What’s the cheapest handgun you’d carry for self-defense? And how much does price factor into your decision when buying a handgun? I recently picked up a brand new, old-stock Tisas Zigana PX 9 for $150, and now I want to find out if it’s worthy of self-defense use.
How cheap can a handgun get? Pot metal derringers can be had for $99, but that’s not a serious carry gun. The Heritage Rough Riders are superbly affordable, but again, they aren’t carry guns. The Hi-Points famously offer sub-$200 guns, but they are direct blowback-operated and hefty because of it.
So that brings us back to the PX 9. Can a $150 Turkish-made pistol find a spot in the budget handgun hall of fame?
The Cheapest Handgun Isn’t an Original Design
The Turkish engineering team behind this gun wasn’t trying to be revolutionary. Instead, they seem to have borrowed from several familiar designs and crammed them together to create the PX 9, which at first glance looks a whole lot like a Springfield XD series.
The XD lineup comes from Croatia, so this is mostly a Turkish copy of a Croatian pistol, but not totally. It’s enough of a copy that some parts and pieces, including the sights, are reportedly interchangeable. The slide, in particular, reeks of the XD design.
Zigana ditched a few flaws in the XD series, namely the grip safety. The grip safety of the XD has been known to break and lock the gun shut. The PX 9 has a manual safety mounted on the frame, and it’s ambidextrous.
Another welcome change is in the magazine design. Rather than stick with the XD’s mags, which are known for weak feed lips that could deform. Instead, they used SIG P226 magazines. You have to use the slightly longer 18-round magazines, because the 15-round mags are a bit too short.
Beyond that, we get an accessory rail for lights, lasers, or whatever else you feel like adding. It also includes interchangeable backstraps, and the all-metal sights—with a fully adjustable rear—are nice.
This might be the cheapest handgun I own, but I’ve got to admit, they made some smart decisions with this build.
The Zigana PX 9: What’s In the Box
I’ve noticed that many budget guns include a wide variety of accessories, and the PX 9 is no exception. For example, this gun comes with a polymer OWB holster and even a GLS-inspired lock system.
That said, the holster doesn’t inspire much confidence. The locking point between the holster and the paddle seems quite weak. I’m pretty sure I could pull it apart if I tried. This is definitely not something built to Safariland standards.
The package does include two magazines and a magazine loader as well, which is a nice touch for a cheap gun. The magazines come from Mec-Gar, one of the most reputable magazine manufacturers on the market. They supply OEM mags for many companies, including SIG, Mossberg, and plenty of others.
Handling the Zigana PX 9: Better than it Should Be
When I first picked up the gun, I was surprised. I had conflicting feelings as I handled it. There’s some good and some not-so-good right out of the gate.
The good comes from the grip design.
I didn’t expect my cheapest handgun to feel so ergonomically nice. It just feels good. The grips are thin in the right spots, rounded in the right spots, and surprisingly comfortable. You can get your hand high on the gun, which makes it feel secure and controllable.
The downside? The gun feels hilariously unbalanced. The slide feels super heavy compared to the rest of the gun. When I assume a good firing grip and extend my arms outward, I can feel the front of the gun wanting to dip due to the heavy slide.
The slide weighs more than a pound, which seems unnecessary for a modern pistol. If they could trim a little weight, get it down to a pound, the gun would be much more balanced.
The controls are fine ergonomically. The safety is easy to reach and engage, or disengage. The magazine release drops magazines without any weird hand contortions, and the slide release is nice and large, which makes pressing it quick.
Nothing about the controls stands out as exceptional, but nothing fails either.
Zigana PX 9 Range Performance
How does it handle at the range? The most important thing I looked for was reliability as a whole. I hit the ground running with the cheapest steel-case 9mm I had on hand and started sending rounds.
I have a few spare P226 magazines, so I was able to throw out almost 100 rounds in quick succession. I wanted to get the gun hot and do it quickly. It was not quite a burn down, but it was quick and easy.
The PX 9 ate it all. I ran it through various drills and only encountered one malfunction, which turned out to be ammo-related. It turns out someone at the Turkish facility producing this ammo forgot to pop a primer in the round.
Still, the PX 9 chewed through 500 rounds of Academy’s finest Monarch steel-cased, zinc-coated 115 9mm ammo without a problem. Would it last 10,000 rounds? Probably not. But when your gun costs almost the same as 500 rounds, expectations are different.
More Than Reliability
Can my Zigana PX 9 shoot straight? Surprisingly, yeah, it shoots pretty well. The adjustable rear sight makes it easy to zero your iron sights in.
At 25 yards, I can put 18 rounds into a B-8 without a miss. It’s not in the black, but it’s in the B8. The large front sight obscured the target a bit, so that level of accuracy wasn’t achieved quickly.
At 50 yards, I can light up an FBI Q target and put rounds in the upper torso and neck area. The trigger rolls rearward but is super smooth and breaks nicely. I’m impressed purely by its cost. You won’t mistake it for a Walther PDP trigger, but for a cheap gun, it works well.
Recoil and control were what left me feeling the cheap price point. The gun’s hefty slide sends a lot of weight back at you, which translates into excessive muzzle rise. Compared side by side with the CZ P10 C and Walther P99, the Zigana PX 9 was noticeably slower on follow-ups.
It’s not uncontrollable, but it lags behind other options.
Setting Expectations
Ultimately, I purchased the Zigana PX 9 because it was $150 and I wanted to experiment with a gun at this price point. It’s been a while since I slummed in the budget handgun market, and it’s crazy to see how much it’s changed.
Is it better than Glock, CZ, SIG, or S&W? No, but it shows how far budget guns have come. It has helped redefine how I feel about ultra-cheap pistols.
