What is the use case for an automatic pistol anyway? Mag (or clip I guess?) dumping at close range? Having never fired an automatic weapon before
this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2026
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confusingly in pistols, automatic usually just means self-loading. this isn't a machinegun.
Oh so it's not like a Glock 18 or a MAC 11?
yeah
1926 
2026 loading my weird pistol with a stripper clip
Spot the difference
yo
Taking this to the range so you can talk loudly about your many "clips" and troll all the 
"it's called a magazine" folks
Trolling gunfucker Fudds would actually be the funniest use case and now I fully support this monstrosity
Can somebody explain to me why this is noteworthy? I know very little about guns.
KelTec is a weird (probably cocaine fueled) company that will make some genuinely off the beaten path designs. On one hand they're about the only marker out there that is actually innovating. But on the other hand, they don't do very strict quality control and refinement. That said, I have 2 KelTecs, both have gone in for service and now both run perfectly and have some features that I really love.
In the case of this pistol though, you don't have a removable magazine, you use stripper clips to load up the pistol. The first model was in a weird caliber (5.7) which isn't very popular or useful, especially in a pistol. So now they made it in another more common, but not very popular caliber (.380 acp), which some argue is a very under powered caliber.
It's not exactly a formula for great sales, but they do what they want and that's kinda cool.
What's a stripper clip
Ok so let's back up. The bullet is a projectile that sits in a little brass case filled with the explodey powder. That entire thing is called a round. When the projectile is fired the casing gets discarded and then the next round goes in the barrel to wait for the explodey powder inside it to be set off and start the process again
For most modern guns you put these rounds in a little box called a magazine, it holds like 10-30 normally depending on the gun and the caliber (size of the projectile) and such. You fill up the magazine and then if you shoot 30 Nazis you just take out the empty magazine and put in a full one and now you're ready to shoot 30 more Nazis.
Guns that are loaded with stripper clips have an internal magazine, you don't swap them out. The clip is a little metal strip thing you can attach 30 rounds to in order to quickly load them into the magazine, so instead of swapping magazines, you have to slide 30 new rounds into your internal magazine to be ready to shoot 30 more Nazis.
They're known for being quite fiddly and inconvenient.
keltec's interest here is that the mechanisms can be slightly smaller, and reloading typically doesn't happen in self-defense shootings. if you need more than ~5 shots you don't need a hand gun you need comrades.
Makes sense for the people who like that kind of thing I guess, but I don't want my gun to be small. Only thing a small gun is better at than a big gun is hurting your hands.
yeah size and weight are carrying optimizations.
with my situation i think if a handgun is going to be beneficial i'm not so worried about it printing
Is this one of those designs that only exists because of legal restrictions on CA/NY/etc?
You'd think so, it's Illegal in both states lol
CA has an approved pistols list that they use as a catch all to keep this kind of stuff out. Would be very funny if it were allowed though, it'd pair perfectly with my Garand.
designing a pistol with a capacity of 8 rounds of .30-06 so the clips are interchangeable with my garand
stripper clip fed pistol
Cool as hell, I love it already
In .380 auto
Why 