Preview of Coming Distractions: Chiappa Rhino

It’s not often that I come across a product that makes me think “Wow…these guys have broken the mold, gone back to the drawing board, and come up with something fresh, new and exciting.” Dyson did it with the vacuum cleaner. And again with his new room fan. (I wish Dyson would go into the gun biz. Wouldn’t THAT be interesting.) But until/unless we get Dyson in the firearms trade, thank Vulcan’s forge that we’ve got the geniuses over at Chiappa, they of the 1911-22LR fame. The little number you see above looks for all the world like some SciFi art director’s concept of a futuristic snubby. Nope. This one’s for real, and I can’t wait to get my mitts on it. Here’s why . . .

The folks at Chiappa started with a radical rethink of the revolver (say that five times fast). They aligned the barrel of the gun with the bottom of the cylinder. Not the top. The bottom. Gimmicky says you? I don’t think so. Apparently, this puts the recoil heading straight back (as it’s aligned with the geometry of the wrist/arm) instead of above the pivot point of the wrist, where it cause the gun to kick. Chiappa claims that this reduces recoil. We’ll see. But I gotta say this is the first revolver that made me think “I wanna shoot that.” (It’s also the first time I’ve been interested in anything called “Rhino,” but we’ll consider the bitter ironies of that at a later time.) Tomorrow, if all goes according to plan, we’ll have a 2-min. interview with the folks at Chiappa about their Wunder-gun. Stay tuned…