Taurus Spectrum.380

Brother called the other morning and said this was on sale for $119 so I thought I’d give it a try. It’s a Taurus Spectrum .380. He bought 3 of them, and to be honest, I almost bought 2 at that price. Kind of wishing I had now. I had always avoided Taurus for no particular reason. I’ve not heard any negatives but general I’ve felt the fit and finish was lacking on most models I’ve looked at, though I have eyeballed this model a few times when it was $189. At $119, I’m giving it a try.

Standard mag

Extended grip mag

Side by by side with Remington RM380 (which is small even by micro pistol standards)

My my first impressions out of the box were that the fit and finish of this firearm are spot on. It met my standards which are very particular. Nice soft inlaid rubber, perfect molded polymer frame, nice matte black finish on the slide. The only flaw was a little scratches around the rod for the recoil spring which is to be expected under normal use. I was surprised that I found no residue inside from test fire as with every other semi auto pistol I’ve purchased. It’s possible that at this price point, the line was spot tested instead of every gun that rolled off the line.

Now let’s face it, comparing this gun to the RM380 (having a $500+ price point before Remington bought it) isn’t a fair comparison but it is all I have to compare it to. The slide tension was firm, a bit harder to rack than the RM380 but not bad at all. My wife was able to rack it but can’t rack the slide on her 9mm. The trigger is gritty which I’m sure most of that will go away with a good cleaning and some oil. Trigger is a wide polymer trigger but is comfortable. There is about a 30% more resistance in the trigger than the RM380, a little more travel as well.

The mags... this is a bit of a sticking point. The mags don’t drop free when released. They will pull free but it takes a little little pressure. Same for loading. It’ll go about half way in the it takes a good smack to seat it the rest of the way. I see no indication that this is abnormal, I think it was just designed that way. Don’t care for it but at $119, it’s not a deal breaker. The gun came with one standard mag and one with a pinky finger extension as shown above (as did my RM380). I had one failure to feed and it was the first round on the second mag I fired off. I am going to guess the mag follower needed worked a littler as it never did it again.

Shooting... this little guy did great. Shot 12 rds @ 75ft and another 12 rds @ 50ft. 2 misses but that was the shooter I can attest to that. The wife also fired off 12 rds without issue. Aside from that 1 initial feed, performed flawlessly. As I said in the beginning, wish I had bought 2... but at least I got the one.

edit: while playing with this thing I noticed that if you hold the mag release down and remove or insert the mag, it does slide in and out freely.