“Stop me if you’ve heard this one …” In the late ’90s, the nation of Croatia was freshly independent from the wreckage of Yugoslavia and trying to build a military and an economy to lobby for membership in the European Union and NATO. As part of this effort, a domestic firearms manufacturer, IM Metal, developed a polymer-framed, striker-fired, 9mm pistol dubbed the HS2000.
The “HS” stood for “Hrvatski Samokres,” which means Croatian Pistol, and the “2000” was what you stuck on anything in the late ’90s to make it sound very modern.
The U.S. consumer market is the brass ring for any handgun manufacturer, because American private citizens purchase more handguns than any middlin’ size European army. So IM Metal negotiated with Intrac in Knoxville, Tennessee, to import their pistols into the USA.
Around late 2000, some posters on the GlockTalk internet forum started talking about these new pistols they were finding at gun shows, sold in generic black plastic cases with a little oil bottle and an instruction booklet for about $200. They seemed reliable. And they were dirt
