Walther failure (courtesy recoilweb.com)

“A student taking an MDFI (Michigan Defensive Firearms Institute) class recently suffered a significant firearm failure while on the range,” recoilweb.com reports. “The weapon was a Walther CCP 9mm handgun and the student was not injured.” And before you go injuring Walther’s rep know this: the vast majority of handgun-go-boom incidents are ammunition-related. Specifically, reloads.

As the recoilweb.com post doesn’t rule out an ammunition-related explosion, there’s no reason to get your knickers in a twist about this Walther ka-blam. Like Boeing aircraft, modern guns are built to withstand above-normal pressures and stress.

Yes, Murphy is out there. Despite Recoil’s revelation that “Unfortunately this is not the first report of a Walter CCP coming apart while firing we have received,” I’d no more worry about the ergonomically awesome Walther CCP failing catastrophically than I would concern myself with the WordPress spell cheater. Checker!

While the company investigates, here’s a video to help calm CCP owners.

 

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58 COMMENTS

  1. Meh, it’s still a cool firearm. If the s&w shield didn’t exist I’d probably be carrying the CCP right now. One gun KBs… Not really worried. Think about all the glock KBs that have happened and besides some hickups they have a great track record for reliability.

      • yes, I only fly R/C craft, but I am well acquainted with the phenomenon. heavy duty packing tape and hot-glue are my friends. Forget to plug in the ailerons or have them reversed? kerwhump! Drone not GPS lock then start to drift? zip zoom whap! Flying inverted and loose orientation for a second, then pull up! bang! I would start a youtube channel but then the FAA would hunt me down and ban me from US airspace. I am novice pilot and menace to all around me, so I fly in the desert, away from innocents and magnetic trees.

        Its not a impressive crash unless your have to brush the dirt off your transmitter. Mole club for life!

        • I’ve wrecked at least one of every type of machine I’ve ever driven, ridden, steered, etc. I figure it’s better for me and society at large if I never have control of a flying machine.

  4. Guns are machines, and any machine can have a failure. Period. I’ve only owned one Walther, a PPX, and it was a decent gun. It wasn’t my cup of tea so I don;t own it any more but not because I didn’t trust it. My wife and I just didn’t like it as much as my Glocks and Jericho or her Beretta and 1911.

  5. This is the first time I’ve read an article at the recoilweb.com website, and can I just say that “The Ultimate Firearms Destination for the Gun Lifestyle” is the worst tagline I’ve yet seen on the web. I used to think TTAG’s “Exploring the ethics, business, politics, culture, technology, practice, strategy, dangers, cuisine, unsightly rashes, secret yearnings, phone apps, moisture levels, metallurgy, strange odors, and fun of guns” was top-notch terrible, but recoilweb’s got ya beat. WTF is “the gun lifestyle”?

  6. One squib stuck in the barrel followed by a full powered bullet strike will turn pretty much any combat handgun into an improvised hand grenade.

    • I bet a pencil won’t make it down that barrel and rather than admit someone forgot the powder it’s all walthers fault. I saw a revolver lose a threaded barrel and part of the frame at a range when a round draft didn’t leave the barrel.

  7. I bought one NIB, had an FTE almost every mag. A trip to Walther CS resulted in “cannot duplicate” and a recommendation for a couple brands of ammo. I tried that ammo and some new mags with the same result. It’s a POS.

    • Sig did the same thing to me. NIB P320. Failure to extract third round everytime. Different mags, different ammo, same result. Sent it to them three times, three times they sent it back with a note that said “cannot duplicate malfunction.”

      • Did you ever let someone else shoot it? You can’t just assume that the gun is at fault, or were you just trying to get the PPQ upgrade?

  9. Bought one of these for my daughter and shot it some myself. I dislike the need for a tool to unhook the slide latch, but other than that I really like the gun. The ergos are as good as my PPQ, the only downside to the CCP is the single stack mag, but with 8 in the mag and one in the chamber it is good enough to get the job done.

    • Well, it looks like if you misplace the tool to disassemble it, you can just keep shooting it until it flies apart. That’s true tool-free disassembly right there.

  10. Same thing happened to me. More specifically, my girlfriend’s daughter. I rented the CCP at the local range and fired it then let her try it. The slide and recoil spring shot out into the range area. No one was injured and we were using the range’s reloads. I believe the gun needs to be cleaned more often due to its gas system and that once a month at a busy range is definitely not enough.

  13. I do not trust anything made in Germany–all their crap, expensive, over engineered cars, guns, everything–if you knew my background you would understand my opinion, but you don’t

    • That’s seems a bit too broad. True Walther products are fine guns: PPQ, PPK, etc. the CCP is a Umarex build through and through (Umarex owns Walther, I think…). The mags aren’t the nice bent steel as you see on the PPQ. They’re cheap slotted steel items. The slide feels cast from scrap metal. The internals are all thin as can be, slide to frame fit is laughable, and the tiny hook part that holds the slide in place is just that–tiny. Read through the Walther forums and you’ll find 60+ pages of Walther fanboys that had high hopes for Walters take on a gas pistol and were sorely disappointed.

    • As the semi-proud owner of a bmw I can start to understand where you’re coming from. Leaves and debris get in the cowl and when it rains all the water flows onto your floor. What, they don’t have leaves in Germany? Oh it must be the rain that they don’t have…

      • The finish mill stand in the rolling mill I work in is the only piece of equipment 8 this plant that is of German origin. kocks, is the company. We have a 60 ft x 80 ft Kocks shop that is dedicated to servicing it. It is the most over complicated mess of a mill stand I have ever seen. A special proprietary purpose built lathe to turn the rolls. A monstrosity of a decoupling machine to remove couplings that actually use hydraulic pressure to expand the shrink fits that hold them onto the drive shafts. A gear and bearing lube system that uses a series of cascading gravity flow tanks to maintain oil flows and pressures. A series of three speed reducing gearboxes all with electronic clutches (that are a nightmare to disassemble) that couple to a 750horse DC motor.

        Everyone of our other mill stands simply have a motor, a gear box, and a set of rolls that can turned on a standard, if rather large, lathe. They all work equally as well.

  14. According to the owner of MDFI, “Received a call from Walther- they state that gun store salespeople are “incorrectly” reassembling them and bending critical parts that are causing this issue. This is the 2nd issue we have heard of with that model. I’m not convinced the bugs are out of it yet”

  15. I had a CCP for a few weeks; dreaming of a cheaper way to experience the P7 gas system. Wasn’t really impressed by the whole “genre” (takedown, swabbing out the powder like a 12 pounder on the gun deck of HMS Surprise). It recoiled no softer than a Shield with the same WinWhiteOneOne5. Yes, easier to rack, but the Mag feed lips seem to be very prone to bending. Fortunately, someone locally wanted it more than I did, and had a NIB RAR .243, so we both came out ahead.

    I had tried a P-38 that admittedly was as old as me; not impressed by the (lack of) accuracy, but fortunately someone locally wanted it more that I did, and had a LNIB VP9, so we both came out ahead.

    So if I work a deal on a PPQ and don’t like it, will there be someone locally who wants it more that I do, and may have a LNIB G34 or G40 or P30? Three times may be the charm! These Walther’s; they are the Bees Knees when it comes to trade bait!

  16. Guys. I suspect that our troll is lower case matt, the proud racist. He and I used to have very intense “conversations” a couple of years ago. Sointense that during one he staed that “Hitlers only failing was not killing more jews”, knowing that Farago’s father had been in a death camp. He was banned. Now he’s back using multiple assinine names in the same thread. If the sites moderators were paying attention he’d get drop kicked again.

    To call this loser a skinhead is probably an insult to skinheads as he’s one of those “sub human” slavs Hitler was so fond of.

    And apparently the moderators woke up and kicked his comments to the curb as I was typing. But they missed his “gray man ghost parrot” comment.

    • Nope. Not matt. You aren’t even warm. You were matt. Conversing with yourself for attention. Nicolas Cage has nothing on you Cali-Zim. You are probably me too.

        • Yup. I strolled right over to the thread above about cops. You know, the one where the 100 comments average a literally underground approval rating. You ain’t no different. “Combat” handgun. Whatever.

          Thank God I come from a different region of the MMPI than cops do.

  17. There have been a large numbers of reported problems with this firearm. I seriously considered buying one until I did the research and found it’s a problem product.

  18. I read somewhere that some H&K guns (P30) are tested during the design phase to show that they won’t expload if you fire with a squib round stuck in the barrel. The barrel deforms but it clears both rounds without a kaboom.

    • I had a squib load in a .45 acp followed by a full power in a Springfield 1911. Probably 30 years ago. Bulged the barrel, did NOT blow up the gun. In fact, after careful examination, I reassembled the pistol with the bulged barrel and continued shooting. No issues. I stacked something like 10 rounds of .22 LR in my Ruger 10-22 while rapidly firing with a 30 round mag. One squib load and, surprising, the rifle continued cycling even though no lead was leaving the barrel. Barrel was bulged, did NOT blow up. Outside of shooting way too hot handloads, guns do not typically blow up all the time, as one commenter above stated.

      Walter apparently is claiming the pistol was a) reassembled incorrectly and/or b) critical components were bent and damaged during incorrect assembly. That’s enough to “just say no”. If a pistol can be reassembled “incorrectly” but still chamber a round and fire, piss poor design. If a component can be “bent” during reassembly and it leads to catastrophic failure, again piss poor design. There are enough very good, time tested designs out there that do not fail in this manner, that are just as economical, that there should be no reason to even look at a Walter after seeing this.

      • I can believe the “not reassembled correctly”. Having a CCP for two months, I grew tired of my inability to grow a third hand to effectively place “tab B in slot A whilst maintaining pressure on the Turbo Encabulator during the Full Moon”.

  21. This occurrence is not rare for CCPs.
    We bought one to use in our classes. We get a large number of women, especially in the Intros and Phase IIs, and a lot of them are older.
    The CCP design is intended for those women specifically. It is indeed easier to rack the slide than other smaller 9s, although not by any huge margin.
    The ergos are actually pretty good. Not all women and smaller-handed shooters can do double stacks. There aren’t many single stack 9s out there, actually, and it’s possible the CCP is one of the most pleasant to shoot of all the smaller 9s.
    The trigger is not to my liking, but it’s easy to “get” for newer and less-experienced shooters; I rate it as a good choice for them. In this case, it doesn’t matter what experts think of the trigger; this gun is about new shooters, and it’s a good one in that use.
    I can’t expect to shoot a CCP myself; it’s not my style, and besides, the mag drops about every six to eight rounds. It’s almost monotonous. If I go one-handed, the problem goes away, but it’s just not going to be my gun.
    However, at the most recent Phase II, the slide and spring departed downrange just as one of our nice grandmas was getting to like the thing.
    The “latch”, the thing in the back of the striker channel that catches on the frame hook, is the big problem with the design. It’s not easy to learn to disengage it, and conversely, it is easy to damage.
    That is no doubt what happened to ours, and the hook failed, and along with the firing pin spring sleeve, is now lost forever.
    We were told by one of the trusted managers at the huge store/range we instruct at not to buy one. He was right.
    I called Walther customer service and they’re sending me a set of new parts. I asked the nice young man: “You get this call quite a bit, don’t you?”
    It was easy to tell he was trained not to acknowledge that, but he slipped a little.
    Not the worst gun I ever handled, but be forewarned: there’s trouble in the ridiculous takedown system.

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