Review: Savage Stance XR

The micro-compact 9 mm pistol fad could fairly be laid at the feet of Kahr in the late 1990s, but for whatever reason it never really took off at the time. Maybe there weren’t enough “Shall-Issue” states, or maybe the early Kahr 9 mm pistols were too expensive, but regardless, these tiny nines remained niche. We hadn’t gotten around to railroading time yet.

There were offerings from a host of manufacturers that tried to ignite the category over the next decade or so, but it wouldn’t really burgeon in popularity until the early 2010s, when the 9 mm M&P Shield was launched by Smith & Wesson, shortly followed by the Glock G43.

Near the end of this period came the Honor Guard 9 from Honor Defense. In many ways it was merely an improved Smith & Wesson Shield, but it was snakebit from launch by numerous factors, among them the fact that Shield overproduction on the part of Smith & Wesson caused the Springfield, MA, manufacturer to drop massive quantities of M&P Shields onto the market at near-cost prices, and also that SIG Sauer, fresh off the marketplace failure of its hammer-fired P290 micro single-stack, had rebounded with the new, striker-fired, larger-capacity, chassis-equipped P365 that continues to sell in enormous quantities to this day.

Speaking officially, we do not know that there is any connection whatsoever between the Honor Guard 9 and the similar Savage Stance. Savage stays commendably coy on the topic. What we can say is that when Honor Defense left the party via the back door, about 5 minutes later Savage showed up at the front door with the Stance, a pistol that looked for all the world like an Honor Guard 9 with a handful of cosmetic and mechanical changes.

We’ll save the “Just where exactly did the Honor Guard 9 go?” questions for future college business textbooks, but undercapitalization and an overworked engineering department are frequently accused as culprits in the rather precarious field of firearms-manufacturing startups.

Savage, on the other hand, had a larger, well-funded engineering staff and wasn’t teetering on the brink of undercapitalization. Its Stance had a few important differences between it and the Honor Guard 9 that we recounted in the review of the Stance in 2022. Initially, those changes were largely cosmetic to establish the Stance as a Savage-branded product.

More importantly, it looks like the engineering department dove into the guts of the whole Stance pistol and put on a full- court press to make it relevant in the current, post-P365 concealed-carry market. I found out about this when an e-mail came through inviting me to come on down to Range Ready in Louisiana for a sneak preview product unveiling in summer of 2024.

On arriving at the firearm-training facility, I popped open the foam-lined clamshell hard cases with the Savage logo molded into the lids and—well, at first it looked like our old friend, the Stance. Appearances, however, can be deceiving.

Things that were the same as the original Stance included the general shape and contours of the slide, including the “speed holes” above the front cocking serrations through which the bare stainless of the barrel glints alluringly, the texture and overall look of the frame with its interchangeable backstraps and the low-profile slide releases and teardrop-shaped magazine release buttons, which are really and truly ambidextrous and equally accessible, no matter your particular handedness.

The most immediately noticeable difference was the appearance of the trigger shoe. The original Stance from Savage used a regular, one-piece trigger shoe. While this is less expensive and simpler, it’s asking a lot from internal springs and the mechanical-engagement angles between sears and strikers. Essentially, if the pistol is dropped with a round chambered and lands on the top-rear corner of the slide, only various mechanical inefficiencies are keeping inertia from pulling the trigger. Glock popularized one solution to this problem by putting a separate, pivoting tab in the center of the trigger shoe. Since the lightweight tab and the heavier trigger shoe had very different inertias, the pistol being dropped onto the top corner of the slide could no longer cause the pistol to discharge.

The resulting trigger pull, while not a lightweight target trigger by any means, is a carry-acceptable 7 pounds. The pull is quite smooth, with a moderate amount of stacking before the break. It feels most like a light double-action revolver trigger, albeit with a very short travel.

The biggest functional change, on the other hand, is hardly noticeable at all. The engineers at Savage widened the magazine body so the capacity of the flush-fitting magazine ballooned by more than 40 percent, from seven to 10 cartridges. That’s a lot of eXtra Rounds (get it?). The pistol also ships with an extended 13-round magazine with a slip-on, textured-plastic spacer to blend with the grip and offer a place for the shooter’s pinkie.

Another change is that, while disassembly remains the same as before (remove the magazine, double-check that the pistol is unloaded, lock the slide to the rear, rotate the takedown lever on the left side of the frame 90 degrees, and run the slide forward off the frame) the engineers at Savage heard the lamentations of original Stance customers and fitted the XR with a captive recoil spring, making reassembly 1,000 percent less annoying.

Atop the slide, the Stance XR can be had with either plain iron sights or, like our test pistol, night sights. These latter consist of a tritium vial surrounded by a bright-orange Hi Viz insert up front and un-highlighted tritium vials in the otherwise plain-black rear blade. The front sight is a fairly chunky .154 inch wide, due to the tritium vial and fluorescent surround, so the square rear notch is correspondingly wide to allow ample daylight on either side. Like the original, the Stance XR uses a Glock-sight-compatible threaded tenon in front and dovetail in the rear. Oh, and the sights are tall enough to accommodate a co-witness should you install a dot, and that’s a good thing because every Stance XR is cut for a mini red-dot sight. (In fact, you can even get them with a Crimson Trace MRDS from the factory.)

Before I describe the unique mounting system, I’d like to congratulate Savage for doing the consumer-friendly thing of just having every XR dot-ready from the factory straight from the jump, rather than doing the annoying “release an uncut version one year and then a separate dot model a year or two later” two-step.

As to the mounting system itself, it’s an answer to the pistol manufacturer’s dilemma in an era where we have yet to standardize on dot footprints. To wit, you could either mount the MRDS directly to the slide, thereby limiting the potential sights your customers could use, or you could put an adapter plate between the dot and the slide and thereby introduce an extra weak point in the mounting assembly, as many early adopters of the Glock MOS discovered the hard way.

The problem with traditional adapter-plate systems is that the sight is mounted to the plate with one set of screws, and the plate is mounted to the slide with a second set, and those latter screws are neither visible nor accessible with a sight mounted. To date, the best solution had been the one used by FN, where the most common sight footprints were accommodated with long screws that ran through the sight and the plate both, with a compressed-rubber donut keeping everything snug.

Savage went a different route and eliminated the second set of screws entirely, using what it calls the QRO, for “Quick Release Optics” system.

To mount a dot, use a (provided) tool to depress what at first appears to be a little set screw in the upper-left corner of the rear of the slide. With this depressed, the cover plate will slide to the right off of the top of the slide. Then, take the optics plate—with the red dot of your choice already fitted—and, lining the two notches on the bottom of the plate up with the dovetails on top of the slide, slide it on from the right with the release button depressed. When it’s properly centered, the button will latch it into place audibly. This allows the optic to sit nice and low. With an RMSc-size optic, the factory sights will actually give a true co-witness, making dot sight-in a breeze.

The result is a pistol with shootability that belies its small size. The test pistol hasn’t had a stoppage in more than 600 rounds of assorted ball and hollowpoint ammunition (is that eXtremely Reliable?) and is capable of shooting sub-3-inch groups at 15 yards with ease, despite the heavy-ish trigger.

Even with the dot mounted, this is a slim pistol. The widest parts are at the slide-release levers and the dot itself, at a few hundredths less than an inch.

While there were some complainants about the trigger weight at the launch event, your correspondent was not among them—but I do shoot rather a lot of double-action revolvers, so a 7-pound, striker trigger was a seaside vacation for me. Shooting with the extended magazine is disconcerting for some because the adaptor collar
wiggles around some under recoil. Also, unlike the original Stance, the XR has decided to be trendy and add a three-slot Picatinny rail to the dustcover, although the number of lights that would fit flush with that stubby cover can be counted without having to remove your mittens.

With MSRP at $469 for the base Stance XR, $539 for night sights and $659 for an included, pre-mounted Crimson Trace MRDS, the newer higher-capacity replacement for the original Stance is an all-American-made pistol that’s worth a look.