Contrary to popular belief, Glock was not the first auto pistol with a polymer frame. This Heckler & Koch P9S which pre-dated the Glock considerably with a “plastic frame,” was not a huge marketing success.
Insert magazine. Rack slide. That’s it. Now shoot it like you would a revolver, taking care to keep your thumb away from the slide and your firing wrist locked, as you would with any semiautomatic pistol.
If you want a manual safety for weapon retention purposes, or because it just gives you peace of mind after a lifetime with some other brand of pistol carried on-safe, an excellent right-hander’s thumb safety can be installed at very reasonable cost by Joe Cominolli, PO Box 911, Solvay, NY 13209.
The Glock is an extraordinarily reliable and long-lived pistol. It is light, fast-handling, and very controllable. The polymer frame can be seen to flex in high-speed photography as it fires, and this seems to provide a recoil-cushioning effect that is enhanced by the natural “locked wrist” angle of its grip-frame. The Hybrid Porting conversion, which reduces recoil by sending several gas jets up through the top of what used to be the slide, will vampire as much as 100 feet per second of velocity and create a louder report, but allows amazing shot-to-shot control. While it seems to take a master gunsmith to make Hybrid-porting work reliably on a 1911, the Glock seems to function perfectly with it installed.
The Glock is southpaw-friendly and lends itself to ambidextrous shooting. A growing cottage industry offers useful accessories for it. Laser sights are available from Laser-Max and Crimson Trace. Models made in the last few years, compact size and larger, have an accessory rail that will accommodate a flashlight. The company has always been scrupulously good about customer service in terms of parts and repairs.
Accuracy is adequate at worst and excellent at best. The only Glocks that seemed to be really inaccurate were the very first runs of the Glock 22, and the company squared that away quickly. I have a Glock 22 that, out of the box, will stay in 2.5 inches at 25 yards with good ammunition; this specimen was produced in 2001. The baby Glocks are famous for their accuracy. This is because the barrels and slides are proportionally thicker and more rigid on these short guns, and also because the double captive recoil spring that softens kick so effectively also guarantees that the bullet is out of the barrel before the mechanism begins to unlock. Modifying a Smith & Wesson auto to have that same accuracy-enhancing feature costs big bucks when done by the factory’s Performance Center; it comes on the smallest Glocks at no charge.
The .45 caliber Glocks also seem to be particularly accurate. First, the .45 ACP has always been a more inherently accurate cartridge than the 9mm Luger and particularly the .40 S&W. Second, the .45 barrels are made on different machinery than the other calibers at Glock, and seem to be particularly accurate. The “baby .45,” the Glock 30, combines both of these worlds and may be the most accurate pistol Glock makes. My Glock 30, factory stock with NY-1 trigger and Trijicon sights, has given me five-shot, 1-inch groups at 25 yards with Federal Hydra-Shok and Remington Match ammunition.
There is a good reason for the Glock pistol’s predominance in the American law enforcement sector and, to a slightly lesser extent, the armed citizen sector. Quite simply, the product has earned it.
Today’s Double-Action Autos
Walther popularized the double-action auto with a de-cocking feature in the 1930s. It was seen at the time as a “faster” auto, the theory being that with a single-action auto like the Colt or Browning, you had to either move a safety lever, or cock a hammer, or jack a slide before firing. With the DA auto, it was thought, one could just carry it off safe and pull the trigger when needed, like a revolver.
At the time, most of America felt that if they wanted an auto that worked like a revolver, they would just carry one of their fine made-in-USA revolvers, thank you very much. In the middle of the 20th century, 1911 flag-bearer Jeff Cooper applied an engineer’s phrase that would stick to the double-action auto forever after. The concept was, he said, “an ingenious solution to a non-existent problem.”
Whether or not that was true at the time, a problem later came up to fit the solution. America had become, by the latter 20th century, the most litigious country in the world. With more lawyers per capita than any other nation, the United States became famous for tolerating utterly ridiculous lawsuits that, had they been brought in a country that followed the Napoleonic Code, would probably have ended up penalizing the plaintiff for having brought an unmeritorious case. Two elements of this would have impact on handgun selection in both police and private citizen sectors.
Gun control had joined abortion as one of the two most polarized debates in the land. Prosecutors were either elected by the same folks who elected the politicians, or appointed by elected politicians. Some of them found it expedient to “make examples” of politically incorrect shootings of bad guys by good guys. For this, they needed a hook.
Contrary to popular belief, prosecutors don’t get big occupation bonus points for winning a conviction for murder instead of manslaughter. If they get a conviction, they get credit, period. If they bring a case and lose, they lose credibility and political capital. This is why a good chance of a win on a lower charge beats a poor chance of conviction on a higher charge. To convince a dozen people with common sense sitting in a jury box that a good cop or a decent citizen has suddenly become a monstrous murderer is a pretty tough sell. But to convince them that a good person could have been careless for one second and made a mistake is an easy job, because every adult has done exactly that at some time. A murder conviction requires proving the element of malice, but a manslaughter conviction requires only proving that someone did something stupid. Thus, it came into vogue to attack politically incorrect justifiable homicide incidents with a charge of manslaughter.
A relic of the early 20th Century, the slide-mounted safety/de-cock lever of Walther PPK inspired designs of S&W, Beretta, and others much later in the “wondernine” period.
Ruger’s P90 beat every other double-action .45 tested and became the issue weapon for author’s police department in 1993, along with Safariland SS-III security holster.
It is common knowledge that a light trigger pull – what a lay person would call a “hair trigger” – is more conducive to the accidental discharge of a firearm than a long, heavy trigger pull that requires a deliberate action. Cocking a gun, or pointing an already cocked gun at a suspect, could therefore be seen as negligence. Now, the key ingredient of a manslaughter conviction was in place.
It reached a point where prosecutors would actually manufacture a “negligent hair trigger argument” even in cases where the gun was never cocked. One such case, State of Florida v. Officer Luis Alvarez, is mentioned elsewhere in this book. Alvarez’ department responded by rendering all the issue service revolvers double-action-only. Some saw this as a weak concession to political correctness. It must be pointed out, however, that if the double-action-only policy had been in place before the shooting, the prosecution never would have had that false hook on which to hang the case, to begin with.
And that was just in criminal courts. On the civil lawsuit side, something similar was happening. Plaintiffs’ lawyers realized that the deep pockets they were after belonged to insurance companies, not individual citizens who got involved in self-defense shootings. Almost everyone