To All the Guns I’ve Shot Before: HK VP9SK
I found the VP9SK second-hand at the local FFL, a rebound impulse after the belated realization that Heckler & Koch truly is the Mercedes-Benz to Glock’s Toyota Auris. The epiphany arrived the moment I first handled a P30LS—ergonomics like someone in Oberndorf had spent an unreasonably tender amount of time shaping polymer for human hands rather than for contracts. It wasn’t a cinematic epiphany, either; I haven’t even made it through a full John Wick film, so whatever HK mystique I absorbed came purely from the geometry of the thing.
The SK variant carried that same genetic inheritance: the almost suspiciously comfortable grip, the trigger that snapped like a carefully tuned camera shutter, the eccentric paddle magazine release that felt more Teutonic than tactical. It shot as straight and as confidently as its full-size sibling. In the narrow sense of performance, it was everything it promised to be.
And yet it was a perfectly competent weapon in search of a personal use case that never materialized.
On paper it was the smaller, concealment-friendly VP9. In practice it was a VP9 that had shrunk in only the most begrudging and inconvenient ways. The weight stayed. The density stayed. The sense that it expected a more exciting lifestyle stayed. If the full-size VP9 was a working dog with a pedigree, the VP9SK was the Border Collie you’re trying to raise inside a Manhattan studio apartment. Brilliant, obedient, full of gifts you can’t use. It wanted a job I couldn’t give it, and it sat in the nightstand with the bright, slightly puzzled energy of something bred for herding livestock but sentenced to accompany me on Costco runs.
Of course, the magazines were compatible across the VP9/P30 universe, so you could slap a 21-round stick into the thing and instantly transform it into the sort of mildly ludicrous configuration Charles Stross might issue a side character who’s about to flee a warehouse full of extradimensional predators. Not quite the full G18/33-round firehose excess, but close enough to make me laugh every time. The gun wasn’t unserious, but it had a habit of inviting narrative comparisons no matter what I did.
Eventually it became obvious that the VP9SK wasn’t going to earn a permanent slot in my life. Guns are tools, yes, but they’re also temperaments. Some demand enrichment. Some need a mission. Some quietly thrive on routine. And some—like the G19 Gen 5 MOS it eventually funded—just lie at your feet like an uncharacteristically mellow Golden Retriever, ready when you need them, undisturbed when you don’t. The Glock isn’t pedigreed. It isn’t glamorous. It isn’t even particularly ambitious. But it fits into my days with an ease the HK never managed. Tail thump. Optic glow. Nothing complicated.
People sometimes look scandalized when metaphors like that slip out. “How dare you treat lethal weapons like… dogs?!” And all I can say is: because. Because temperament is the only vocabulary we have for the way tools actually behave in a human life. Because a carry gun is closer to a working companion than a collector’s trophy. Because understanding something you rely on often starts with understanding the story it seems to tell about itself.
That’s where I think of Mr. Three Safes, a local legend of accumulation who measures the years not by birthdays or promotions but by the rate at which his safes fill. He’s where he is because he’s kept them all—every platform, every variant, every limited run, every discontinued magazine pattern. His narrative is an ever-expanding ensemble cast. Continuity is the point.
I am not Mr. Three Safes.
My trajectory feels closer to the reluctant protagonist of a harem anime who wakes up one morning surrounded by too many personalities, each demanding screen time, and realizes—with a sort of comedic dread—that he can’t possibly maintain all of these relationships. Each gun I’ve owned has been a character with a trope attached: the shy one, the overachiever, the chaos gremlin, the stoic mentor, the one who returns in the finale, the one that left on a cliffhanger. I didn’t accumulate; I serialized. I didn’t build a pantheon; I built a memoir in discrete chapters disguised as pistols.
The VP9SK’s chapter is about mismatch rather than mistake. It taught me that excellence doesn’t guarantee fit, and that a gun can be admirable, capable, even endearing—and still not belong to the life you actually live. It was overqualified for my needs and underutilized in my routines, a creature bred for harder tasks than I could offer it.
When it finally left, traded toward a G19 MOS, it wasn’t a breakup so much as a quiet acknowledgment: thank you, but your story is bigger than mine. I needed something simpler, steadier, less ambitious. Something that doesn’t peer expectantly at the door, waiting for a job that never comes.
Miss Irony called right as I was signing the 4473, of course. She has excellent timing. I’d come full circle—back to the Toyota with an optic after a brief detour in Mercedes country. But the detour mattered. It gave me a chapter worth writing.
And that’s how this series begins. Not with the guns I kept, but with the ones that taught me something on their way out.
To all the guns I've shot before,
who traveled in and out my door—
I'm glad they came along,
each chapter short or long;
this is the song I owe them for.