM rounds made nice little holes in it.
Tokarev, you've got little bits of Kevlar that are peeling out the back now,
you saw the vest actually moved, jumped when I hit it. The Tokarev was imparting a lot more energy.
What the PSM is able to do is take the smaller amount of energy it has to begin with,
but focus it more effectively to get through something like a Kevlar vest.
So the PSM does have some pretty decent penetration potential,
as evidenced by the fact that it does it as well as the Tokarev, which is renowned for being a high penetration gun and cartridge.
However the PSM wasn't actually designed to do that, and if it had been they could have made it something like the FN 5.7 round,
higher velocity, higher pressure, and much more effective at armour penetration.
Anyway, this was a lot of fun to try out, very interesting. You know if you do want, if you do need armour penetration,
a Tokarev will do it. You don't have to go and find yourself a unicorn of a PSM.
I would like to give a big thank you to Mike Carrick from Arms Heritage Magazine
for allowing me to do this shooting with his PSM. Thank you very much Mike.
And if you enjoy this make sure to subscribe on YouTube and Full30.
And check us out next week for more armour-penetrating Soviet pistols.