What's really amazing is the fact that there is such a huge number of people who make or made a living with firearms, people who have been in many real deal, no **** gunfights, people who know the ins and outs of firearms use and abuse like no one else, who carry, recommend and swear by Glock pistols. In fact you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who fits that description who doesn't think a Glock is a great choice. Amazing that such a large number of people like that can be "taken in". Why do you think that is?
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Yep, I drank the Glock kool aid. Got this one in '08 and I shoot it no less than 600 rounds a month. No idea what the round count is, after I got it over 100k it seemed pointless to keep track. Stupid ugly gun. I'm glad I saw this thread- it reminded me that I'm overdue on the quarterly cleaning- the last time I had it apart was before Xmas.
Yup, you've been "taken in" man! It's a conspiracy! Don't you know those guns are plastic garbage! You must be part of
(Which apparently includes all of the other combat vets I know or have talked to about the subject)
TomJ
Contributing Member
I've tried a number of Glocks and have sold them all, except for my Gen 3 19, which rarely leaves the safe. They were all reliable, just not a good fit for me, which is a personal choice. That being said, they are the right fit for a lot of people and I'm happy they found a gun that works for them. Getting upset with them because they chose something different than me somehow has never crossed my mind. It's at the same time amusing and sad how Glock threads bring out the worse in some people.
It's a well engineered, functional, commodity-grade product. It works. There are numerous other products in the same category(ies) that work just as well. They have certain advantages in the marketplace, and the network effects of holding the biggest market share is a big one.
People who don't like it and want adjudge it to be worse than that are fooling themselves. So are those who love it and want to insist that it is better than that.
People who don't like it and want adjudge it to be worse than that are fooling themselves. So are those who love it and want to insist that it is better than that.
For some people, there is the idea that because I do not like the source of the idea or product, that the idea or product must be bad (logical fallacy called the genetic fallacy fwiw). Gaston Glock, like a lot of driven folks, is not going to be confused with Mother Teresa, in his business dealings or personal life. That has no affect and should not on the genius of his design work on the Glock. Please note that I said design and not invention because the principles and part types were used by others to make firearms but Glock put the manufacturing, parts design, marketing, and innovative package together as something for militaries and the police of nations to use. Once those bids were secured, the general public wanted the same.
The design of the Glock handgun, not just the use of polymer (see H&K VP70 for that one), but his throwing out the rules on how to make safe and affordable handguns function reliably has justly made Gaston Glock at least as famous to contemporary America as Sam Colt or JMB was in his heyday. He is similar to Eugene Stoner as a disruptor in the market by applying modern materials and manufacturing to drive down the price of making them. As a result, those that were using more traditional hammer driven designs had to scramble in order to meet his challenge in reliability, cost, and ease of use.
BTW, I have shot Glocks and do not own any simply because I do not like their aesthetics and they fit my hand worse than other handguns. Personally, I prefer S&W Third Generation DAO in semi auto or the Sig D/A action because of their resemblance to a revolver trigger pull and I prefer a good revolver above semi-automatics. That being said, if you own a striker fired polymer semi-auto, you have been affected by Gaston Glock just as someone firing a revolver is giving homage to Sam Colt or Daniel B. Wesson.
Oh, and one last thing on his design. Compared with his contemporary market challengers at the time, Glocks could be assembled and disassembled by someone with about one day's worth of training and the parts purposefully were made were cheap and easy to fix and replace without fitting. Smith and Wesson Third Generation semi autos or revolvers required a lot more training and much less parts commonality to get reliable function and 1911 maintenance required a much higher level than either of those two. Sigs and Berettas are also more complex to fix than a Glock and all except Glock can require fitting (not talking about aftermarket Glock stuff here).
Some of us actually enjoy tinkering with mechanisms but I suspect that we are in the minority.
The design of the Glock handgun, not just the use of polymer (see H&K VP70 for that one), but his throwing out the rules on how to make safe and affordable handguns function reliably has justly made Gaston Glock at least as famous to contemporary America as Sam Colt or JMB was in his heyday. He is similar to Eugene Stoner as a disruptor in the market by applying modern materials and manufacturing to drive down the price of making them. As a result, those that were using more traditional hammer driven designs had to scramble in order to meet his challenge in reliability, cost, and ease of use.
BTW, I have shot Glocks and do not own any simply because I do not like their aesthetics and they fit my hand worse than other handguns. Personally, I prefer S&W Third Generation DAO in semi auto or the Sig D/A action because of their resemblance to a revolver trigger pull and I prefer a good revolver above semi-automatics. That being said, if you own a striker fired polymer semi-auto, you have been affected by Gaston Glock just as someone firing a revolver is giving homage to Sam Colt or Daniel B. Wesson.
Oh, and one last thing on his design. Compared with his contemporary market challengers at the time, Glocks could be assembled and disassembled by someone with about one day's worth of training and the parts purposefully were made were cheap and easy to fix and replace without fitting. Smith and Wesson Third Generation semi autos or revolvers required a lot more training and much less parts commonality to get reliable function and 1911 maintenance required a much higher level than either of those two. Sigs and Berettas are also more complex to fix than a Glock and all except Glock can require fitting (not talking about aftermarket Glock stuff here).
Some of us actually enjoy tinkering with mechanisms but I suspect that we are in the minority.
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They're like athletic shoes. People in the US wear them more than any other kind of shoe. Some people spend an order of magnitude more on custom shoes in more traditional materials, but in the most practical sense, they both do the same thing. You can't really look at an athletic shoe and decry it for so many practical reasons. It's plastic, foam, urethane, nylon and polyester. It takes abuse day after day and keeps working. It's not particularly glamorous, but you can't expect much sympathy if you look at it and say, "I would never wear one of those." You'd just be a shoe snob. On the other hand, you could get really enthusiastic about it, talk about it all the time and go around telling others how reliable it is, and well, there's a good chance they won't share your enthusiasm because it's just a shoe. As for Glock's business? It's good to be "Nike."
.308 Norma
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I'll stick with my Cabela's hiking boots and Springfield 9mm, but that's a very good analogy, labnoti...in my opinion anyway.
rpenmanparker
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Because it is a very good gun. And for some folks that is good enough. It just isn’t the only gun, the be all and end all, the clear choice. Some of us think that just going bang every time the trigger is pulled is a good thing, certainly a necesssry thing, but not the only thing. Some of us really value an independent safety. The Glock’s safety isn’t just not the best. It is entirely missing. And some of us think a gun should be handsome. Glock’s are butt ugly. And here’s the interesting thing. Not a single aspect of the Glock’s function requires that form to work. In other words it is ugly to no purpose, for no reason except a lack of interest in making it handsome. Shame.
rpenmanparker
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But don’t tell me a modern gun inspired by the 1911 couldn’t be just a reliable, just as simple to work on, just as low maintenance. With an exposed hammer and single action. Not a 1911, but inspired by the good and fixing the bad. The fitting is required because there are many makers putting out similar, but not quite the same, guns. So replacement parts for the genre don’t fit every embodiment the same. But if you limited the subject to a single manufacturer observing appropriate tolerances and modern manufacturing quality principles, there is no reason that replacement parts would have to be fitted.
rpenmanparker
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Pretty isn’t inherently more expensive than ugly.
Eh, making something prettier often includes more machining operations. Not always, but often.
I mean, the Glock's slide is very simple from a manufacturing standpoint. Simpler shapes are easier to build injection molds for and will often have lower rates of rejections/failures. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but the Glock's simple, blocky form is at least somewhat related to containing costs. Of course, they lean into it, and have marketed very successfully and convinced many people that's what "serious" pistols should look like.
I mean, the Glock's slide is very simple from a manufacturing standpoint. Simpler shapes are easier to build injection molds for and will often have lower rates of rejections/failures. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but the Glock's simple, blocky form is at least somewhat related to containing costs. Of course, they lean into it, and have marketed very successfully and convinced many people that's what "serious" pistols should look like.
Do you ever work on firearms? Hammer fired designs are almost always more complex to do safely and if not carefully done can be less reliable than striker actions. There is a reason that the U.S. and other militaries went with bolt actions using strikers instead of using hammers to hit a firing pin. Hammer fired actions get more complex with a safety mechanism and one infamous shortcoming of many hammer fired actions which requires more complexity to avoid is that they can fire when dropped unless you add some complexity to the system (revolvers had to have hammer blocks or transfer bars added and a bit more had to be added for things like Sigs to be known as drop safe.
A striker bolt action rifle (leaving aside the whole straight pull madness) involves fewer parts, only one spring, and so forth. There is a reason that the last of the bolt actions adopted, the MAS 36, uses a striker system.
I like hammer fired firearms but I find them more complex when doing complete takedowns (not the routine sort of cleaning stuff) but complete disassembly whether for rifles or handguns. Glock, being outside of the firearm designer mainstream, was not hindered by the market and prior designers' ideas of hammers, DA or DAO, the whole artificial argument between DA and SA, etc. Simplicity won.
The other analogies that are easy to make are the Bic pen or Bic lighter. You can't argue that they don't do the job. Compared to fountain pens or matches or a fast-drying Zippo, they're more "reliable," "dependable" need less maintenance, repair and parts replacement, and they cost less too. The 1911 is the book of matches. It's been around almost as long and has a similar low-capacity. The 1911 is the fountain pen. It's costly to make and especially finicky when it's made poorly. Making a fine one is very costly, but as a fashion statement or status symbol, nothing else will do. The Glock is like a Bic. They're plastic, functional, and low cost. There are far more of them around than anything more unique or elaborate, but they do nothing special to please or distinguish the user.
Gridley
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Depends on the format, but in almost any engineering discipline? Yes it is. Making something "pretty" means you paid attention to aesthetics in your design phase. That costs money, because any time spent doing something costs money. In my industry we spend that money (lots and lots of it...). Sometimes we even compromise performance for "pretty" because pretty sells... to a certain demographic. Pretty also generally means more curves. Curves are, for any conventional machining operation, more complicated than straight lines. If nothing else they're harder to inspect. Worse if you get *really* into pretty you get into surfaces with non-constant curvature. That tends to mean more complicated forming operations, not to mention more complex and specialized tools.
Now, as noted above Glock doesn't do pretty. In fact I think at this point they *deliberately* don't do pretty. That's their brand. They're the "tough gun". They produce enough volume that they could do "pretty" at a trivial per-unit cost. But why bother? They get lots of police contracts because they're a recognized brand (with, of course, a product that meets requirements) and they can offer attractive pricing.
If you want a "pretty" Glock you buy a S&W M&P (without the optional safety).
Where I could not make an analogy is with the automobile. It's worth considering because besides a house, an automobile is probably the next largest purchase that most people in the US will make. Guns and smartphones are actually not far behind since purchases of items much greater than $1000 are fairly uncommon with the exception of houses and cars. Most major appliances can be had for $1000 or under and they're purchased less frequently than smartphones and cars. The only popular big-ticket item I can think of that's between guns and cars is big-screen TV's, but I'd say the majority of those sales are well within gun price range.
Ok, so cars. We cannot say the Glock is like a Toyota Camry or Honda Accord, or Ford pickup truck. Despite their apparent ubiquity, those automotive products are vastly more complex and unique with an incredible array of available customization. The Glock might have been likened to a Model T at one point in history, but today we cannot identify a single model car that is nearly so ubiquitous. Instead, we could say that polymer-framed striker-fired autoloaders are like "crossovers." They easily dominate the market, outselling everything else combined, but there is no one particular brand or feature set that totally dominates market share.
I remember something Bob Lutz would say about cars. He'd say that there is no unmet demand in the automotive market. He was saying this decades before self-driving cars seemed like something that could soon be realized, so apart from that what he was saying is still true. There is no real unmet demand from consumers for some capability or feature that isn't met. The same is true in the handgun market and will be so until some disruptive technology like guided munitions (like tracking point for handguns) comes along and is affordable. So with no unmet demand to address, Bob turned to what he called "consumer turn-on's." He believed the way to make a vehicle stand-out for consumers was to find something that turned people on. Products like Glock and Bic do not do this. The Desert Eagle did it. The 500 Magnum did it. So did the .410 revolvers. In a way they're irrational, even stupid products, but they appealed to customer turn-on's and they sold. Not all turn-on's are irrational. The 1911 is a turn-on for a lot of people, and so are revolvers like the Python, Model 19, or SAA -- and those are all very practical and effective guns if a bit nostalgic at this point. A CZ, Sphinx, or Sig Elite have more turn-on's than a Glock, but are still totally rational.
I don't think anyone has ever produced a vehicle that is like a Glock or a Bic, at least not in the US. I suppose the closest automotive equivalent to a Glock would be an Uber. For the person who is not a "car guy" it totally gets the job done. There's no arguing that it's not reliable. It's not too expensive. But still, for a "car guy," I don't think he could be content if his only choice was to take an Uber and he couldn't have anything that came with "turn-on's."
Ok, so cars. We cannot say the Glock is like a Toyota Camry or Honda Accord, or Ford pickup truck. Despite their apparent ubiquity, those automotive products are vastly more complex and unique with an incredible array of available customization. The Glock might have been likened to a Model T at one point in history, but today we cannot identify a single model car that is nearly so ubiquitous. Instead, we could say that polymer-framed striker-fired autoloaders are like "crossovers." They easily dominate the market, outselling everything else combined, but there is no one particular brand or feature set that totally dominates market share.
I remember something Bob Lutz would say about cars. He'd say that there is no unmet demand in the automotive market. He was saying this decades before self-driving cars seemed like something that could soon be realized, so apart from that what he was saying is still true. There is no real unmet demand from consumers for some capability or feature that isn't met. The same is true in the handgun market and will be so until some disruptive technology like guided munitions (like tracking point for handguns) comes along and is affordable. So with no unmet demand to address, Bob turned to what he called "consumer turn-on's." He believed the way to make a vehicle stand-out for consumers was to find something that turned people on. Products like Glock and Bic do not do this. The Desert Eagle did it. The 500 Magnum did it. So did the .410 revolvers. In a way they're irrational, even stupid products, but they appealed to customer turn-on's and they sold. Not all turn-on's are irrational. The 1911 is a turn-on for a lot of people, and so are revolvers like the Python, Model 19, or SAA -- and those are all very practical and effective guns if a bit nostalgic at this point. A CZ, Sphinx, or Sig Elite have more turn-on's than a Glock, but are still totally rational.
I don't think anyone has ever produced a vehicle that is like a Glock or a Bic, at least not in the US. I suppose the closest automotive equivalent to a Glock would be an Uber. For the person who is not a "car guy" it totally gets the job done. There's no arguing that it's not reliable. It's not too expensive. But still, for a "car guy," I don't think he could be content if his only choice was to take an Uber and he couldn't have anything that came with "turn-on's."
.308 Norma
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Showing my age, I think the Volkswagen beetle was pretty close at one time. They were everywhere back in the '60s, and even into the '70s.
FL-NC
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In the end, it comes down to what someone likes, and hopefully that person is able to use the the full potential of both themself and the chosen pistol. The Glock works great for me, and they worked great when I was in the mil, as a contractor overseas, when I shot in 3 gun, and as a HD/CCW/hunting sidearm today. They seemed to do very well for everyone else in the mil and on the contracts as well- and when I was a trainer, it was much easier to work with in relation to my students than other designs. That's why I like them. I don't care for DA pistols, especially the M9, and I have my own reasons for this. I have plenty of reasons why I dislike the pistol, but it's difficult to make a logical argument that it is an inferior tool since there are people that use them that shoot them better than I can shoot anything. There are also SASS shooters who can outshot me with their Colt SAA's and Ruger blackhawks and the like, so...
rpenmanparker
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The fact some folks can shoot a gun well does not mean it is easy to shoot. Some folks are just abnormally, even peculiarly talented. Case in point, Jerry Michulek and revolvers. He is a magician with a revolver. It defies understanding. But that doesn’t mean that revolvers are better tools than semi-auto pistols. Most people can do better with a semi-auto pistol than a revolver. I love watching Jerry, but I know better than to buy another revolver. I can’t shoot the damn things. The fact that he can is about him, not the gun. How well could he shoot a 1911 if he put his mind to it, eh?
Another thing: with all the reasons folks like Glocks, do most of them ever test whether that is the gun they can shoot best? Does that figure into it at all? I would bet that most of the various trainees are pretty mediocre shots. Some are outstanding, I know. But most are probably just ho-hum or worse. Just for grins do instructors ever test them to see whether they can do better with a different type of gun? I think that would be interesting to know.
rpenmanparker
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Hudson, anyone?
No, but Colt and Smith & Wesson have both, at times, enjoyed the same kind of ubiquity that Glock now has. Happens with some frequency in most consumer good markets. And every time it happens, it feels like it will last forever... until it is suddenly over.
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