Do they still make Glaser Safety Slugs?

IIRC it’s just #12 shot in a jacket. Not very impressive in gel.




At least vs other stuff.

At skull contact distance, they will scramble brains. I saw the pictures of the results of just that. I had sold the Glasers, along with a Taurus 85 to the victim, who supposedly died by suicide. I don't believe it was, but that's what it was ruled.
My personal experience with them is limited to shooting a can of pop with a .380 Glaser from 10 ft. (at $2 a pop thirty years ago, I didn't want to miss.) I got very wet and sticky, all I found of the can was the bottom with a small strip of the side showing the force on it, and the spray shot up @ 20 ft. I impressed me enough that the bottom round in my SD .45 ACP mags is a Glaser. The forensic evidence pics reaffirmed that they can be effective, but they are a close range round.

KarateHottie93 said:

It's just one of those weird things you have to try for yourself though (in my case)...regardless of how pointless or expensive it is.

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I certainly understand that, sounds like lots of stuff I have done.

Well, you could get some of these,

http://www.corbins.com/prj38.htm

and this,

https://www.ballisticproducts.com/Chilled-Lead-Shot-12-13mm-11_bag/productinfo/02612/

and make plenty to test with.

This thread is a bit of a walk down Memory Lane for me. I used to carry Glaser rounds in the 80s. Lol. At that time I fell for the line that they were the best thing since sliced bread.

Still wanna try the real thing.

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32, 380, 9mm and 40 here.

https://www.gunbroker.com/All/search?Keywords=Glaser Safety Slug or

they worked in Man Hunter, sort of.

I remember the hype was real, and all over, both the glossy paged magazines and the pulp pare ones, too.
The Marshall-Sanow reports rained on the parade a bit with down jackets and defensive postures (like raising a hand or forearm) limiting effectiveness.

Being $12-15 for six definitely was an issue, vice 25-35¢ for "proven" JHP you could practice with.

Plenty (probably) was sold and loaded into nightstand and purse guns to probably still be loaded and forgotten today, forty-something years later.

I noticed an average sized whitetail doe low in a ditch driving home one day. He legs had obviously been broken and she didn’t even try to move when I approached her, but she tracked me with her head and her eyes were alert. The gun with me was a J frame loaded with one Glaser and four rounds of 158 grain lead +p hollow points. This was maybe 15 years ago.

I shot her broadside in the same spot I would have placed a hunting shot with the Glaser. The light was pretty dim but my impression was that it didn’t have all that much of an effect. I shot her a couple more times in the same spot with the HPs and she slumped over.

I know that’s hardly a definitive test but it made an impression. I didn’t replace the Glaser when I cleaned and reloaded the gun.

I have no idea if they're around any more or not. I haven't looked for them. Looking at the internet, apparently Cor-Bon makes a version of them, at least.

When I was much younger they were just coming out and getting a lot of press. (Middle '70s.) The demonstrations of shooting butchered meat and the resulting horrendous damage convinced a number of people.

I was in law enforcement and starting talking to other lawmen and reading the shooting reports. As far as I could determine, all the 'successes' on real suspects in real life were essentially pain compliance wins. The bullet would shatter on a hard surface, the loose pellets strike the villain and said villain gave up. I decided heavy, flat fronted bullets were better if they really resisted with lethal force.

Yes

Weren't Glaser Safety slugs invent for use inside buildings with hard walls and use in aircraft?

whm1974 said:

Weren't Glaser Safety slugs invent for use inside buildings with hard walls and use in aircraft?

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yes and no. it was rumored that air marshals carried them to reduce ricochet hazards inside an airplane as well as reducing over penetration fears. for unobstructed frontal shots they will definitely mess a bad guy up. however, their lack of 12" of ballistic gel penetration means they don't cut the mustard with the FBI.

JERRY said:

they worked in Man Hunter, sort of.

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Yep... FBI special agent Will Graham took down the superhuman bad guy with SIX shots of .44 Special Glasers from his 5-shot Charter Arms Bulldog -- and proceeded to cover the fallen bad guy with his evidently still loaded Bulldog.

That magic CA Bulldog is on my wish list...

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Corbon bought the company some years ago.

JFrame said:

Yep... FBI special agent Will Graham took down the superhuman bad guy with SIX shots of .44 Special Glasers from his 5-shot Charter Arms Bulldog -- and proceeded to cover the fallen bad guy with his evidently still loaded Bulldog.

That magic CA Bulldog is on my wish list...

.

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Just saw that the other night and noticed the 6 shots. We ere let down by the Mann.

I still have the same glasers I bought for my .357mag over 20 years ago. They sit there in the speed loader. Maybe I ought to shoot them.

When they were a thing I noticed that they tended to blow open on the card board target backing at our range and dust the backstop.

At the time I was sharing an apartment and the person in the other bedroom that shared a wall with mine used a revolver for night stand defense. I gave them a pack of Glasers and really played them up for inside the room use and happily watched them load up and thank me.

I slept much better and easier on the other side of that studs and dry wall wall and heavy wall tapestry after that....

-kBob

entropy said:

At skull contact distance, they will scramble brains. I saw the pictures of the results of just that. I had sold the Glasers, along with a Taurus 85 to the victim, who supposedly died by suicide. I don't believe it was, but that's what it was ruled.
My personal experience with them is limited to shooting a can of pop with a .380 Glaser from 10 ft. (at $2 a pop thirty years ago, I didn't want to miss.) I got very wet and sticky, all I found of the can was the bottom with a small strip of the side showing the force on it, and the spray shot up @ 20 ft. I impressed me enough that the bottom round in my SD .45 ACP mags is a Glaser. The forensic evidence pics reaffirmed that they can be effective, but they are a close range round.

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At "skull contact distance", a 9mm blank will "scramble brains". (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon-Erik_Hexum)

Glasers are highly effective... at separating you from the money you should have spent on good carry ammo... and training with it, rather than keeping your "precious" ammo (as if it's some kind of Tolkienesque jewlery) that's both expensive and ineffective, particularly when you won't train with it.

Glasers are effective within their limits. I was a cop in the eighties when they were the new hotness, and there were a few police shootings locally with 9mm and .357 Magnum Glasers. In those shootings they were at least as effective as the hollow-points of that time. In every one of the few cases locally the suspect was stopped with two to four shots- basically the same as conventional ammo. As to stories of them being stopped by metal buttons a local suspect was hit on a heavy metal button on his coat with a .357 Magnum Glaser. The coroner found the badly mutilated button next to two of his back ribs about an inch from his spine...

The caveat here is that 9mm and .357 Magnum Glasers displayed acceptable performance in some situations, but these are very, very velocity dependent. Smaller calibers like .32 ACP and slow calibers like .44 Special could be expected to under-perform badly.

Marshal Evans found that, in general, they were as effective as hollow-points but were subject to situational failures. With a full-frontal torso shot at close range they were devastating... but that's much more common in a civilian defensive shooting than a police shooting. On duty I stuck with hollow-points, but at home in my apartment, with the paper-thin walls and three children under five next door I loaded Glasers. They are neither useless nor a magic wonder-bullet; they are a limited-application special-purpose round and not suited to general duty or self defense outside of the home.

I have not seen a new pack of them for sale in YEARS. The only pack I have seen in person was at a family friends sporting goods store, and that pack must be at LEAST 30 years old. I would go with the idea they were gimmick loads.

A friend of mine and I made a "Glaser load" once with a hollow point bullet we melted the lead out of and stuffed with number 8 pellets and candle wax. It was a beautiful failure when we shot some milk jugs.

JFrame said:

Yep... FBI special agent Will Graham took down the superhuman bad guy with SIX shots of .44 Special Glasers from his 5-shot Charter Arms Bulldog -- and proceeded to cover the fallen bad guy with his evidently still loaded Bulldog.

That magic CA Bulldog is on my wish list...

.

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Isn't that that the film based on the 1980's Novel "Red Dragon"?

whm1974 said:

Isn't that that the film based on the 1980's Novel "Red Dragon"?

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It is indeed... And a much more faithful adaptation, I believe, than the movie actually titled "Red Dragon" which starred Edward Norton as FBI profiler Will Graham.

The Thomas Harris novel, by the way, is EXCELLENT. Time constraints kept either movie from getting into the torturous (and tortured) back story of Francis Dolarhyde, who becomes the Red Dragon. That novel really deserves to be adapted into a top-notch TV mini-series...

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