The Burnt Bronze Springfield Armory Hellcat Pro combines flawless reliability, surgical accuracy, and staggering good looks all in a package you can easily and comfortably conceal underneath a pair of shorts and a t-shirt.
Cramming everything that is righteous and wholesome about the Hellcat Pro into an exceptionally alluring, color-coordinated chassis, this is the gun that keeps you safe and looks cool doing it. If you’re the sort who wants to stay frosty while projecting an air of refinement, daring, and elan, this is your iron.
The Gun
The defensive handgun market is cluttered these days. Fully half the states in our Great Republic offer some form of permitless carry. Additionally, a glance at the news any given day shows that folks aren’t getting any nicer to each other the deeper we get into the Information Age. As a result, capitalism offers an unprecedented selection of optimized concealed carry handguns. Ensconced firmly atop that rarefied heap is the Springfield Armory Hellcat Pro.
I’ll spare you the technical details. They’re on the website. Suffice to say, the Hellcat Pro is almost unnaturally compact while remaining surprisingly accurate and monotonously reliable. So long as the sun comes up in the east, Springfield Armory defensive pistols will continue to shoot every single time you squeeze the trigger. The Hellcat Pro offers you 15+1 onboard and a superlative striker-fired trigger all in a package that can conceivably ride in the front pocket of a pair of 5.11’s. Shooters of yesteryear could not have imagined such rarefied capabilities in such a compact package. (Editor’s Note: Be sure to read Massad Ayoob’s Hellcat Pro review.)
Keeping Up Appearances
Launched in September of 2019, that original Springfield Armory Hellcat raised the bar on high-capacity micro carry guns. While those first Hellcats offered performance and capabilities unimagined just a few years earlier, they came in basic black or nothing at all. Nowadays — right, wrong, or otherwise — we all like to color coordinate our weaponry.
This is a curiously modern phenomenon. My gut feeling is that it all started with the Global War on Terror. We saw the way real operators heading downrange were spray-painting their rifles and began gazing lustfully at the Krylon every time we strolled past the hardware section at our local Walmart. Nowadays with the extensive array of durable finishes available to both manufacturers and hobbyists alike, the capacity for customization is legitimately unprecedented.
The new Burnt Bronze Hellcat Pro is the perfect example. Offered exclusively through the distributor Lipsey’s, this is the standard black frame from a Hellcat Pro mated to a slide finished out in burnt bronze Cerakote. Cerakote is used throughout the firearms industry these days. It has been proven to be a rugged, durable, and effective all-weather gun finish.
Trigger Time
The Hellcat Pro includes the expected superlative striker-fired trigger with a safety tab in the trigger face along with a standard Picatinny rail up front for accessories. The billet-cut slide comes from the factory ready for your favorite micro red dot sight. The front sight sports a tritium insert, while the rear is a white semi-circle. Nothing is faster.
At typical across-the room defensive ranges the Hellcat Pro is a precision instrument. Unlike most micro compact pistols, the Hellcat Pro is also fun to shoot. Recoil is not unpleasant, and the controls are perfect. So long as you do your part, you can shoot the buttons off a shirt with this thing at across-the-room ranges.
Empty magazines leap out of the frame when the mag catch is hit. Give the slide a little manual tug or hit the slide release to drop it over a fresh box as the spirit leads. The adaptive grip texture represents the perfect interface between frame and hand. There are also nifty little parking pads on the sides to give your trigger finger a place to hang out when you’re not actively throwing lead downrange.
If you need to reach out to football field or more, this is not your iron (Editor’s Note: To see GunSpot prove the good Dr. Dabbs wrong, click here). Springfield Armory has other products that will perform that mission swimmingly. However, if you need a gun you can comfortably pack that will reliably secure your person and your family in the face of life’s many manifest ills, then look no further. The addition of the burnt bronze slide lets you stay safe while looking sharp.
Measure of Performance
Ammunition | Group Size | Velocity |
---|---|---|
Black Hills 100-gr +P HoneyBadger | 0.25″ | 1,190 fps |
Remington Golden Saber 124-gr Bonded JHP | 0.20″ | 1,123 fps |
Winchester Defender 147-gr JHP | 0.10″ | 936 fps |
Denouement
I say we should just own it. I want my defensive handgun to be effective, comfortable, accurate and dead nuts reliable. However, I also wouldn’t mind if it looked cool to boot. The new Springfield Armory Burnt Bronze Hellcat Pro from Lipsey’s checks all those blocks and then some. While I may not be much to look at myself, my new defensive pistol is absolutely gorgeous.
Can’t you smell it?
As the light turned to dark, a male leopard cautiously followed a well-worn path in the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro. The cat had been here before, perhaps as recently as the previous night. As he slipped in and out of the long grass, the leopard passed the dimly glowing lights from a nearby manyatta (village), then continued on his seemingly purposeful mission, stopping frequently to sniff tracks and check out his surroundings with his superb nighttime vision.
Native voices, possibly herdsmen, faded away as the leopard crept along, now closer to the ground. It stopped and crouched even lower, peering through the grass to watch the comings and goings of people in a tented camp. The big cat waited patiently until the strange voices were silent. Then, beneath a bright, cold Africa moon it started to sneak toward the camp.
The leopard approached one tent and circled it silently before its attention was drawn to another. Still creeping low and undeterred by the flickering light of the campfires, it picked up its pace and, with the brazen audacity common only to leopards, it rushed through the open flap of the tent and in a flash, stole away with its chosen prey.
The year was 1903; the place was German East Africa (later Tanganyika, now Tanzania). The camp was that of two hunters: Kalman Kittenberger, a young Austro-Hungarian sporting gentleman, and an old African military man, a corporal at the Moshi Garrison.
The men, who had pitched their tents about 100 yards apart, had arrived to hunt elephants in the area, which was soon to be a protected reserve. Their tents were pitched adjacent to two separate trails that each hunter would scout separately the next day.
That night Kalman had visited the old African’s tent and had drank and talked well into the wee hours. The old African owned a bulldog named Simba, perhaps for its tenacity, but a strange choice of dog in this climate. The breed’s short nose and breathing passage makes it hard for the dogs to stay cool, and it would probably have had suffered much discomfort in the days to come. The bulldog is also prone to suffering from heatstroke. But the old African loved his dog and it went everywhere with him, usually sleeping under his bed. On this night, however, his loyal companion was snatched from beneath him with unbelievable speed by the marauding leopard.
The African wasted no time in grabbing his 7mm Mauser and firing at the fleeing cat. The commotion brought his colleague rushing from his tent and the two hunters fired in the general direction of the escaping leopard.
Everything was silent as the hunters followed the predator into the inky blackness. Unlike lions, leopards have a habit of doubling back and attacking their pursuers at incredible speed. Knowing this, the two men proceeded with extreme caution, their eyes gradually adjusting to the dark. Intermittent clouds obscured the moonlight, making their task even more difficult. Listening for the leopard’s distinctive cough or the dog to whimper, the two men moved silently through the long grass. The only sound was from their pounding hearts.
After a short time the hunters stumbled across the dog’s body. Their shots had apparently missed, but at least they forced the cat to drop poor Simba. Like a ghost, the leopard had escaped to live and maraud another day.
There were many stories of man-eaters prior to World War I in East Africa, but lions weren’t always to blame. Leopards were, in fact, the bigger culprits, and stories such as this were not uncommon. Cattle and other livestock were in particular danger, but unbeknownst to most Europeans at the time, leopards also accounted for many human injuries and deaths. But their favorite prey was the dog. They snatched them from camps and villages, sometimes in broad daylight right in front of their masters. One has to realize that leopards were far more common than lions; indeed, they could be found almost everywhere on the African continent, but because of their secretiveness, they were seldom seen.