Caracal C under glass (courtesy The Truth About Guns)

Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance. Having counseled me not to fall in love with the Caracal C in the first place, Ralph may laugh at my progress through the U.A.E. gat grieving process. But it is what it is. Or was. The C was my EDC (everyday carry) gun. Now, it isn’t. And the time is fast approaching when I will have to say my final goodbye to my C. And the mags. And the awesome RKBA Kydex holsters that carried it. But not straightaway . . .

Caracal’s having issues with the shipping procedure. Something about customers shipping loaded guns and U.P.S. only accepting the boxes at main offices. They’ll arrive in a couple of weeks. A full refund will follow. And then, the new gun (CP661) will be available! Same great trigger, Quick Sights and mid-engine-like ergos! Better striations! Only not this summer (as I was told at SHOT). Next year.

By then, I should be well into the anger phase.

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55 COMMENTS

  2. I don’t get the appeal. It looks pretty much like a Glock and operates like one, right? Why not just get a Glock?

  3. Too bad for all the Caracal fans.

    At this point with all the stuff that has happened, I wonder if they wouldn’t be better off taking the HS2000 route and rebranding their gun with the help of an American company.

  4. IMO, Caracals probably pulling out of the US market and just doesn’t want to trigger a panic by announcing so.

    People being people, if you say “were not doing business in America due to regulatory BS” , everyone with a Caracal will hang onto it in a nationa orgy of hoarding. If you say it’s a recall, well everyone will trip over themselves to send back the hardware.

  7. My five stages are complete. The F was my EDC (due to its design, the F was only slightly larger than a glock 19 and slimmer too). Since then I’ve gone all-in on Glock 19/17 and haven’t looked back. I don’t have the time to wait around for Caracal to un-f*ck themselves, and once you accept Glock-bite as a part of your life, being a Glock guy is a pretty sweet gig; good trigger, low recoil, spare parts availability, lots of sight options, magazines are cheap and plentiful at retail stores, a customer service department that can get your gun back to you in a few weeks instead of two years, endless holster options, etc. I had to learn to hold the Caracal low so as not to trip its retarded slide release in the middle of a mag. I can hold the Glocks as high as I want without having to worry about locking the slide back in the middle of a mag. I’m glad I went back to Glock.

    • I would not have trusted caracal from the get go. For a toy I might’ve owned one, but for my life I own sig, glock, and XD’s. Sometimes it’s good to go with the flow instead of having an off the wall brand.

      • I know that I am going to get flamed by every XD fanboy out there, but I’d trust my Caracal over that Croatian piece of shit any day of the week. The third pistol I ever owned was an XDm. Full mags wouldn’t seat, recoils hard relative to other striker fired guns and experienced multiple failures to feed. Springfield wasn’t even that nice about it… they treated me like I was the problem. My caracal never gave me a hiccup that wasn’t operator error (i.e. holding too high and tripping the slide lock, as previously mentioned), the trigger was a dream and it pointed better than any handgun I’ve ever owned. The “no-recoil” myth was B.S., the Caracal was comparable to Glock in terms of recoil but overall it was an excellent gun. I broke up with caracal because of the Company, not the design.

      • Yeah it doesn’t happen often but I use a high grip to manage recoil. So, sometimes I get a bite. The upside is that you only realize you’ve been bitten after you’re done for the day, so it has not bearing on shootability.

        • I have the slide bite problem with compact gen 3 Glocks, but not gen 4s. Seems they took off juuuuust enough material around the grip so that the slide doesn’t catch my hand anymore.

        • Subjectively, to me gunsmithing is defined as:

          1) Parts need to be filed to fit
          2) Springs need to be adjusted and tuned to achieve reliable function.

          Also, hunting for the magical magazine that will work with your gun is a pain in the ass.

          “Um, hey Glocks? It’s 1911s calling. You win.”

  11. A gun, built by raabs, that don’t work, that often suffers catastrophic failures, with zero customer support (but is some how ‘Better’ than a Gluck),,,what is not to Luv?
    Me smell secondary agenda!

  18. This is tremendously disappointing. Farago’s C was an outstanding shooter, and one of my favorite test pistols of all time.

    This announcement from Caracal leaves a bad taste in my mouth, though, because all of the wonderful things the Caracal folks told us at the SHOT Show just four weeks ago were complete bullshit.

    If Caracal didn’t have its shit together to sell guns this year, I have to question their enormous expenditure in bringing their Potempkin Village of display guns to the SHOT Show. Keeping their brand alive is an exercise in futility when there’s no product to sell.

    As any marketing whiz will tell you, “Fix the product, *then* fix the brand.”

    I don’t expect Caracal to recover from this, nor do I think it particularly deserves to. One can’t imagine Glock or H&K announcing a one-year hiatus on production and importation, because they’d lose their market and go bankrupt.

    It’s a shame such a promising gun will never be available here, but this gun is now dead.

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