Rule3 said:
A 1911 is still a 1911, AR is a AR Look at these Turkish chunks of metal Canik or what ever yet another CZ clone. You can also dispute the most issued pistol for Military and Police (CZ claims) Folks in the USA do not realize how big the rest of the World is. But this is another topic well beaten into the dirt.
Folks in the USA also do not realize that marketing hype is just hype -- or that they're reading more into CZ's advertizing than is actually there...
CZ claims the that their weapons are the
most widely-used, not the
most-issued. CZ has certainly sold a lot of CZs to many different police departments in Africa, the Middle East, spots in Europe, and elsehwere in the world; they can probably justify the claim of "most widely used." But, they haven't sold many CZ semi-auto handguns to national military organizations.
Beretta has probably sold more M9s to the U.S government than CZ has sold to all the militaries and police departments in the world. Throw in all of the CZ copies and clones, and I doubt you will unseat Beretta from the top of the "most-issued" list.
As best I can tell, Beretta's total sales to the U.S. government is right at 1 million units, counting the initial order of around 400,000 in 1985, 450,000 in 2009, and 100,000 more ordered this year.. (It's hard to find details.) The civilian version of the M9 was also widely used by police departments in the U.S. for a number of years, and they're still a popular civilian weapon here. Beretta has been successful elsewhere, too -- starting with Brazil where they built guns for the Brazilian military and later sold the factory and rights to make that specific weapon to Taurus! Several NATO countries also used the M9 over the past couple of decades.
While the CZ may be the most COPIED design,
it's clearly not the most widely used design, even when all of the rip-off copies are thrown into the totals! The Warsaw Pact never used the CZ-75 and also never used the 9x19 round; had it been used there, that would have evened things out a bit. The few places where the CZ-75/75B has had military use are relatively small. Israel bought rights to the Tanfoglio version and then made their own; after buying some true CZs, Turkey did the same. You have to keep in mind, however, that most military organizations don't issue handguns widely; they end up being issued to pilots, armored crews, military police, and officers. Police departments use more, but they tend have far fewer members.
I'm a big CZ fan and was a long-time moderator on the original CZ forum. In the late 90s and early 2000s a bunch of us there spent a lot of time and effort trying to track down details that substantiated what we thought were the CZ marketing claims. We never did -- but we also come to understand that we had misinterpreted those claims.
It now looks as though CZ is starting to make headway with military users, but it's mostly thanks to the new P-07/P-09 design. The fact that CZ survived the the fall of the Soviet Union and successfully adapted to capitalist practices is a major achievement!
That they survived tells you a lot about the organization and the true worth of their products.
Wikipedia has a pretty good list of CZ military and police users, but shows only 18 organizations. If you investigate, you'll see that NONE of those organizations have a large number of members. There are probably many other small departments using CZs, but the total number of weapons used is certainly modest. Here's a link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CZ_75 Scroll to the bottom. You'll also see who makes or made a bunch of the copies
.