The latest from Lionheart is a new gun but one with a lot of history. In the early 1980s, South Korea’s Daewoo first began designing a handgun named the DP51. When it was adopted by the Korean military in 1989, it was dubbed the K5. The K5 saw limited exports to the United States in the 1990s through several companies, but not in earnest until 2011 when a small company named Lionheart became the sole importer. The gun that was the DP51-turned-K5 became known as the LH9, and the Lionheart Regulus (see RECOIL Issue 64) was essentially an improved, American-made K5.
In 2020, everything changed when Rob Falkenhayn acquired Lionheart and moved the whole works from Redmond, Washington, down to Winder, Georgia. Falkenhayn, who first got his start with the founding of Exotac, consolidated the disparate manufacturing operations of Lionheart in-house. Being vertically integrated not only allows for greatly improved problem solving, but also streamlines QA and QC.
“We’re pioneering new manufacturing procedures for firearms that have never been done before,” Falkenhayn tells us. The barrels are a good example: instead of
