A TURKISH TAKE ON THE CZECH CLASSIC
Had things been different, Josef and František Koucký might’ve whiled away their days smoking big cigars in a villa overlooking the Vltava River. As it stands, the talented gun designers’ names are little more than footnotes. That’s difficult to reconcile, given their creation is perhaps one of the most prolific handguns of the last half-century: the CZ-75.
Why yes, one of the original “Wonder Nines” of the 1970s earned the Kouckýs little kudos … and even less money. Therein lies the rub, given the sheer number of CZ’s iterations of the recoil-operated, semi-automatic pistol and its throngs of mimics. Weak Combloc patent laws allowed the bird to fly the coop, and every Tom, Dick and Harry with a manufacturing concern popped off their version of the “Wonder Nine.” Perhaps no other gun of the past 50 years has been more copied; it took more than a century for John Browning’s 1911 to develop as many facsimiles. Alas, if there were only royalty checks for the Kouckýs.
The talented Czech
