Hi-Point YC9 "Yeet Cannon" Delay Explained (SHOT Show 2022 Look Back): Supply Chain, Glock-Style Sights and a Stronger Magazine

Squat Squad, this one is a look back to SHOT Show 2022 (the video went up on February 6, 2022). I was talking with Charles from MKS Supply, the company behind Hi-Point Firearms, and even though our chat was supposed to be about something else, I had to ask the one question everybody was asking: where is the YC9, the “Yeet Cannon”?

What I got was one of the most honest answers I heard at that show. Not a launch date, but the real reason a budget gun company couldn’t just flip a switch and start shipping a brand-new pistol in the middle of the gun-buying boom.

Quick note: this is a short show interview at SHOT Show 2022, not a SlavGuns range test and evaluation. No YC9 was shot for this video, and the plans described here were current as of early 2022.

Want to see where the story ended up? Check the Hi-Point YC9 “Yeet Cannon” at KYGUNCO.

TL;DR

Status in early 2022: no date, but Charles called the YC9 “extremely close,” and hinted at 2022 without officially saying it.
Why the wait: existing Hi-Points were selling faster than the company could make them, plastic and material problems hit, and barrel material lead times went from about two months to about nine months.
The scale problem: showing a couple of prototypes is easy. Making a thousand, two thousand or three thousand guns a week is a different thing.
Changes since the early prototypes: a Glock-style front sight so you can use commercially available sights, a completely redesigned magazine welded up the back for strength, the “ears” people complained about are gone, and harder steel.

Why the Yeet Cannon was late

Here’s the part I appreciated. Charles didn’t hide behind marketing. When you already have a product that is selling like crazy and you can’t keep up with demand, it’s very hard to develop a new gun and put it into production at the same time. Bringing a couple of prototypes to a show is one thing. Building thousands of them every single week is a whole different proposition.

And then there was the supply chain. He told me Hi-Point had problems with materials and with plastics for a while, and that lead time on their barrel material went from two months to nine months. During that stretch it just wasn’t feasible to launch the YC9. Meanwhile, Hi-Points (like most other firearms at the time) kept selling really well.

He also made it clear nobody wanted that gun out more than the people at Hi-Point. In his words, the company had “millions and millions” of dollars into the YC9 already. The market simply didn’t allow them to build it at the volume they needed.

Honestly, I got it. I’d been through something similar with another manufacturer, where a gun was supposed to be announced and then got pushed. There’s no sense starting something new when you can’t even fill the demand for what you already make.

What changed on the YC9 prototype

Charles said Hi-Point had final prototypes at the show, and a few things changed compared with what people saw in earlier years:

Glock-style front sight. The point is simple: you can use commercially available sights instead of being stuck with something proprietary.
A completely redesigned magazine. They changed it about halfway through development. The new mag is welded up the back, which he said makes it much stronger.
The “ears” are gone. Everybody complained about them, so they removed them.
Harder steel. He called it much more hardened steel overall.

He couldn’t give a date. When I said “so, 2022?” he basically laughed and told me he couldn’t say. Fair enough.

How the story played out

A year later at SHOT Show 2023 we went back to the Hi-Point booth and asked the same question again. That time we got a full rundown of the YC9 feature set and a surprise 10mm handgun, the JXP10. Read that follow-up here: Hi-Point at SHOT Show 2023: where was the YC9 “Yeet Cannon,” and the new JXP10 10mm. Today the YC9 is on store shelves, so the wait did eventually end.

This interview also ties into my other SHOT Show 2022 chat with Charles about Russian ammo and Barnaul. If you have niche calibers, that one is worth a read: Barnaul ammo and the Russian import ban, SHOT Show 2022 update.

My take

This video is a good snapshot of 2022. Everybody was mad that the Yeet Cannon wasn’t out yet, but the reason wasn’t laziness. It was barrel material, plastics and a market that was buying every existing Hi-Point the company could build. The changes Charles described, like standard Glock-style sights and a stronger welded magazine, are the kind of practical stuff budget shooters actually care about. Again, this was a show-floor interview, not a range review, so judge the gun on its own merits before you buy.