FCU for Personal Defense

This is something that's pretty neat. This is the FCU designed to be a personal defense weapon and what's unique about it is the FCU itself, isn't actually a firearm. Now you may have seen some devices that are designed for you to sort of clamp the plastic body around an existing firearm, to turn it into some kind of a PDW type situation. This is actually something that's very different. This is a unit that's designed to accept the fire control unit of the chassis from a SIG P320. Of course, they may end up doing a lot of different types of pistol assemblies that you can put into here. But the first one on the market that really is built the way that works with the FCU is the 320. So what's happening here is the trigger control group from the 320. That is the registered controlled item. As far as the ATF is concerned is living inside here. And now that I've got the guns closed you can see that the slide and the barrel, everything on the top half of the 320 is also living inside here. Now this is designed that you can attach any kind of accessory that you would do any type of PDW and SBR or even a Carbe. So I've got a brace here. Of course, the brace is designed to go around the arm. It can be pushed up against the body also but it's intended to be put around the arm. You can shoot this like a pistol. You can certainly grab up here on the front, underneath the hand stop and shoot this like a pistol in this way too. The charging handle does reciprocate. So you're gonna wanna make sure you don't have your thumb up here. It's obviously an ambidextrous charging handle that can be locked open. You have another hand stop over here and another rail section over here. So we can attach lights lasers, things like that. And you can even screw a suppressor on to the barrel. There is a threaded barrel at the end of this 320 top F inside of the FCU. Now the grip angle, you can see here very much does resemble the one that normally comes with the gun. And this is a SIG 320 extended magazine in there. The brace of course, is telescoping. This can go in and be pushed in shot from here. Can't be shot from the completely closed condition because it is coming out in front of the ejection port area but we can very quickly grab this and open it up to be able to use it in a defensive situation. Obviously it's very compact. The advantage of something like this, because of the stabilizing brace, because you can push it up against your body or you can attach it to your arm is that you have increased deviation control. You end up with at least two if not three or even four points of contact. We've also got this Trijicon aiming device up here. This site, in this case, it's a green triangle that I can use as an aiming point. Now, again, the advantage of having that aiming point and having these four points of contact when I braced the gun is that I'm gonna be able to fire at a higher level of precision more rapidly in a defensive shooting situation. So I put the FCU up and let's go ahead. Let's see how it shoots. I got to say I'm pretty impressed that's a really nice tight group fired relatively quickly. Let's see about putting around, up near the head, right there, a couple shots into the head and you go back to the body. Well, it obviously it's reliable. It shoots well now I have not had a lot of time to spend with this but I have been checking it out earlier today. And as you can see the gun functions very well it's very easy to use. Let's take a look and see what's going on inside of it. Obviously we wanna make sure that it is unloaded and take these things off now. And this will be the first time that I'm actually checking out to see what's going on inside of here. But I believe I push that in very simply and sort of roll that up and again you can see there's your 320 slide and barrel assembly. I'm gonna hit the slide lock, lock the slide open. I'm gonna push down on this lever here. And now if I remember correctly that should just slide right off. So there's your threaded barrel, P 320 SIG top end. And if we look inside there you see that fire control unit, right? You see that trigger group and kind of all the internal working parts from that SIG P320 pistol had been dropped into the FCU and we have the magazine release here. We've got the trigger, obviously the take down lever and the ambidextrous slide stop. Now, in addition to that ambidextrous slide stop. You also have the charging handle here which can be pulled back and pushed up to lock that back. And again, that is ambidextrous as well. I gotta tell you for something that I had never seen before and having seen some of the other things you kind of drop a Glock, or you drop another pistol into, I was a little bit skeptical about whether or not I was gonna like this thing. Now, of course, we have a long-term testing, you know issue with durability and everything else. But this thing is incredibly well-made. I just learned about its existence recently, the idea that people are going to be building these chassis to run around the fire control unit that the ATF has decided is the firearm on this P320 is really interesting to me be interesting to see who else does things like this in the future. But right now what we have is a really nice PDW conversion based on a pistol again, this isn't a stock. This is a brace designed to be going around the arm. You can shoot it one-handed to get extra stability there. Being able to take SIG P320 magazines. We know that the system is reliable. Now, of course, this trigger group system would be subject to the update issue, the upgrade issue for the drop safe issue that was identified with the P320. It looks like this is the original trigger you certainly could put in any of the other triggers or you could get that upgrade done to this unit. No doubt, all the R and D that went into this was done with the original P320. It is light. It is fast. It is easy to shoot. It's very easy to be rapidly accurate with, of course, shooting here. I don't know, probably about 21 feet or so. That is beyond the distance most people are gonna be using in a defensive situation inside their home and around your vehicle. This is going to be something that also could be carried. You know maybe there's even some potential replacement issues for a patrol rifle. If you had someone who was interested in having something very compact, maybe a motor officer someone who is on a motorcycle and isn't gonna be able to have that rifle maybe even an SBR is gonna be a little bit much especially if they're already using a 320 as a duty gun. Now, the magazines are gonna be interchangeable. If this were in a compartment on a bike or in any other situation for somebody who's out in the wilderness, maybe they're on an ATV something like that. You know, we have the Rangers out there in the National Parks things. I think that there are some applications for something like a PDW, both in the army professional world and a personal defense world. Something that works around a reliable trigger group works with other reliable parts really easy to see this concept being expanded. But this FCU, the fire control unit is the first of its kind that I've seen. I'm impressed with it. I'm excited about it. And I'm sure you can look for it coming soon at a retailer near you.