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All,

I recently purchased one of the new Diamondback .380's and did so because of its build, my hate for KT's and the love a good light weight simple designed carry gun. A little back ground I own two Kahr 9mm's. The CW9 and the PM9- I love them equally as well but they are heavier than my DB so I have been looking for something extremely light to wear while in summer clothes. As a professional soldier and CHL holder for 9 years now concealed carry means lots of different things. First I believe that you can carry only what you can hide. In the winter I have no issues concealing a G23, a Sig p228, a commander sized 1911, all of which I own and have carried. In the summer with a loose fitting shirt you can get awy with that as well. But I dont wear button up hawian shirts very often so its usually a CW9 or the PM9. I bought the DB because when I picked it up it was very light when I took it apart it was very much like a glock and that made me happy to see. I dont see the .380 as a serious contender with alot of other rounds but I firmly believe that when you start punching holes into people they dont stop to consider the caliber. They start leaking and either die or look to get away from what is making them leak. Ok onto my main point.

Test Firing the DB- This will be just a fair and unbiased analysis of what I did you take it for what its worth. All of this firing was done on Friday 29JAN2010 without a cleaning in between.

As per instructions on "break in" I fired 100 rounds of ball ammo (PMC 90gr FMJ, and MAG TECH 95gr FMJ)
I had 1 failure to reset the trigger - by this I mean a round and fired and ejected, a new round was seated in battery and the trigger didnt reset alowing for the round in the chamber to go bang.

In the second 100 rounds I fired (I never believe the instructions I had to be double sure) I had several more problems
3 x Trigger reset failures (easy to fix you just pull your slide back about half an inch and it re-cocks)
1 x Stove pipe (I blame myself it usually is the the shooter at fault for that)
1 x Failure to extract/eject (the extractor litterally failed to grab out the spent casing) This problem causes alot of ass pain with this gun. With no slide catch you cant lock back the slide to drop the mag and fish out the rounds or spent casings. This is a time consuming process.

From there I went on to SD ammo. I used Gold Dot 90gr JHP, Aguila 90gr JHP, Federal HydroShock 90gr JHP, and Corbon 90gr JHP. I fired two mags of each.

The gold dot cycled really well with no issues (this gun likes this ammo)
Aguila - 2 Failures to feed due to failure to extract and eject the last round fired, 1 squib ( light strike I thought but then I tried the same round 3 more times and still no joy)
Federal Hydroshock - Fired very well no problems and I guess this gun likes this ammo as well.
Corbon - really dissapointing 2 squibs (again I tried three times to make them shoot, so I call into question the strength of the striker trigger system) and lots of feeding issues.

Not leaving good enough alone I went back to the gold dot and federal and had no problems with either of those bullets. It makes sense because a little SD gun is geared to shoot higher pressure SD ammo.. It just works better which is why the Corbon problems hurt my feelings so bad.

To merry up test results with another gun I fired 200 rounds out of the Kahr 9mm just to take a poll on how many hang ups it had. 6 is all, much faster to clear than the DB.

Ok so to my count with traditional ammo FMJ I had 6 issues with the DB making the gun 97% reliable - not to shabby - take most any gun to the range and shoot 200 rounds in a row out of it and I can almost promise at least a few malfunctions even if it is just the ammo you run out of it.

So you have this data feel free to use it as you see fit. I will tell you that I am keeping the gun. I can see a use for it.