Tombstone 9mm Lever Gun Is Fully Tactical With a 20-Round Mag

It’s been a while since a gun company released a tactical lever-action rifle, but Patriot Ordnance Factory stepped up on Jan. 2 with what you could call an unconventional entry in the category: the new Tombstone 9mm, which doesn’t look anything like the guns they would have had in Tombstone, Arizona, in the late 1800s.

“The Tombstone 9mm lever-action rifle pays tribute to the legendary Old West town of the same namesake while bringing the iconic platform into the modern era,” said POF’s narrator doing his best Sam Elliott impression.

If you’ve never seen the movie, Tombstone is the historical account of an Arizona boomtown where Kurt Russell and Val Kilmer resist their sexual urges for one another — wait, no. That’s a completely different movie.

The real town of Tombstone was “built on silver and made infamous by the gunslinger’s iron and lead,” according to POF’s video. It’s the place where Wyatt Earp, his brothers, and Doc Holliday had an infamous gunfight that has become a piece of American folklore replicated in countless movies and TV shows over the years, including Tombstone.

And according to the gunmaker’s comments on Facebook, the company’s new gun bearing the legendary Arizona town’s name is the first ever lever-action rifle chambered in 9mm. It also may be the highest-capacity centerfire lever gun on the market today.

A New Kind of Lever Gun

Anyway, POF-USA described the Tombstone 9mm carbine as a “modern-lever-action” rifle, meaning it has popular features such as ambidextrous controls, a 16.5-inch free-floating fluted barrel, a removable dual-port muzzle brake, ghost ring sights, front and rear quick-detach mounts, a Magpul stock, and a single-stage flat-faced trigger tuned for a 3.5-pound pull.

The POF Tombstone 9mm features a 20-round magazine, a flat-faced trigger, cross-bolt safety, and ghost ring sights.

Instead of a wooden or solid polymer handguard, the skeletal handguard on the Tombstone sports rows of M-LOK slots at the 3, 6, and 9 o’clock positions for accessories and features a 2-inch Picatinny optics rail atop the receiver. This system is much more accommodating for user customization than most of what’s currently available on factory lever guns.

The unique-looking handguard also owes its looks to the fact that the Tombstone 9mm ditches a tubular magazine and instead feeds ammo from a proprietary 20-round double-stack box magazine — the kind of mag the 9mm cartridge was made for. In fact, if you rest the gun on the mag while shooting prone, you may just have enough room to work the action.

Since posting the announcement of the gun’s release on social media, the Tombstone 9mm has generated plenty of comments. While it garnered the typical “WTFs” and complaints about the $2,000 price tag, POF has given further insight into the thinking behind the design.

While the proprietary magazine might be a turnoff for some, the company said it’s compatible with other POF guns; specifically, this carbine can use the 10-round magazine designed for the Phoenix pistol.

Why chamber it in 9mm instead of a ballistically similar rimmed cartridge? POF says they did it because the 9mm is much more silencer friendly than traditional lever-action rounds, just in case you wanna go full tacticool. Plus, this could be a great option for people who want to run modern accessories on a pistol caliber carbine but live in a restricted state — but they’ll have to grab some of those POF 10-rounders.

The Tombstone 9mm will be available in black and flat dark earth and will retail for $1,962 and $2,097, respectively. There has been no word on when it’ll be available in stores.