HiPoint’s C9 9mm pistol is already a favorite among drug dealers and that fat guy you know that wears a load bearing vest to the grocery store. When I say that it’s a terrible pistol, I want to assure you that I’m not just jumping on the internet hate bandwagon. I actually bought an old C9 used (it still sits locked in an old tool box in my office to this day) in an effort to see if it was possible to have fun with a pistol I scooped up for less than a good bottle of whiskey.
And to be fair, I have had fun with this pistol… but really only in the ways you have fun re-watching a bad movie. My buddies and I still occasionally put our decent-to-good firearms down from time to time to take turns reveling in just how bad a pistol this old C9 really is. Rather than relaying it all to you anew, here’s a section from a review of the C9 I wrote for SOFREP years ago:
That is, of course, assuming the magazine stays in the gun, which in my experience is fairly unlikely. The magazine release isn’t in the way and it easy enough to avoid, but the weight of the magazine when fully loaded with eight rounds, combined with the recoil and jostling of occasionally actually firing, followed by me yelling “tap, rack, bang” at the pistol like it’s a lance corporal who works for me and trying to make it seat another one, almost always makes the magazine just…fall out of the pistol.”
It’s not just unreliable though. It’s also heavy as hell. Despite being a single stack 9mm, this thing is bigger and heavier than my Glock 19x, thanks in no small part to how thick they had to make the cheap “pot metal” slide just to keep it from exploding. The result is a painfully bad shooter that often drops mags at random intervals but is heavy enough to use as a club if you’re so inclined.
Hi-Point can’t be deaf to the complaints of the shooting community, they just know their market. They aren’t going to compete with Glock or more expensive offerings from Sig and the like. Nor are they going to reshape their reputation with a new cheap pistol. Instead (and I think admirably), they chose to lean into how they’re perceived and left it up to the internet to decide what they’d call their newest C9.
And the internet didn’t disappoint. In the tradition of “Boaty McBoatface,” the online voters chose a seemingly silly name… that honestly is probably the most appropriate one that could have been chosen for a new Hi-Point: Yeet Cannon.
If you can’t wait to get your hands on a Yeet Cannon, they’ll be out later this year, but Hi-Point is already selling their old C9s with “Yeet Cannon” engraved on the slides just in case you’re the type of guy that would settle for an even crappier version of what’s sure to be a crappy gun. I’ll level with you, I actually think this was a good decision on behalf of Hi-Point. After all, here we are talking about them…
I’m no gun shamer and I’ve spent more than $200 on some pretty dumb things before, so if you’re jumping on the Yeet Cannon waiting list (either for ironic laughs or because you just like bad guns), I say good for you. Do what what makes you happy.
I’d just prefer you weren’t watching my back with it.
