Trailblazer Pivot
The Rifle Reimagined
With the buttstock extended, it becomes a high-quality, practical 9mm carbine ...
The Trailblazer Pivot is a radically unconventional 9mm rifle designed to collapse into a compact package for covert portage or handy storage. The Pivot feeds from standard GLOCK 19 magazines and is threaded to accept a sound suppressor. However, it’s the only thing conventional about this firearm. The patented action of the Pivot, well … pivots. The top half swings around the bottom half with the press of a button. The resulting package sports a 16″ barrel but a collapsed length is only 5″ longer. The practical applications are thought-provoking, to say the least.
... when collapsed, the Trailblazer Pivot only sort-of looks like a gun.
Dispatches From The Dark Side
Dirk Studman leaned forward quietly nursing his Doodh Pati Chai. The thick, milky tea was ubiquitous here in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa of Pakistan. Studman suspected the stuff would make a superlative paint stripper. He had developed a taste for it over the course of several operations in this ghastly part of the world.
Dirk Studman was a SAD agent. That’s not to say his time as a hitter with the CIA had left him depressed. He thrived on the work. SAD stood for Special Activities Division. Dirk Studman was an assassin.
Studman had been recruited out of the U.S. Army’s Special Forces Operational Detachment — Delta. Now four years into his time with The Agency, he spoke Pashto like a native and could pass himself off as a terrorist. It was a marketable skill. To kill a terrorist sometimes you had to act like a terrorist.
His target was Saqlain Muhammad Shahi and he was a proper psychopath. After having been forcibly ejected from ISIS for cannibalism, the monster now worked freelance. His latest masterwork involved an elementary school and puppies. For this and a few other things, Uncle Sam determined he must die. As Shai kept to crowds, the standard Hellfire-off-a-drone approach would have been unduly messy. He therefore got to meet Dirk Studman. Their professional relationship would be brief.
Shahi arrived alone and took his regular seat at the outdoor café nearest the wall before ordering something vile. Studman saw no reason to drag this thing out unduly. He took one quick look around before discreetly unzipping his book bag and extracting his Trailblazer Pivot 9mm collapsible rifle. He deployed the gun on the draw and had the glowing red dot hovering over Shahi’s chest before the puppy-killing terrorist could react.
“Take this, you furry turd,” Studman muttered as he squeezed the trigger. The Trailblazer Pivot and three bucks’ worth of 9mm hollowpoints had just made the world a much better place. Forty minutes later, Dirk Studman was enjoying a cold Coke in a cheap hotel room while debriefing his Agency handlers on the mission particulars.
The Trailblazer Pivot is markedly smaller than most common comparable weapons (shown here with the HK MP3) while offering a rifle-length barrel, collapsible stock and superlative engineering.
Back In The Real World
Steely-eyed muscle-bound professional killers lurking in the shadows dispensing death at bad breath range are not technically real. Guys like me make them up for adventure novels, movie scripts and top-quality gun magazines. However, if Dirk Studman was a real guy and he needed a compact reliable firearm to rid the world of some terrorist menace, he would wield the Trailblazer Pivot.
This is the best time in human history to be a gun nerd. Yeah, you could buy Tommy guns over the counter back in 1933, but literally nobody in the country who wasn’t a criminal could afford them. By contrast, nowadays the full power of the Information Age is focused on giving us defensive firearms that are reliable, lightweight, effective and cool. The top of that heap is the Trailblazer Pivot.
Trailblazer Firearms are the guys who brought us the LifeCard. This single-shot .22-caliber pocket gun occupies the same space as about half a dozen credit cards. It really will fit in your wallet in a pinch. In the words of the company, it is the last gun you’ll leave behind. Building upon their experience crafting concealable firearms, Trailblazer’s mob of gun-crafting maniacs has taken everything to the next level.
The LifeCard is undeniably cool, but it is not the most practical weapon in the safe. It is the gun you drop into your pocket and use when more conventional iron is either not available or otherwise out of the fight. By contrast, the Pivot is a practical and effective defensive tool.
When fired off a rest at typical 13-meter CQB ranges, the Trailblazer Pivot almost prints a single jagged hole.
Pivot Particulars
Pistol braces were fun while they lasted, but those days appear to be gone. Now to produce a truly compact shoulder arm that will pass muster with the BATF, you have to get creative. The Trailblazer guys live in this creative space.
The Pivot is a semi-automatic, magazine-fed, direct blowback 9mm rifle. The gun weighs 5 lbs. and there is space to carry the magazine in the stock. When collapsed, the Pivot is 1.15″ thick and 5.9″ tall. There is plenty of Picatinny rail for optics and there are M-LOK slots up front for accessories. The top-mounted charging handle runs like an HK MP5. The thumb safety is reproduced on both sides. The magazine release is comparable to your favorite GLOCK pistol.
Construction is polymer, steel and aluminum, and the workmanship on my test gun was flawless. The flat-faced trigger drives an internal hammer. The fire-control parts are finished in a slippery, indestructible gold finish. The Pivot incorporates a mechanical interlock preventing it from firing unless the gun is in the extended rifle state.
The weapon sports a 16″ threaded barrel and a collapsible stock. It feeds through the pistol grip and, when deployed, runs like a fairly conventional rifle. Everything else about the Pivot is weird — but it’s a good kind of weird.
To deploy the gun you stroke the action release and pivot the top half around 180 degrees. Everything locks in place automatically. You can then deploy the buttstock as desired. Breaking the gun down for storage involves clearing the action, removing the magazine, hitting the release catch and doing everything in reverse.
Trigger Time
Like all 9mm blowback weapons, recoil is spunkier than you might expect, but without being unpleasant. The trigger is fairly long and creepy like most military-style weapons. Plinking at discarded beverage cans with the Pivot is a great way to kill a lazy Saturday afternoon at the range. Pay attention to what you’re doing and the 16″ barrel produces single jagged holes at CQB ranges. In full beast mode with a SIG optic, Streamlight TLR-8G light/laser, SilencerCo Osprey sound suppressor, and an extended 33-round magazine the Pivot is a close quarters monster.
Magazine changes are both fast and intuitive. I found it easier to manage the magazine release with my weak hand. The action must be manually cycled between mags, but a zillion HK MP5 users can’t be wrong. The gun fed hollowpoint rounds as readily as it did the cheap hardball stuff. Overall, the Trailblazer Pivot is handy, reliable and fun.
With an MSRP of $1,795, the Pivot isn’t cheap. It is magnificently well-made and terribly clever, but such stuff costs money. However, whether you are a defensive-minded civilian, a cop maintaining a low profile or a CIA SAD operative like Dirk Studman, the Trailblazer Pivot is reliably good company in bad places.
