The Guns of James Bond: Every Walther, Identified

Last updated September 2026 · By Nick Hall

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Quick Answer: James Bond’s gun is the Walther PPK, a .32 ACP pocket pistol he has carried in most films since 1962. Walther still builds it and you can buy one today for about $900. Two things most articles get wrong: the gun in Dr. No is not a PPK, and the gun Q hands Bond in Skyfall is not the gun the script says it is.

Every gun identification on this page is checked against the Internet Movie Firearms Database, frame by frame. Every price is the live headline from a retailer we trust on the day of writing.

Table of Contents

The Gun That Built the Character

Sixty years of films, six actors, and one small blued pistol that keeps coming back. No other prop in cinema is this closely tied to a character. Ask anyone in a gun shop what James Bond carries and you’ll get “Walther PPK” before you finish the question.

What makes it interesting is that the films have been sloppier about it than the reputation suggests. The pistol in the scene that started the whole thing is the wrong model. The pistol Q issues in Skyfall is the wrong caliber. Bond spent nine years carrying something else entirely and most people never noticed.

Here’s what he actually carries, film by film, and what each one costs if you want the real thing.

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1. The Walther PP: The Gun in Dr. No Is Not a PPK

The most famous gun scene in the series is M taking Bond’s Beretta off him and handing him a Walther. Major Boothroyd does the pitch: “Walther PPK. 7.65 mil with a delivery like a brick through a plate glass window. Takes a Brausch silencer with very little reduction in muzzle velocity. The American CIA swear by them.”

The prop he’s actually holding is a Walther PP. Longer slide, longer grip, and chambered in .380 ACP rather than the 7.65mm the dialogue specifies. The PP was the Metropolitan Police pistol of the period, which is almost certainly why one was on the armorer’s shelf in London in 1961. Watch the scene again and the proportions give it away immediately.

There’s a second problem in the same scene. M calls the Beretta underpowered. The Beretta in question fires 9mm Corto, which is the same cartridge as .380 ACP, and the PPK that replaces it fires 7.65mm, which is .32 ACP. Bond gets downgraded. The scene that made the PPK famous is built on a ballistics claim that runs backwards.

Can you buy one: not new. Walther stopped building the PP decades ago, so this is a used-market and collector proposition. The PPK and PPK/S below are the current-production descendants.

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2. Walther PPK: The Actual Bond Gun

• Action: Blowback, double action / single action, exposed hammer
• Caliber on screen: 7.65mm Browning, which is .32 ACP
• Caliber you can buy: .380 ACP and .32 ACP
• Barrel: 3.3 inches
• Capacity: 6+1 in .380, 7+1 in the PPK/S
• Films: Dr. No through No Time to Die, with a nine-year gap

From From Russia With Love onward the PPK is simply what Bond carries. Connery, Lazenby, Moore, Dalton, Brosnan and Craig have all used one. It is a 1931 design, all steel, blowback operated, and it weighs about as much as a modern 9mm while firing a cartridge with a fraction of the power.

Shoot one and you learn two things quickly. The first is that the trigger reach in double action is long and the pull is heavy, which is normal for the era. The second is slide bite. The tang is short and the slide runs back directly over the web of your hand, and if you have big hands it will find you. Ours drew blood on the second magazine until the grip changed.

None of which stops it being a lovely object. The steel is properly finished, the lockup is tight, and it points like something far more expensive. Our full Walther PPK review goes through it properly, and the best Walther pistols guide puts it against the rest of the line.

At roughly $900 for the .380 it is not a value proposition and nobody buying one thinks it is. If you want it purely as a carry gun, our .380 ACP roundup has lighter and cheaper options. If you want this gun, nothing else will do, and it is worth watching the handgun deals page because Walther runs rebates on the line more often than people expect.

Best For: The one gun on this list people buy for what it is rather than what it does.

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3. The Skyfall Gun: Q Names the Wrong Pistol

Q hands Bond a pistol and describes it as “a Walther PPK/S, nine-millimeter short”, coded to his palm print so only he can fire it. Nine-millimeter short is .380 ACP, and the PPK/S is a real gun: a PPK slide on the longer PP frame, which buys you a seventh round and gets your hand clear of the slide.

The prop is neither of those things. It is a standard PPK with mock-up grip panels, and the remastered frame above shows the slide rollmark plainly: Modell PPK-Kal. 7.65 mm. Standard PPK, .32 ACP, wearing a custom grip. The armorers grabbed the gun they had and the script did the rest.

While we are counting, the film also puts more holes in a door than Bond fires rounds, and more than a PPK holds. The palm-print reader is pure invention, though the idea had already turned up in Licence to Kill two decades earlier.

Buy the real PPK/S and you get the better gun of the two. The longer frame is what most shooters actually want, it holds one more round, and on the day we checked it was running roughly $170 under the standard PPK. Stock sits with mid-size dealers rather than the big chains, so prices move around.

Best For: Anyone who wants the Bond gun but has hands the standard PPK does not like.

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4. Walther P99: The Nine Years Everyone Forgets

From Tomorrow Never Dies in 1997 until Casino Royale in 2006, Bond’s sidearm is a Walther P99 in 9mm. Nine years and five films, and it barely registers in the public memory. The PPK reputation is that strong.

It is the better gun by a wide margin. Polymer frame, 9mm, a proper magazine, and a striker decocker that was ahead of its time. Craig carried it through the whole of Casino Royale, which means the grittiest Bond film of the modern run is a P99 film, not a PPK film.

Walther has since discontinued it. What you find now is the P99 AS Final Edition, at around $800 from the specialist dealers, and the supply is genuinely thin. If you want the shooting qualities rather than the film connection, the PDP is the modern descendant and costs less than the gun it replaced.

Best For: The Bond fan who would rather have a gun they’ll actually shoot than one they’ll admire.

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5. ArmaLite AR-7: The Bond Gun You Can Actually Afford

Bond’s briefcase rifle in From Russia With Love is an ArmaLite AR-7, chambered in .22 LR, and the same model turns up again in Goldfinger in Tilly Masterson’s hands. It is the one gun on this page a normal person can buy on a whim.

Henry builds it today as the U.S. Survival AR-7, and at about $288 it costs less than a third of the PPK. The barrel and action stow inside the buttstock, the whole thing weighs three and a half pounds, and it floats. It was designed for air crews to carry in a survival kit, which is exactly the sort of detail the films liked.

It is not accurate in any serious sense and the sights are what you’d expect. It is also enormous fun, and it is the cheapest possible way to own something Bond carried. If .22 is your thing, our .22 LR pistol guide covers the handgun side.

Best For: A first rifle, a truck gun, or the cheapest honest way into the Bond collection.

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The Beretta M Took Away

Before the Walther there was a Beretta, and in Dr. No it is a Beretta M1934. In Fleming’s novels it was a smaller gun again, a .25, which is where the “underpowered” line comes from. The film swapped the gun and kept the dialogue, which is how the scene ended up making a claim the hardware contradicts.

The M1934 is a collector’s gun now. Beretta’s modern equivalent in spirit is the 92 series, which has had its own long run on screen, and which we cover in the guns of TV legends series.

What the Bond Guns Actually Cost Today

The spread is wider than people expect. The AR-7 is under $300. The PPK/S is around $730 and the standard PPK around $900. The discontinued P99 sits near $800 and is getting harder to find, while the PDP that replaced it costs about $600 and is a better gun than either.

So the full set, the two Walthers plus the rifle, is a little over two thousand dollars at current prices. That is a real number rather than a fantasy one, which is part of why this particular film collection has stayed popular with shooters. We put the wider numbers together in what it costs to own the movie hero guns, and if you want to understand why screen guns so often aren’t what the script claims, how Hollywood armorers work explains the practical side.

Prices on the Walther line move with rebates more than most brands, so the handgun deals page and the wider gun deals roundup are worth a look before you commit to a PPK at full retail.

Which Bond Gun Should You Buy?

If you want the icon, buy the PPK and accept what it is. It’s heavy for the caliber, it will bite a big hand, and it costs twice what a modern .380 costs. None of that matters, because nobody buys this gun for ballistics. Get the PPK/S instead if your hands are large, since the longer frame fixes the one real ergonomic complaint and saves money at the same time.

If you want something to shoot, the P99 is the honest answer and the PDP is the sensible one. And if you just want to own something Bond carried without spending real money, the Henry AR-7 does it for under three hundred dollars, which is the best value on this entire page.

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