I set out to buy a Hi-Point in .40 or .45 a few years ago out of morbid curiosity, just so I could experience holding and shooting the world’s ugliest contemporary semi-auto before selling it a short while later. I placed a few slightly lowball bids on multiple auctions at the same time and accidentally wound up with two like-new Hi-Points in .45 (for $83 and $90). D’oh! I shot 50 rounds through each of them, and that was more than enough to scratch the itch. I planned from the outset to get rid of them, but they were basically worth less to me than the time that would involve, so they were with me until December 2020, when I finally started clearing out guns I didn't want anymore (with all the new panic buyers on GB bidding them up to stupid levels).
Anyway, the experience was fairly typical, from what I’ve read. One had a single failure to feed with WWB 230-gr. JHP. Notwithstanding the frequent claim that Hi-Points are every bit as reliable as more expensive, higher-quality semi-autos, failures to feed appear to be a fairly common problem -- but also one that's apparently pretty easy to remedy with some adjustments to the shoddy mags and perhaps some polishing of the feed ramp, according to Hi-Point fans. They shoot quite accurately, if one can overcome the trigger. Barrels seem to be of surprisingly high quality for the price. The guns are not quite the “tanks” they're proclaimed to be, however, as even slides fashioned from an enormous amount of Zamak are not going to approach steel for fatigue life, but they’re also not imminently dangerous to the shooter in the way some of the other pot-metal stuff is (Jennings, Bryco, and others).
They’re comically crude, but they’ll generally get the job done for quite a while. I thought they ceased to have much of a purpose in the market from roughly 2017 to early 2020, when you could find a fair number of high-quality semi-autos from respected manufacturers for rock-bottom prices, but with the panics and shortages of the last two years, the latter guns have all ballooned in price, and Hi-Points are once again significantly less expensive than almost everything.
