Originally Posted by
LockedBreech
I have always had a soft spot for $300-400 guns that don't suck. Probably my favorite area to keep up-to-date on.
The easy winner here is the current high availability of basically new police trade in Gen 5 Glock 17s. Yeah, it's a bit over $400, but come on, it's a current-gen Glock. For like $450-500. I spent $650 on my G17 Gen 5 MOS and I was happy to spend it. $450-500 is unreal. And a lot of them have night sights!
As someone noted, the SP2022 was a steal for $400 and I enjoy mine well enough, but they're consistently $550-600 now and I think that's a bit iffy for the gun when you can get so many awesome things in that price bracket. Hell, if you want hammer fired $600-700 gets you a P30 these days and that's easily the better choice, no disrespect to the SP2022. 550-650 gets you most Beretta 92 variants.
My APX for $324 is probably my best gun buy ever. Still a great deal now, both the original and APX A1, readily available in the $400-450 range. Robustly built and very reliable. The M&P 2.0s I got in 2018-2019 for like $350 new were up there as amazing deals too, my M&P45 4.6" and M&P9 Compact 2.0 combined cost me less than $700.
Gen 1 M&Ps in .40 (I won't touch the 9mms due to early accuracy issues) are like $300. Get some Gen 2 backstraps and maybe a little grip tape for the front and you've got an accurate, tough as hell, reliable as hell, police quality gun that shoots .40 the way some guns shoot 9mm. Great pistols, terminally underrated. There's a reason a Gen 1 M&P .40 is my field gun. Cheap enough not to baby it, tough and reliable enough to count on. Reminds me of a used .38 revolver in the 1990s.
I am very curious about the Canik, Mossberg, and Arex options but just haven't seen enough data points to be confident they run. That's probably not fair to Canik, there's plenty of data on those, but I still haven't been sold. Still awful cheap for what seems to be a solid running gun though. The Masada looks sleek and runs around $400, but again, not a lot of data points on how they run hard.
Pistol-Forum finally got into my blood so these days I am more likely to wait and pick a $500-700 gun (in others words, I've been drinking the Glock flavor-ade pretty thirstily) but it's nice that even in a time of supply chain pinch and inflation there seem to be a lot of solid choices.