I’m going to piggy back on Erik’s post about the Curve with a slightly different angle. Most of us saw pictures of the Curve and expounded WTF. I think the community in general had the same response. I wanted to give the gun a chance as I don’t think it’s fair to review something you haven’t handled. We found out the Taurus didn’t even have this at the Media Range day, which I think is a sign they didn’t want bad reviews, so other than what you may have seen online there will be no reviews from SHOT on how this thing fires.
The Curve is really a silly exercise in engineering and design. The curved handle is so minor its almost not worth mentioning. The gun is so small it felt the same in both right and left hands (this is marketed as a right handed gun….whatever that means).
The gun comes in two models, one with the integrated laser flashlight combo (either both on or both off, no variable settings) or one without. The unit with the integrated laser light system has a simple flip switch to turn the unit on or off but it is meant to be manipulated by your right hand trigger finger and as we played with it we found it plausible that flicking of this switch in a forceful or panicked manner could result in the trigger finger sliding to the trigger pretty easily. Would this cause accidental discharges? Probably not but it seemed like a bad design choice. Strictly speaking shooting the gun left handed and using your right hand thumb to operate the switch seemed like a better idea.
As pointed out by Erik the magazine release was clumsy and the gun has a magazine safety which is a feature I find pretty useless in an actual fighting gun. The lack of slide stop is concerning and when I asked what they recommended if someone had an extended stoppage I got a blank stare.
This gun is really a single use unit. Shoot it until it’s empty and hope the target goes down. It’s a close range emergency gun and in that respect it seems OK but for all the buzz it’s really not worth the attention. I’d still like to shoot it but if you want a well designed 380 there are better options.
