Heckler & Koch VP70

The VP70 was the first production pistol with a polymer frame, predating the Glock 17 by twelve years. Heckler & Koch built it from 1970 as a straight-blowback 9×19mm design with an 18-round double-stack, double-feed magazine, a spring-loaded striker instead of a hammer, and a very heavy double-action-only trigger pull in place of a manual safety. Its barrel is deliberately cut with unusually deep rifling, venting propellant gas past the bullet to keep slide pressure low enough for an unlocked blowback action to handle a full-power 9mm round — at the cost of slightly reduced muzzle velocity compared with a conventionally rifled barrel of similar length.

Two versions were sold. The VP70M (“Militär”) accepted a detachable polymer holster-stock that doubled as a selector, unlocking a mechanical three-round-burst mode fed by an internal ratchet mechanism; the civilian VP70Z (“Zivil”) has no provision for the stock and no burst-fire parts at all. A small run of about 400 VP70Z pistols was built in 9×21mm IMI for the Italian civilian market, where 9×19mm ownership was then restricted to the military and police. Production ran until 1989; the pistol saw service or police issue in several countries and was used during the Lebanese Civil War.

Most figures here — mass, dimensions, sight radius and magazine capacity — come from Heckler & Koch’s own specification sheet for the VP70Z, preserved by an archived third-party mirror rather than by H&K’s current site. The 2,200-rounds-per-minute burst cyclic rate is Wikipedia’s own figure with no inline citation of its own and is recorded as estimated for that reason. No free source publishes a sourced muzzle velocity for the VP70’s shortened, gas-vented barrel, so no velocity is recorded. Both images show a civilian VP70Z and a line drawing of the stocked VP70M; no photograph of a genuine VP70M with its stock fitted turned up on Wikimedia Commons, Smithsonian Open Access or DVIDS.