I had the incredibly good fortune of winning this firearm during a raffle conducted at the 2025 Bianchi Cup Awards dinner. I was definitely excited about winning a gun when my ticket number was called, but I wasn’t familiar with Pardini, so I had no idea how special this was. It wasn’t until I was approached by a few people after the Awards dinner who congratulated me on winning “the prize of the evening” that it began to dawn on me that this wasn’t your typical handgun.
A few weeks later when I made my first trip to the range with the GT9, those congratulatory comments, as well as what I had read during my own research, were convincingly confirmed. The GT9 is the heaviest of my competition pistols, but this is not a drawback; the weight, balance, side porting on the slide, and the angle of the grip, which drives more of the recoil straight back through your strong side arm, makes this the softest shooting 9mm I have ever shot. The weight of the trigger pull is appropriately light for a competition pistol (right around 2lbs) and there is minimal trigger reset travel, which will make follow up shots or rapid strings easy to execute. And the fact that these trigger parameters are easily adjustable via the two screws that can be accessed via the cut out in the bottom of the trigger guard is a real plus.
(A friend of mine, who is a long time competitive shooter, and who also likes to pull my chain, asked if he could dry fire my GT9 to see what the trigger was like. I obliged him and after he tested the trigger and trigger reset, I saw a slight smile before he turned to hand the gun back to me and remark with a now somber expression, “Well it’s not the greatest trigger I’ve ever experienced…. “ And then as I stared at him in disbelief, he concluded, “It’s just the best damn trigger ever!”)
The performance and accuracy of the GT9 are also impressive. The smooth operation of the slide is well beyond what I’ve experienced with any other semi-auto pistol (one reviewer characterized it as being like “ a glass moving across Teflon”). Racking the slide requires little eAort and standard factory rounds have reliably cycled and ejected.
Out of the box with no sight adjustments and using standard factory ammo (CCI Blazer 115 grn FMJ), accuracy was excellent. (If there are misses on my target when I use this gun, it will be me, not the gun.) Recently I shot 35 rounds at a standard AP1 target (used for NRA Action Pistol , 4 inch diameter X ring inside of an 8 inch diameter 10 ring). My shots were from 10, 15, 20, and 25 yards, with over half of the rounds (about 20) being shot from 20 and 25 yards. All shots were done free style. Results: 16 – X; 16 -10; 2 just outside the 10 ring and 1 errant shot that occurred early when I was getting used to the sensitivity of the trigger. I like this gun a lot! Kudos to Pardini for creating such a fine handgun.
B O’Boyle