chiappa rhino

Cool (looking) gun

My opinion is that if Chiappa made a variant that held 8 cartridges, moved the Picatinny rail back to a place where it would actually be useful for mounting a weapon light you could hit with your fingers while maintaining a firing grip on the pistol, did away with the useless metal above the barrel so I could mount an Aimpoint Micro or Trijicon RMR between the iron sights, then I would seriously consider picking one up.

Until Chiappa does all of that, I see the Rhino as a neat but impractical curiosity. The grip angle and barrel placement really do seem to mitigate the recoil problem by changing the dynamics of how it affects the shooter, but it doesn't make up for limited capacity, extraneous and heavy metal that provides no place to mount a co-witness micro optic, and a Picatinny weapon light rail that's in the wrong place. Smith & Wesson does the same stupid thing.

The point of having a weapon light is to provide the shooter with an illumination tool that he or she can access while maintaining a firing grip on the weapon. The placement of the rail pretty much negates any advantage of a weapon mounted white light.

For whatever silly reason, there's a school of thought that says the weapon light has to be mounted as far forward as possible to negate shadow cast by the barrel.

Perhaps you could mount one of those stupid micro bayonets on it for some added tacticoolness.

The plastic grip model would be the one I would choose, but the grip texture needs to be the same as that of the wooden grip models.

Apart from that, it's a neat concept gun.