CZ’s Five-Year Plan
The Firearm Blog has this photo spread of the lovely and intimidating CZ Scorpion EVO III, which is a 9mm submachine gun made to replace the out-of-production CZ Skorpion, aka Vz. 61.
At SHOT Show this year, I talked to CZ about this little guy specifically; they’d announced a few months ago that they were working on a run of semi-automatic EVO IIIs for regular people. And here’s the final product, a Scorpion sans fun button.
Of course, in Europe, there are no short-barreled rifle restrictions, none to my knowledge, anyway, so these sort of things are more popular, even if they’re catching on here in the US with the NFA-savvy.
So when can we expect CZ-USA or Starik to start putting these purty machines on store shelves? Well, from the horse’s mouth, the ATF has shitcanned the EVO III. Not importable. It gets better. The 805 BREN, the modern, short-stroke piston-driven multi-caliber carbine? Too damn evil.
But CZ isn’t going to let that be the end of that.
CZ-USA has a partner company, Dan Wesson. Dan Wesson used to make a bunch of different guns but now is pretty focused on their 1911s. And shit, if you have a cool grand and want the best 1911 your money can buy, just get a Dan Wesson already. They’re fantastic.
Dan Wesson is about as Czech a name as you’d expect from a maker of top-shelf 1911s, and that’s because they’re from New York. Where they have… facilities.
So there really is just a huge demand for CZ firearms. All of them, not just the EVO and BREN. So much so that CZ can barely keep up, and they take up pretty much all of the town of Uherský Brod.
CZ needs to expand, and they want to sell these guns that can’t be imported to the US. Some very bright person in need of a raise had the idea to expand their Dan Wesson facilities and start making those evil black guns here in the States, where by virtue of being American, will be perfectly legal for all.
It’s their five-year plan.
And patience will be rewarded. The BREN, chambered in both 5.56 NATO and 7.62 Russian, is being modified with AR- and AK-compatible magwells for the US, because those magazines are cheap and plentiful. It’s not been decided yet if the magazine wells will be integrated into the receiver or swappable. But it does mean that no one’s going to have to buy a bunch of proprietary magazines.
The EVOs will also be made here, and both will be developed in semi-auto as well as select-fire; a lot of LEOs wanted to get their hands on these firearms, if just to evaluate them.
Like all five-year plans, no one at CZ would say it’s a hard-and-fast schedule. But it’s in the works just the same.
Oh, and what about the relatively benign full-size CZ P09 polymer pistol? Sorry, not in 2012. But that’s not the ATF getting all up ons. CZ just can’t afford to make them; too much demand. And since they’ve just re-vamped their P07 line of polymer pistols, they’re busy as hell trying to replace all the old, warped frames.
CZ-UB told CZ-USA that they could begin to fill orders for about 200 P09s a month, which just isn’t enough to launch a product. With that few guns and the present demand, it’d basically be a vaporware launch, and CZ doesn’t want that kind of damage to their reputation.
I’m told that I might be able to get my hands on a P09 as early as October of this year, for evaluation; they’re in manufacture but CZ-USA wants a big pile of ‘em before they bring them to market, sometime in 2013.
So if you were planning on picking up a P09 to defend yourself during the Mayan apocalypse, you should change your plans, too.
For now, we’ll just have to be happy looking at the pictures of that sexy new Scorpion.
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