For most of us, it’s a staple of action movies and an icon of first-person shooter video games that’s rarely seen in the American wild. For others, it’s a gun they love to hate — or perhaps a gun they hate to love. The somewhat obscure and oft-misunderstood weapon we now know as the Brügger & Thomet TP9 rarely gets discussed in any depth and sometimes catches an unjustly bad rap — likely the result of being analyzed outside of its intended role or without an appreciation for its inner workings.
After spending several months with a complete test setup in hand — a factory short-barreled rifle with suppressor and full accessory suite — we’ve gained a new appreciation for this smooth shooting, compact PDW with undeniable sex appeal. But before we get to any of that, we need to start at the beginning. Which was, albeit, far less glamorous than what you see here.
A ROCKY START
Long before the B&T there was the TMP — a Steyr product of the early 1990s. The ’90s were, generally speaking, a time of outside-the-box thinking for small arms development and deployment with a number of would-be paradigm shifts that … well … wouldn’t be, as time tells us. One such concept was
