I was too young to catch Miami Vice in prime time, but I didn’t miss out on it entirely. My dad enjoyed the show, and through the joy of reruns, I more or less grew up watching the show. I think it really shaped my enjoyment of firearms and media. It’s not a big surprise that the guns are great, especially with Michael Mann behind the wheel. The series really encapsulates the era of firearms and pushes them front and center to millions of households every week. With that in mind, what are Miami Vice’s best guns? Which ones really encapsulated the 1980s?
The Bren Ten
The Bren Ten was Crockett’s gun in the first and second seasons and arguably the most famous from the series. In the 1980s, the DA/SA design chambered an entirely new cartridge, the 10mm auto. The 10mm auto hit hard, moved fast, and was flat-shooting. Michael Mann wanted the most modern handgun possible for his hero character, and he got it. The creators of the Bren Ten even hand-crafted two guns for the production.
The Bren Ten promised to be the best combat pistol since the M1911. Jeff Cooper helped design the round and later had input on its production. The pistol essentially took a CZ 75 design and upscaled it to 10mm, utilizing a single-stack magazine. The idea sounds great.
Unfortunately, Dornaus and Dixon dropped the ball. The gun’s popularity exploded in and out of the usual circles. The show Miami Vice was a huge hit, and the gun was immensely popular. They tried to pump guns out as fast as possible, and they cut corners and sent guns out that weren’t properly QC’ed and even lacked magazines. The Bren Ten was a spectacular failure.
The KG-99
The KG-99 was an early, open model of the TEC-9. The KG-99 series were popular bad guy guns, and Miami Vice helped popularize the image of the TEC-9 style pistol as the bad guy gun. The KG-99’s open bolt design made it very easy to convert to full auto, and production did just that, legally, of course. Plenty of people didn’t do it legally, and that made the ATF crack down on open-bolt guns.
The KG-99 is a really simple, brutish, downright crude weapon. It’s a huge 9mm pistol that’s absurd and less functional than a Glock. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t necessarily innovative. Well, it had one innovation: the polymer frame. Polymer frames weren’t popular in this era, but the KG-99 rocked one without shame.
The TEC-9 features an aggressive look that did not translate into an effective firearm. The magazine is forward of the pistol grip, the barrel shroud, and the obnoxious size made it stand out and great as a movie star. It was always a bad guy gun in Miami Vice, and in real life, it was viewed the same. It was worth noting that the actual submachine gun variant, the KG-9, made an appearance in season 3.
Ithaca 37 Stakeout
I think my love of shotguns might have come from playing Miami Vice with my older brother. He got to be Crockett, and I was Tubbs. Tubbs seemed to have a real affinity for shotguns, specifically short shotguns. He used a double barrel early on but eventually seemed to settle on a slick, custom Ithaca 37 Stakeout shotgun. The Ithaca 37 Stakeout was already a short-barreled AOW, but Miami Vice made it shorter.
Tubb’s Ithaca follows the Serbu Super Shorty routine. It looks like it has a two- or maybe a three-round magazine. The pump is replaced with a folding vertical grip, and the barrel wears a heat shield. There are no sights. It’s a PGO blaster that’s a point-and-shoot affair. The Ithaca pistol grip features a single sling point at the top, which allows it to easily fit under an 80s suit jacket.
The Ithaca 37 Stakeout occupies the 80’s world of shotguns by having nothing more than a pistol grip. That was a staple of 1980s shotguns in both film and media. Even police forces saw an uptick in PGO shotguns, which were often desired for their compact size. The downside is the fierce recoil.
MAC SMGs
I’m almost positive that the only gun that graced every single season of Miami Vice was some form of MAC. It’s mostly MAC 10 clones with a few Cobray M11/9 appearances. The MAC is another bad guy gun that occupies the hand of every smuggler, drug dealer, and criminal on the black market. Every so often, the bad guy guns become good guy guns when needed.
The MAC series of guns is another favorite of movie armorers. These guns were also released as open-bolt semi-auto guns and became easy machine gun conversions for movie sets. Much like the KG series, the MACs encouraged the ATF to get rid of open-bolt semi-autos.
MACs are mean little machine pistols/submachine guns. They are straight blowback bricks of metal with a flimsy stock and terrible accuracy but are surprisingly reliable. The little MAC series was incredibly affordable and came bad guy-ready.
Colt Carbines
Throughout the series, both the bad guys and good guys use various Colt carbines. Police officers, SWAT teams, and high-end hitmen carry the guns. We know there are various Colt carbines, and Miami Vice brought plenty to the table. One of the best is a bad guy wielding a Colt’ submachine gun’ style rifle in 5.56 with a 100-round drum and massive later sight connected to an external battery pack.
Other examples include classics like the Colt 654 and 733. Both of which later appeared in Heat. These represented insanely modern Colt rifles for the era and predate the widespread acceptance of carbines as a whole.
We see guns like the Sporter 1 carbine, the M16 series and even the DEA carries classic Colt SMGs. Michael Mann seemed to recognize the potential of the AR and the fact that it was the future of police weapons and keyed it into his show when possible.
Miami Vice Will Always Rule
In the 2006 Miami Vice film, some of the same themes followed. Crockett liked high-end, large-bore firearms. Tubbs like shotguns, and everything’s high-tech. Miami Vice in the 1980s is a little cheesy these days, but honestly, it’s still a fun show. You’ll see lots of Weaver stances and chicken wings, but these were a symptom of the era. If you like guns of the 1980s, then Miami Vice will scratch that itch.
