The ASP: An Early Subcompact 9mm for Sneaky People

hi guys thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten weapons calm imean I'm here today at the Rock Island auction house taking a look at some of the guns and their upcoming September of 2015 premier auction and you know something that we have just a huge wide variety of today are very compact concealable pocket pistols in reasonable calibers it's really frankly pretty easy to go down to the gun store these days and find yourself a subcompact 9-millimeter carry gun be it one of the new Glocks one of the new Walthers there everybody makes one kel-tec makes one high-end low-end everything well it hasn't always been that way back in the 1970s there were very few options for truly compact carry guns in truly substantial calibers like 9-millimeter now you could get them but they were pretty much always highly customized gunsmith creations and we have an example of one of the more famous one of those in its original one of 100 special edition that actually came out in the late 70s or early 80s this is a 9-millimeter asp now the asp was developed by a guy named Paris Theodore who really kind of was the real deal if if anyone had can lay claim to the title of being like the actual Q from James Bond it would be someone like this guy in the early 1970s 1970 in fact he set up seven trees limited which was a holster making company and a made great holsters but in the back of the shop he also experimented with all sorts of interesting clandestine guns and frankly the CIA was actually one of his big customers he made a lot of guns for people who are going into dangerous places kind of on the sly so DEA CIA undercover law enforcement all these sorts of folks who were very interested in subtle concealable and yet effective and powerful firearms now the ASP is kind of his signature creation this started out life is a Smith & Wesson model 39 pistol which was a single stack 9-millimeter there were pretty good guns but they were large there were service pistols really what he did was he made apparently more than 200 individual modifications to the guns but the most significant ones where he cut the bottom of the grip off cut the front of the slide off shortened everything melted all the edges so that there were less sharp corners on the guns and came up with in kind of interesting proprietary sighting system so well and I bring the camera back here and let's take a closer look at this guy so the asp was a handgun that really was built around a whole system of of close-range practical shooting knowledge so what Theodore was looking for was a gun that wasn't going to nag on its way out a gun that would be very quick to bring into action a gun that you could shoot not necessarily I don't want to say accurately you obviously don't want to shoot inaccurately but the goal was to be able to shoot effectively very fast and at very close range because that's the sort of confrontation that the gun was designed for with that in mind you did a number of things the the outside of the gun is Teflon coated give it a nice slick surface the grip panels were replaced with lexan so that you could see inside and see the number of cartridges remaining in the magazine because this has been cut down it has a 7+1 capacity and you know for example it was recognized very explicitly in the manual in fact that you cannot effectively keep track of how many cartridges you fired when you're in a gunfight because there's too much else going on and you're not going to be paying attention to trying to count rounds hence clear see-through grip panels so that you can at a glance see how much ammunition you have left the most I should also say a lot of the edges have been rounded off on this gun to make it smoother and cleaner the front strap the trigger and the grips are all left very smooth this was deliberate there's a little bit of checkering on the back strap but the rest of it is less smooth with the idea that you would not grab the pistol and get a bad hold which was then kept in place by friction or checkering on on various parts of the grip instead it was thought you could instinctively grab the and because everything was smooth it would slide into place and stay in place it's an interesting idea can't really comment myself on on how practical that was but that's what they went with and the guys who carried these and the guys who made them certainly knew what they were doing it also has this front hook for a finger this is not really in the modern doctrine but it was in the 70s now the most interesting thing which I've been avoiding mentioning is this what's called a guttersnipe site no go back to this one so the idea here is that instead of having a front in a rear sight which you line up and get a proper picture and get proper focus place the target the sight on your target and then pull the trigger now instead you want something that is a lot more instinctive to use the I deal with this gutter sight whereas it was called gutter snipe sight was that those yellow side panels really very quickly grab the eyes attention and draw it to that center point now the the proper sight picture is to have that white right in the middle like that this is going to shoot high that's going to shoot low but this wasn't meant to be shooting bull's eye groups the idea with this was that you can very quickly draw the gun your eye gets pulled right into that site and you can fire quickly and make effective hits on a target at close range you'll notice this one actually has a couple of luminous dots or or places for luminous dots on the side so that you can have some night sights on it as well so a little bit of history on the production of these guns Paris Theodore was making these in the 1970s and they were completely custom guns you would get yourself a Smith & Wesson 39 and you'd send it to him along with what was kind of an obscene amount of money at the time numbers vary and I think a price changed over the years but you are typically looking at about $300 which you translate that to today's money and you're you're talking 1500 or so so quite a lot of money more than the pistol the the base pistol cost anyway you send it to him he makes all the modifications and ships you back and ASP rather like this one so unfortunately it seems that Parris Theodore was a better weapon Smith than he was businessman and his company hit some real financial issues in the late 1970s and it asked which stands for armament systems and procedures was actually bought out by some other folks who continued to make the guns they made them out of Appleton Wisconsin and that's where this particular example is made you'll probably find more of those than you will of the original custom guns so guys in Appleton making these guns did run a hundred guns special edition original price for this was eighteen hundred and seventy five dollars which was quite quite very expensive in the 1980s and it was done in a fake book open this a little leather tab and inside we have a nice lined case you have yourself an ASP pistol instead of the complete lexan grips this has Buffalo horn with a little lexan panel in it you have and this was a voluntary or an optional extra the ASP logo tie tack apparently that was another hundred bucks if you bought them with the guns you have the dagger slash letter opener here and then underneath here you would have two spare magazines this as an auction lot this gun actually comes with I believe seven spare magazines they just aren't in the book case right now so that's the special quest for excellence edition which is where this particular gun came from I think these are really interesting to look at from the point of view of frankly of development of the relatively high powered and yet relatively quite small concealed carry pistol these really were the guns of choice for the people who were doing sneaky things in dark places and actually had a very legitimate need at the time for a high powered and very concealable handgun now I find it kind of interesting a lot of the guns like this from the time these and the date Onyx 45s the early ones and the the summerling manually operated 45 caliber pistols there are a lot of people who will continue to say that these were the apex of development of this type of gun and I'm not so sure about that I think that is more an expression of nostalgia than it is of an understanding of true handgun development because frankly a lot of the modern guns we have do all the same work and they do it as a mass-produced factory item that makes them a little less sexy and cool and exclusive but these guns really did set the standard for the things that we kind of take for granted today well thanks for watching guys I hope you enjoyed the video if you've already got yourselves a date onyx and the cut down star and maybe a simmer leg this can be just the thing to round out your collection of early compact 9 millimeters so if you'd like to own this one check out the link in the description text below that'll take you to rock island's catalog page on it they actually have not one but three different aspects in this auction so I'll leave it up to you to poke around and find the other two thanks for watching

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 820,254

Rating: 4.959537 out of 5

Keywords: 9×19mm Parabellum, ASP, Theo, theodore, paris, paris theodore, cia, dea, spy, quest, excellence, S&W, smith and wesson, 59, model, compact, subcompact, CCW, CCP, gutter, guttersnipe, cut down, melted, dehorned, covert

Id: 4trmOFxuJw0

Length: 10min 12sec (612 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 22 2015