Tab Clearing...

• The Connoisseur's Glock.


• The pitfalls of using blanks in scenario training.


• Marko is giving away ten signed copies of Descent. (Or you could preorder a regular old un-signed copy here.)

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Hey, look!

Gaston, who passed away recently, was not a gunsmith by training or avocation, but it would not be out of line to say that he’s had as large an effect on the handgun market as such enduring legends like Sam Colt and John Moses Browning.

Controversial? Yup. Aesthetically challenging? Perhaps. The Glock G17 nonetheless transformed and—with the expiration of early patents—continues to transform the defensive-handgun market, like it or not.

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Mixed Legacy

So, as you have probably heard, Gaston Glock shuffled off his mortal coil a couple days ago.

He probably had more impact on the world of handguns today than any other single individual not named "Sam Colt" or "John Browning".

Not that he was necessarily a design genius or brilliant gunsmith or whatever. He was an engineer who owned a company that hired designers and gunsmiths, but the end result is that he made a pistol that was dirt cheap to manufacture yet adequately reliable, accurate, and durable.

I carried Glocks for years. I likely will again at some point. I was a moderator at the GlockTalk forum twenty-three years ago. I even had a Glock desktop theme on my Win95 computer. (Remember desktop themes? Mine played a .WAV of that Tommy Lee Jones "nickel plated sissy pistol" quote when I shut it down.)

At the same time, there's no denying that Gaston's dirt-cheap-to-manufacture pistol really kicked off the race to the bottom that has consumed the handgun market over the last thirty years.

So my feelings on hearing this week's news are... complex.

Rugged

There's a certain attractive quality to rugged, reliable gear. Think of the adulation heaped on Glocks for their durability:

A saying I remember from being in camera stores where my dad worked when I was a child was "If you have a Leica and a Nikon and have to take a photograph over a wall, stand on the Nikon and shoot with the Leica, because it won't hurt the Nikon."*

Jim Grey was just out and about with a new-to-him 1963-vintage Nikon F, which was the company's first pro-grade single lens reflex camera:

"The F is nigh onto indestructible. It would surely survive a drop from your hands to the ground, it would probably survive a drop off the roof of your house, and it might just survive a drop from an airplane."

It still works great for a sixty-year-old tool! No wonder survivors are bringing good money.

Do you know what else a Nikon will survive? Fifty years of being buried in a mountaintop glacier near the summit of Aconcagua, with twenty four frames of potential evidence of foul play sitting exposed inside it, waiting to be developed...

"FOR NEARLY 50 years, a Nikomat camera, carried by an American woman, sat frozen in a high-altitude time capsule. But it was not frozen in place.

Where the camera was dropped may not be where it was found. The Polish Glacier has been shrinking and shifting, cracking and moving downhill by the pull of gravity and with the change of seasons.

And on a sunny day in February 2020, the heart of the Argentine summer, the camera sat on a stocky penitente, like a museum piece on a pedestal.

[SNIP]

The camera was intact; the only crack was inside the lens. The mechanisms worked. The leather holster screwed to the camera bottom had probably protected it from leaks."

*The only exception might be if your Leica is a Leicaflex, aka "The Diesel Leica", which was their baroquely overbuilt attempt at an SLR. One survived plummeting to the floor of the Mojave Desert from a crashing F4 Phantom II.

Retro Kydex

I mentioned that this past weekend I was using a Raven Concealment Systems Phantom holster set up for IWB use with my Glock 37.

The Phantom is made by old-fashioned kydex bending and has long been replaced in the RCS catalog by the more mass-production-friendly injection molded Eidolon and Perun holsters.

They're doing a batch of old-school Phantoms by pre-order only this summer, though, and for a first, you'll be able to get a Phantom for the Colt Python or Smith & Wesson L-frame. I don't think that's been possible since the old days where the RCS guys would set up at the Indy 1500 and bend kydex to order.

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"Because they don't make a 46."

The average level of training and experience in this past weekend's class was higher than that of any open enrollment class I've ever attended. Over a third of the class were current or former cops and probably half the class had been to Gunsite, including one Gunsite Rangemaster*.

As a result, the number of 1911 pattern pistols in .45ACP was higher than in any class I've seen, to include that Awerbuck class back in '09.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, there were no janky off-brand Government Model clones among the bunch. There were a couple Gunsite pistols and the rest were Wilsons. Three students were shooting Glocks (including me) and there was one Sig Sauer P320 X-Five and a Heckler & Koch HK45. Both of the other Glocks had dots, and I was using Ameriglo TCAPs on my Glock 37, which I was running from concealment out of a Raven Phantom carried strong side IWB. 

Yes, I scattered a bunch of .45GAP brass amongst all that once-fired .45ACP. Some brass hound at Riley Conservation Club probably hates me now.

The class started with some dry practice and as souvenirs we got a couple of the handy little Tap Rack dry fire safety training aids from Rogers. If you've never used those, they're handy little gizmos that keep the magazine follower depressed so you can function the slide to reset the action without it locking back. Yes, the .45ACP size works in Glock .45GAP magazines.

*What do I keep saying about good instructors being eternal students?

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Remembered Pain

The 20 lines-per-inch checkering on the Springfield Pro is sure grippy, but it will leave your hands bloody and taped up by the end of a three-day Louis Awerbuck class.

Even 30 lpi checkering can chew you up with enough shooting in a weekend.

Of course, if you're shooting the Austrian Drastic Plastic, there's always Glock knuckle to contend with.

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Chunky Style

The Hellcat Pro and the Glock 19 side-by-side illustrate the grip diameter penalty imposed by the polymer bodies of the Glock's magazines.

The latest iterations of teeny hi-cap micro pistols like the Hellcat, P365, and Reflex all have grips that are much svelter than that of the O.G. Drastic Plastic despite having similar magazine capacities.

Dead Letter

I was an enthusiastic user of .40S&W in the 1990s.

My first "name brand" pistol, which I bought in 1993, was a stainless double-action-only Ruger P91, and I pretty quickly traded it in on a Glock 23, still a fairly new pistol back then.

I largely carried one variety or another of the Glock 23 for the next ten years. I eagerly bought into the "stopping power" hype and could quote the percentages of various loadings from the Marshall & Sanow books faster than your eyes could focus on the page to check my answers. I was pretty sure that a hot 155gr .40 caliber bullet was the next best thing to Mjolnir when it came to flattening bad guys.

Ah, youth.

As it turns out, the thing that .40 cal is best at is prematurely wearing out pistols that had originally been designed for 9mm. That and making Major in USPSA.

The revolution in tiny high capacity guns like the Reflex and the Hellcat is because manufacturers no longer feel constrained to make them compatible with .40 cal, which is rapidly becoming a cartridge used by nobody other than gamers and by people who enjoy being different for the sake of being different, like .38 Super has become. There's something poetic about that, since .38 Super was originally designed as a sort of ultimate law enforcement cartridge as well.

I carried 155gr Hydra-Shok because of its 93% OSS rating. Seriously.

Big Gun, Little Gun

For the longest time, in the realm of duty/service pistols, I've been using "Small Frame" and "Large Frame" in a specific fashion.

Large frame and small frame compact Smiths

I used "Large Frame" to refer to the pistols designed around the cartridges with a ~32mm overall length: .45ACP, 10mm Auto, and .38 Super. "Small Frame" was for pistols built around the ~27-29mm OAL: 9x19mm, .40 S&W, .45 GAP.

So a S&W 4516 would be a "compact large frame single stack Smith" and a Glock 17 would be a "full size small frame double stack Glock".

In general, manufacturers spun all their guns off their duty-size guns. The aforementioned compact Smith .45 was essentially a full-size 4506 with the slide and grip shortened, while Glock created the subcompact small-frame 26 by essentially shortening the 17 likewise. The little guns would even eat out of the magazines from their larger siblings.

But starting with the P365 and now extending to most manufacturer's catalogs we now have a category of even smaller small-frame guns, ones that don't share magazine dimensions with their duty-size catalog mates. To further confuse things, there are now upsized versions of these guns, like the Hellcat Pro and the P365 XMACRO.

My terminology gyros are tumbled.

I have no idea what to call this.

Not a Fan, Personally...

I can provide my own "Glock w/malfunction" stock photos.

When Glock released its 10+1 capacity slimline 9x19mm pistols, the G43X and G48, it didn't take long for the aftermarket to rush a sheet metal 15-round flush-fit magazine to market.

Made by Shield Arms, they're really popular, but I remain dubious. For starters, metal aftermarket mags have been a hot mess in Glocks since the days of the USA-brand ones in the early Nineties. For another thing, Glock already makes a perfectly serviceable 15-shot compact with a 4" barrel, and it's practically the industry standard for reliability and shootability. If you want a compact 4" 9mm Glock with reliable 15-round magazines, why not just get a "widebody 48", a.k.a. the Glock 19?

Nearly every class I've attended or sat in on to photograph over the last couple years has featured someone running a G48 and having issues with aftermarket 15-rounders. At the Rangemaster Instructor Development class here in Indiana back in September of 2020, Tom Givens mentioned that he'd seen numerous students have issues with them (the topic came up because, you guessed it, a student was having issues with them.)

It looks like Dr. Sherman House isn't entirely sold on them, either:

I’m still undecided on the SHIELD magazines for the Glock 43X and 48. I know people that have success with them, but I’ve also seen a number of them fail. I chose to go with, “eleven for sure,” in my 43X, but you’re welcome to use what you like. I enjoy having the availability of a nearly 50 state legal pistol in stock configuration, but that’s my view.

If I were to go back to carrying a Glock after my Year of Living Dangerously (with a wheelgun), a Glock 48 might well be my choice...but I'd stick with the factory magazines. "Eleven for sure", indeed.

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What makes a classic?

Blogging has occurred at the other place.

Relatedly, this 27-year-old Gen2 Glock 19 has outlived its second set of night sights. Time to put some Trijicon HD XR's on it like I've been meaning to.

Book Report

P.E. Fitch just reviewed Glock: The Rise of America's Gun for GAT Daily. I enjoyed reading his take on it.

The first chapter opens up with the infamous 1986 Miami FBI gunfight. Barrett sheds details of the rise of the “wonder nines” and the demise of the service revolver in American policing. Coupled with the young company’s competitive pricing and proactive sales tactics, the timing for the Glock’s entry into the handgun market could not have been better either.

"Competitive pricing and proactive sales tactics" is such...diplomatic phrasing.

It was interesting to see his take on it and caused me to go back and reread my old review.

The book is a combination of investigative business journalism, and Margaret Mead-esque anthropology, as Barrett turns his outsider's eyes on familiar names, spending time with Massad Ayoob and interviewing Dean Speir. As with any investigative journalism, the book rakes muck, and Glock is a company with plenty of muck to rake: Lawsuits, accusations of shady business practices, executives for which "colorful" would be a charitable description... even a strip club scandal.

All in all, though, I have to hand it to Mr. Barrett. He claimed he was going to write an even-handed portrayal, and he did. (And I'm not just saying that because I have a tiny, off-screen part: I laughed out loud when he mentioned that Dean Speir was "banished" from GlockTalk.) If you want the warts-and-all story of how Glock went from nowhere to being the 800lb gorilla of the handgun world, you should read this book.

I'd forgotten that the book's author popped up in the comments section of that post back in 2012.

Complete Package...

The driver was later identified as 19-year-old Wardell Wright, who ignored orders from the police to stop driving the stolen vehicle.

Wright led officers on a pursuit that resulted in him driving through a fence at the University of Indianapolis and crashing the car. The suspect then exited the vehicle and continued running on foot. University police assisted IMPD with apprehending the suspect.

A handgun with a Glock switch was recovered from the scene.

A 'stendo, a beam, and a switch on his Glock 23...

This dude stepped on all the power-ups in Grand Theft Auto '23: Circle City. 

Didn't keep him from getting rolled up by IMPD, though.

I've fired a G20 with a (dealer sample) selector switch on it. That was sporty; you wanted to use both hands, good technique, and lean into it a bit. One-handing a .40 caliber G23 with a selector? The first round will go where you had the gun pointed and the rest are bound for distant corners of whatever ZIP Code you're in.

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Local Sportiness

Apparently a bit of excitement happened up on Broad Ripple Avenue in the middle of the night...

A Sunday morning incident in Broad Ripple prompted a police chase that ended in a crash and a suspect being shot by police later in the afternoon, IMPD said.

According to IMPD, officers responded to the 100 block of Broad Ripple Avenue, near Broad Ripple Park, around 3 a.m. for a report of shots fired. A woman told officers she was involved a dispute with the father of her child, who she said fired at least one shot, hitting her car as she drove away.

The incident started at 0300 with dude taking a shot at his ex girlfriend's car at "A" on the map.

Cops went looking for him and found him at a gas station at "B" on the map, down by the Fairgrounds. If any of y'all have been to the Indy 1500 gun show, it's the BP station right across the street.

Dude took off north on Fall Creek Parkway, which turns into Binford Boulevard there where it crosses Keystone, and wrecked out into an innocent bystander's car at the intersection of Kessler & Binford, "C" on the map.

He unassed his wrecked vehicle, and decided to blaze away. The cops dumped him with return fire, rendered first aid, and he got whisked off the the hospital where he's in critical condition at this writing.

Dude had two Glocks. Both had 'stendos. The Gen5 G45 with what looks like maybe a Klarus on it fell out of the car there at the wreck site.

The compact he blazed away at the po-po with had a cheap clear 'stendo...note it's broken, either from the fall or possible from getting shot...and a slide cover plate selector switch.

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Lessons Unlearned

From the national news:

A gunman who livestreamed himself driving around Memphis shooting at people, killing four and wounding three others in seemingly random attacks, was finally arrested after crashing a stolen car, police said early Thursday.

The hours-long rampage had police warning people across the city to shelter in place, locking down a baseball stadium and university campuses and suspending public bus services as frightened residents wondered where the man might strike next.

They shut the city down. Canceled a baseball game. Buses and trolleys stopped running. All for one dude driving around a metro area of over a million people and occasionally popping rounds out the window or carjacking a fresh ride.

The fact that this was possible was then broadcast across the nation by prime time national news, no doubt reaching the ears of any potential copycat who cared to take notes.

Oh, also, he had a switch on his G-lock. Didn't he know those are illegal?

#USA 🇺🇸: A gunman carried out a mass shooting in #Memphis and broadcasted the shootings live on Facebook.

The gunman seems to be using a Glock 19 pistol with full-auto switch and extended magazine. pic.twitter.com/8WmASRqJ8a

— War Noir (@war_noir) September 8, 2022

Hail Hydra!

Would it be ridiculously pretentious of me to list this thing, the whole kit with all three barrels (9mm, .40S&W, and .357SIG), for seven hundred bucks by promising to throw in a signed copy of the magazine?

I haven't decided yet, because I really dig having a longslide .357SIG, but I'm getting to the point where I need bucks worse than blasters.

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Attack of the Clones

"The number of firearms that you can assemble yourself from scratch, from the frame/receiver up, without using a single part made by the original manufacturer makes for a pretty small club. And if that club is small, then the exclusive party room in the back is populated by designs where you can buy completely assembled derivatives from third parties. This usually happens when a popular firearm becomes old enough that any patents have expired, although sometimes clone makers do jump the gun and matters get settled in court.

Glock pistols, at least of the first three generations, have been in the first club for a while. Off the top of my head, I can’t recollect when the first turnkey, aftermarket Glock frames became available, but it has to be getting close to 20 years. CCF Race Frames were certainly available in the early Aughties, and (as this is written, anyway) you’ve been able to buy stripped grip frames to get your DIY gun-building kicks for a while now..."

Click on through to read the rest...

Tab Clearing...

• The last gasoline-engined V-series Cadillac?


• A really cool photo essay about sheep ranching on the Russian steppe.


• The Glock carbine was a rumor when I was still a moderator on GlockTalk twenty years ago. It's still a rumor today, albeit a more concrete one.


• Adrianople: Twilight of the Legions.

Hey, look!

"If you look at a picture of a car and it has tail fins, you know it was from the 1950s. If you look at a picture of home interiors and they’re full of shag carpet and avocado-hued appliances, you know they’re from the 1970s. Nowadays, if you look at a photo of a pistol and it looks like the slide lost a fight with a CNC machine, you know it’s from the end of the Twenty-Teens.

I’m not exactly sure who actually originated this fad, so I’ll blame Glock.

It didn’t actually start with Glock, mind you. IPSC and USPSA open shooters, in a never-ending quest for flatter-shooting guns and wanting to shave every possible picosecond off cycle time, were lightening the slides on raceguns since way back in the day.

But, it was Glock that brought lightening cuts in slides to the masses at the gun counter via its G17L and the later “practical tactical” G34 and G35. While these pistols were developed with competition in mind, the primary rationale behind the ovoid windows in the top of their slides was more prosaic than that..."

Go and RTWT!

The entirety of the great outdoors, surely trying to get in through the hole on a G34 slide.