The first floor of SHOT Show is often referred to as the dungeon. The dungeon costs a little less than the second floor, which tends to be where the big boys sit. In 2022, I crept through the dungeon and discovered the Ounce pistol. As a fan of odd and interesting guns, it instantly captured my attention.
Introducing the Ounce Pistol
The Ounce was a folding, semi-automatic, recoil-operated, locked-breech, bullpup pistol. That’s a lot to take in. A little company called Third Bay was producing the Ounce. Little companies are great because not only are they excited to see you, but you get to meet the owner, the designer, and the engineer, who are typically the same guy.
I was hooked on the Ounce and began a painstaking wait that lasted three years. I applaud Third Bay for not releasing some half-cocked weapon. They were serious about making sure the Ounce either worked or was not released at all.
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I sat on the waiting list, and as soon as I got the email saying mine was available, I promptly put in my order. Keep in mind, Third Bay did not take pre-sale money for the Ounce.
What Is the Ounce?
A bullpup, folding, semi-automatic, locked-breech .22LR gives us a lot to unpack. Let’s start by mentioning it weighs more than an ounce—it’s seven ounces unloaded. It’s named after the Benjamin Franklin quote, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
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The idea behind the Ounce is to create a gun that’s extremely easy to carry and equally easy to shoot. It’s designed from the ground up to be easy to use for people who aren’t gun people, regardless of how weak or strong their hands are.
It truly is tough to know where to start. The Ounce is a lot of things. Most of them are weird, but the other parts are good. The Ounce is a folding pistol. The frame, barrel, and magazine all fold into the pistol grip. This creates something that resembles a vape.
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What matters is that it doesn’t look like a gun when folded. It looks pretty far from a gun. There is no visible barrel, no visible trigger—just a weird, angular, blocky thing.
More Than an Ounce of Safety
It’s also safe when folded. Not only is the trigger completely covered, but when folded, the firing pin is not aligned with the cartridge. So, if it falls, it doesn’t strike the cartridge. Additionally, you can carry with the chamber empty and have no worries.
Unfolding the gun also loads the chamber. So, you’re not trying to put your seat belt on before the car crashes. The lever-action loading mechanism means there is no need to rack a slide, which is an advantage for low-hand-strength shooters.
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Technically a Bullpup
Alright, so it’s a folding gun. Next, it’s technically a bullpup. This isn’t the first bullpup pistol, but bullpup pistols are always a little odd. The magazine isn’t behind the trigger, just the action. The magazine sits above the trigger, above the barrel, and above the action.
Yep, a top-mounted magazine. It’s an integral magazine that is loaded by opening a small door and just dropping the rounds into the gun.
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The magazine is also weird. Most magazines have a spring that presses a follower, but that’s not the case here. It has a ratchet and a transporter. The action of the gun feeds rounds into the transporter and loads the chamber. The magazine requires zero hand strength to load and holds ten rounds total.
A Locked Breech Pistol
Most semi-auto .22LRs are blowback-operated firearms. In fact, every semi-automatic .22LR I know of is a blowback design—every one but the Ounce. The Ounce uses a long recoil design, much like a Browning Auto 5. This means it has a locked breech. This has two benefits.
First, even less recoil from the already near-recoil-free .22LR. Second, safety—the gun is less likely to fire out of battery. The long recoil system means the barrel and bolt reciprocate together until they bottom out. At that point, the barrel moves forward, and the bolt remains at the rear.
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Then the round ejects downward through the hollow grip. If a case gets stuck, the shooter can use a small red shelf to manually push the shells out. I never had to do that in my testing; in fact, it was hard to stage this for display purposes. The Ounce is hammer-fired, which seems to be necessary to make sure the rimfire .22LR is reliable.
Ergonomics
The grip is hollow and feels weird. It flexes a bit when you grip it, and every so often, a hot ejected case hits your hand and gives it a little sting. My only real complaint with this gun is its grip. It just feels weird. It doesn’t seem to detract from a performance perspective. However, I wish it were stiffer, just for the vibe and feel.
Besides that, the Ounce’s ergonomics are fine. There isn’t much to say about the gun. The only controls are the lever-action design to load the gun and the trigger. No slide lock, no manual safety, nothing like that.
With that said, if you are an experienced shooter, the gun won’t feel intuitive. It’s such an odd design that it lacks a slide to rack, a magazine to insert into the grip, and any other button or lock.
Most shooters can take a gun out of a box and figure it out, but that’s not the case with the Ounce. Read the manual, or better yet, watch the numerous videos on the Ounce website. For the odd design, it’s not that tough to use. It takes some practice to get the loading and chambering aspect down, but it’s not overly difficult.
Third Bay used an interesting color scheme to tell you which way to point the gun when you operate it. Red means that’s the way the barrel points. So, when you unfold it, keep the red portion pointed away from you. Blue means safe, and that means you can have that portion pointed at you. The lever to unlock the gun is blue, and the lever to fold the gun is green.
Shooting the Ounce
Alright, now that we are about a thousand words into this thing, let’s get to the range! I was apprehensive about this gun. I spent $900 on it, knowing it could be a disaster. Weird guns are rarely good guns. Who remembers the USFA ZIP? I do, because I have one and carry the weight of its disappointment. It’s like that awkward middle school photo that you just can’t get rid of.
I got my Ounce after three years of waiting, loaded it up, and let it loose. My apprehension loosened as the first ten rounds fired problem-free. Then the next ten rounds, then the next, and the next. Before I knew it, I put 300 rounds of CCI through the gun and 50 rounds of Blazer, 50 rounds of Federal Bulk Automatch, and 50 rounds of Federal Punch.
Every round was fired without a flaw. The more I shot, the more excited I got. Third Bay maintains a list of ammo that the Ounce works best with. The general guidance is full-powered, nothing subsonic, and it should be heavier than 29 grains. They also advise you to avoid lead round nose designs to prevent lead buildup in the Ounce.
You can use it, and I did, but they advise you to clean it thoroughly to avoid lead buildup. The Ounce is reliable—very reliable.
Some problems can be user-induced. More than once, I didn’t fully lock out the grip when I deployed the gun. It still fired, but the grip slipped after a shot or two. I had to stop, lock it out, and keep shooting. It’s a bit like short-stroking a pump shotgun. It’s user-induced, but the design makes it more likely, especially when shooting fast.
Shooting Straight
What really surprised me was the gun’s accuracy. The sights sit on top of the magazine. They are small, all black, and don’t contrast all that great. The short sight radius doesn’t do wonders either.
With that said, the gun shoots straight. At 15 yards, I can make a fairly tight group inside an 8-inch circle. At seven yards, I can put ten rounds of .22LR in a 2-inch-sized dot. Most of the time, at most, I’d miss the 2-inch dot twice.
At 25 yards, I could hit a reduced-sized IPSC target most of the time. Likewise, against a full-sized IPSC target, I hit it 100% of the time. Even at 50 yards, I hit the full-sized IPSC target four out of ten times—impressive for a micro-sized pocket pistol. The Ounce’s trigger isn’t the lightest, but it’s crisp and short, just a bit heavy—not bad by any means.
Recoil? There is practically none. Seriously, the gun is incredibly easy to control. It doesn’t recoil; it just burps a bit. You can fire sub-second double-taps from the low ready. I shot a 10-10-10 drill with all ten rounds in the black in 2.87 seconds. A low-ready bill drill took less than two seconds.
Unfolding the gun and getting it into action takes some practice. It took me five seconds to deploy the gun and fire ten rounds the first time from a pocket draw. I’ve knocked that down to about three seconds.
An Ounce To Go
What I like about the Ounce is that I can drop it in my pocket and forget about it. I carried it at my day job in my shirt pocket all day, and no one ever noticed. You could open carry this thing in your hand, and no one would know it was a gun.
It doesn’t look like a gun, doesn’t print like a gun, and carries with absolute ease. Plus, for the average non-gun person, the Ounce presents an easy-to-conceal, easy-to-load, recoil-free option for self-defense.
It’s accurate enough, reliable enough, and with the right .22LR, you can even get excellent penetration. .22LR might not be optimum, but if you’re a non-gun person, the Ounce has a lot to offer.
The price point might make it a tough way to enter the market. However, this is, without a doubt, the most innovative firearm I’ve seen since I joined the industry a decade and some change ago.
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