Last week we looked at our favorite guns from the John Wick movies. This week, let’s insert ourselves in a slightly different way; choosing our own firearms for crazy Hollywood multigun battles. I’m going to go for all of the maximum performance, Open/Unlimited division guns.

Shotgun: Dissident Arms KL-12 14″ NNS
Amusingly, even though I’m not much of a shotgun guy, this was the easiest choice to come up with. Per our rules, we need a shotgun. Going with box-mag fed shotgun means we can reload without worrying about deuces and quads nonsense. The most proven box-mag fed semiautos out there are the Dissident Arms Vepr 12 builds, which are almost an entirely new shotgun. The KL-12 comes with all of the fancy extras pre-selected, including a lengthened forcing cone on the barrel, left-side charging handle, threading the barrel for (internal) chokes that can be installed and swapped with a compensator still on the barrel, replacing the iron sights with picatinny rail segments, adding an AR stock adapter, tuning the action, installing a tuned ALG trigger, adding a magwell, installing an extended mag release, and installing an extended safety. We have but a few choices to make: stock, pistol grip, cerakote color(s), compensator model, keymod or mlok handguard, and barrel length. Vepr 12s come with a 19″ barrel from the factory, but Dissident arms will happily cut that down to 16″ or 14″ and then redo the threading for the compensator if you like, pinning and welding as necessary for the NFA. A shorter barrel is handier, and we don’t give up very much in terms of reduced length in a shotgun barrel.

Our chosen options are: the Custom Arms Competition grip (with a palm shelf), XLR Industries Tac Lite stock, Dissident Arms Phoenix Comp, Mlok handguard, and a barrel cut to 14″. We’ll go with a two-color cerakote finish, with Cobalt (actually a dark grey) as the primary color and USMC Red as the accent color.

For shotgun sights, we’ll take a Vortex AMG UH-1 atop the rear sight block rail, We’ll mount a Trijicon Type 2 RMR06 a 45 degree offset mount on the dust cover rail to let us take right hand corners more easily without switching shoulders. We’re going with the big Huey for primary because I kinda like holographics, and the offset RMR because it has the nicest controls of any microdot and window size really doesn’t matter for offset long gun sights.

Carbine: Cobalt Kinetics Evolve
This one was quite a bit harder, since I like to go out and build my own rifles from carefully chosen parts. Now I need someone to do it for me, but without choosing from a giant list of options so as not to break my own rules. So let’s try to find a rifle with the premium parts I love plus some special sauce that I can’t easily do myself. And it’s gotta look really good, because this is Hollywoodland. Enter Cobalt Kinetics. Their Evolve is their flagship competition model. It has a bunch of high-end parts, including a billet matched receiver set, billet handguard matched to the upper, 16 inch Proof Research carbon-fiber wrapped barrel, Cobalt’s excellent and effective Pro compensator, a gorgeous billet aluminum pistol grip, and a billet aluminum adjustable stock. The operating system is exactly what we’d expect with an adjustable gas block, low-mass bolt carrier, and a tuneable buffer setup with a weight and spring set for that perfect recoil feel. The safety is a 45-degree throw design, and the trigger is the exceptional AR Gold. All of that is cool. The real special feature is CARS, which will automatically drop magazines when empty, and automatically send the bolt home when you insert a full mag. This can be disabled if you prefer to do all of this manually, but it can give you a bit of a speed edge. I really like it. I also like the lines of the handguard, receivers, and stock. Everything else is classic high-end carbine parts.

We don’t have much in the way of options for the Evolve: the gunsmiths at Cobalt Kinetics have already put all of their magic into it. All we get to pick are our cerakote finish colors. Again, we’ll go with Cobalt as the primary and USMC Red as the accent color. Now our longarms are color coordinated.

Sights time. This is pretty easy. While I love my Vortex, the Swarovski Z8I-BRTi 1-8×24 has two more magnification levels, has fantastic FOV and glass clarity, and even has a bright dot. We’ll grab that and mount it with Geissele’s mount, because I’m pretty fond of that mount. We’ll grab another Trijicon Type 2 RMRO6 in a 45 degree offset mount for those hard cover leans, the occasional rapid transition, and maybe as a bit of a backup.

Pistol: Limcat Stormcat
Saving the hardest for last. Of course, I wanted a fancy Open-division ready 2011 with all of the optional extras. These tend to be custom guns made to order, which is not what my rules allowed. Sigh. Limcat makes some excellent pistols that have been used by some fantastic shooters to win a whole bunch of competitions. They’ll make you something custom, or you can order a preset model. The Stormcat is Scott Greene’s model for Unlimited Division 3-gun, which we pick for its awesome features that are compatible with minor power factor (i.e factory) ammo. We have a few options to choose here. We’ll pick a caliber of 9mm, midlength “HBar” barrel, which has a tungsten sleeve, steel grip, and a medium, flat, red SVI Trigger. I do like a heavy pistol. Heavy is good. It’s a sign of reliability. And if you ever run out of bullets, you can always hit people with it.

On to the sights. We’re going with a frame mount, of course. I’m not entirely satisfied with any of the current red dot sights on the market for pistol use. I think the best choice as far as balancing durability with window size and overall mass is the Leupold Deltapoint Pro, though I’m not a big fan of its control setup. Still, it’s a really nice dot. That gives us our heavy, really high-capacity pistol with a fantastic trigger and a cool guy compensator. Plus, plenty of fancy slide cuts and a nice finish.

Backup Pistol: Glock 26 Gen 5 with TTI Combat Carry package
I really like that John Wick carries a backup pistol, so I’m gonna get one too, by Awerbuck. I’m going with the Glock 26 Gen 5 for my backup. There are smaller backups, but I like the Glock 26’s size to balance concealment and shootability. Also the Glock 26 has a solid history of reliability. I like to stick with more proven options. The Glock 26 also allows us to use the larger Glock magazines if we like, or if we find some. The Gen 5s are pretty fantastic, and I could make do with them as they come from the factory, especially given that the excellent high-visibility Ameriglo Bold sights are a factory option. But that’s not really our style. So we’ll get a complete TTI Combat Carry package. And, since an RMR cut is an option, we’ll go with that too, and a Type 2 RMR06 for our sights. Done and done.

Knife: Ban Tang Double-Edge Clinch Pick
My grandfather gave me a pocket knife for my eighth birthday, saying that every little boy should have a pocket knife. I still like knives, and I’ve spent some time studying their use. In this context, I want something for the close in fight, something that’s easy to deploy, something to give you that extra edge¹ in a grappling engagement. The Clinch Pick is designed for exactly that purpose by Craig Douglas, and it fits well with his style of knife employment. Ban Tang makes a nicer version, available in single or double edge. We’ll take the double edge model.

There we have it. Super fancy guns, and they’ll look great on camera, which is important for Hollywood. They’re also gonna be really fun to shoot our way through various stag–er, Hollywood Gunfights with.

We’ve also earned ourselves the following achievements:
ONLY SHOOT OPEN
IRONS DEFICIENCY
THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUNS