Colt 2000

The Colt 2000 was the legendary American company’s response to the Austrian Glock pistol—and the worst of the company’s many recent misfires. Despite being developed by noted gun designers Reed Knight Jr. and Eugene Stoner (inventor of the original AR-15 rifle) the Colt 2000 was an embarrassing failure. The actual design of the gun was theoretically quite good, with a polymer frame coupled with metal slide to shed weight, a double stacked magazine that held fifteen rounds and a striker-fired design. Unfortunately the gun had serious reliability problems, with many owners experiencing failure to extract jams, poor accuracy and a safety recall. The Colt 2000 was billed as a gun that would dominate the world of twenty-first-century handguns, but the gun lasted only four years on the U.S. market, from 1991 to its cancellation in 1994.

Kyle Mizokami is a defense and national-security writer based in San Francisco who has appeared in the Diplomat, Foreign Policy, War is Boring and the Daily Beast. In 2009, he cofounded the defense and security blog Japan Security Watch. You can follow him on Twitter: @KyleMizokami.

Image: Reuters.