Now that I had passed the CCW class, and could apply for a permit, I decided it was time to look for a handgun. A friend at work owns several guns, a happy easygoing sort, I figured he could help with some concealed carry weapon choices. My friend is a Classic Star Trek Nut, I will call him James T. Kirk. He takes life seriously enough to get a PhD in Chemical Engineering, but not seriously enough to tuck in his shirt. Monday morning, bright and early at work, I asked Kirk what he thought would make a good concealed carry weapon.
“My pre-requisites for a gun are twofold”, I told him. “Cheap and reliable”.
“I don’t know about reliable, said Kirk, but about the cheapest thing you can get right now is a CZ-52”. “You can get them at gun shows for under $200, and the ammo is dirt cheap.”
“What is a CZ-52”? I asked.
“It’s an inexpensive gun that the Czek army used while they were a Soviet satellite”. “They have switched to another model, and there are warehouses full of ‘52s being dumped on the market”. Kirk said. “It will go through anything”. He added, as an afterthought.
“Define anything”. I asked.
“Well, lets put it this way, probably not through concrete, but definitely through a car door, a house, and mabey 10 people, even through body armor”. Said Kirk.
“How do you know this?” I asked.
“Well, a buddy of mine and I did some experiments”. Kirk replied.
Then the story came out. He had purchased a CZ-52 at a gun show for under 200 dollars along with several hundred rounds of 7.62 x 25 "Tokarev" ammunition , the standard Eastern Block military handgun round. One day when at his buddies house, the two of them had decided to test a Kevlar bulletproof vest that just "happened to be laying around". They put a large block of Styrofoam in the vest to simulate a human torso and took shots at it with different guns. The Kevlar stopped everthing, .22 pistol rounds, 0.38, 9mm .40, .45, even a 10mm would would not penetrate the Kevlar. Then they tried the CZ-52 with it's Tokarev round. It went throught the front side of the vest, punched a hole through the Styrofoam and then passed cleanly through the back of the vest, and finally stopped after taking a chunk out of a concrete slab.
As Kirk waxed poetic of the wonders of the Tokarev round and the CZ-52, I wondered if any of our neighbors in the apartment complex own one of these things, or for that matter anyone on the block. Were our apartment walls really concrete as the rental office had boasted? Should I load our dressers up with bricks? The image formed in my head, of America awash with ugly, cheap former East Blok surplus handguns, rusting under car seats, tossed into pickup truck toolboxes. These Slavic castoffs, coming in by the boatload, oozing from behind the rusty iron curtain , as Slovak factories turned out untold thousands of cases of armor piercing ammo. Wasen’t armor piercing ammo illegal for civilians to purchase? Did the police know about this lethal tide? I thought of those cops that patrol their beats, sandwiched in layers of Kevlar, now potentially rendered useless by the cheapest handgun a person can buy. I imagine a cop buying an $800 vest to protect himself, while across town, a crook plunks down $116 on a CZ-52, then gets pulled over by the cop in his brandnew and totally useless Kevlar vest.
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