No, this is not a middle-aged woman chasing young guys while smoking a stogie...

Looking for an inexpensive carry gun, I bought a Stoeger Cougar in .40 S&W today.

Click image to see larger picture.


It has my favorite fire control mechanism. - It can be fired single or double-action, and has a de-cocker. The magazine holds 11 rounds, so with one in the chamber you have twelve.

The double-action pull is much better than I expected, one of the best I've ever encountered. It really surprised me. The single-action pull is good too, but I kind of expected that.

Everything works well on it, all of the controls are positive, the sights are good. Nothing about it cries out "Cheap Gun", in fact it seems to be a quality piece. My son noted that the barrel rotates slightly upon locking up. - Dunno what the deal is with that.

They're made in Turkey.

Tomorrow I'll take it to the range and see how it behaves. My first impression though is very good.

More later.

I have 2 of Beretta 8040 Cougars and they seem to do everything well. Nice pistols. My understanding is Stoeger procured Beretta's tooling so would expect high quality.

I have had the same gun as the OP for 5 years now, a stoeger cougar in .40 S&W. If I could shoot a pistol worth a crap I could really help you out, but since I can't I'll tell you that the cougar is pretty good gun from what I can tell, so far it has yet to fail to feed, jam, fail to eject, or fail to fire. I have ran probably 3000 rounds through it, from hornady and federal self defense ammo to the absolute cheapest ammo I could get my hands on and it has cycled and shot all of them reliably. I don't have a lot of experience with pistols, but I believe this gun is probably the most dependable and reliable pistol for the price.

I had one in 9mm that shot great and always cycled.