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Here are all the reasons why I hate Glocks – not

“I hate Glocks!”

“Tactical Tupperware,” “Drastic Plastic”  – whatever you choose to call it – this terrible product that Gaston Glock threw on this poor country in the early ’80s has ruined us as shooters forever.

I will offer a few reasons why I don’t like these Austrian pistols.

First, there aren’t enough levers and hammers and gadgets to play with. They are too simple!

Jeez, all you do is pull the trigger to fire the dang thing. Most pistols have a safety lever and decocker and even a hammer to mess with in the middle of a gunfight.

I could probably hand this pistol to my wife, with minimal safety training, and she could use it quite effectively. How am I supposed to impress her with my shooting prowess if she can handle the gun competently after only an after-noon of instruction?

Secondly, that simplicity of operation causes another problem: Anyone who handles them inattentively will most likely fire a bullet into something they didn’t intend to. A common way for this to happen is to re-holster the pistol with your finger on the trigger. This is inconceivable! Imagine pulling the trigger on a firearm and having it fire!

Third, if you feed them re-ally bad or grossly over-pressure ammo they might blow up. Much has been made of this but unfortunately for my purpose of making the reader see how terrible these pistols are, this is an ammunition problem.

Lastly, I make my living as a gunsmith. These things never break! I have seen one trigger spring break on a gun with around 25,000 rounds through it and the pistol would have actually still functioned in an emergency.

Every other “broken” Glock I’ve seen was either operator error or VERY bad ammo. How am I going to make a living fixing guns that never break?

Quit buying these things!

Seriously, the only thing you can do to them is put on night sights, maybe change the recoil spring guide rod out for a steel one or do a trigger job.

The latter is usually a good way for me to feed my family but Mr. Glock ruined that for me too. Although that job should be done by a qualified gunsmith or armorer, it’s not very time-consuming, so I can’t charge much for it.

As you have probably surmised, all of the above is tongue-in-cheek.

I am a huge fan of the Glock family of pistols. It is true that they don’t put much green in my pocket but man, do they work!

One of their greatest assets is their simplicity of operation.

It was quite easy to transition the average police officer from his or her trusted duty revolver to the Glock pistol. The reason is that the operation is as simple as: pull the trigger to fire it and take your finger off of the trigger to return it to safe mode.

If anyone has ever told you their Glock pistol has just “gone off,” there is a 99.999999999 percent chance they pulled the trigger at the wrong time and don’t want to own up to it.

The pistol has a safety lever right on the face of the trigger. Its purpose is to keep the pistol from firing if something should snag the side of the finger lever. The striker of the pistol is also not fully cocked until the trigger is pulled fully to the rear.

Even if the trigger somehow were to release the striker, it is not cocked back far enough to fire a chambered round.

The Glock also has a firing pin safety, as do most modern pistols; this prevents it from firing if dropped or struck by a hard blow.

The striker absolutely cannot move forward until this safe-ty device is also deactivated by – ingeniously enough – pulling the trigger fully to the rear.

Another advantage of the Glock over all of the pistols that have followed and copied it to some degree or another is the Tenifer finish applied to all of the steel parts of the pistol. This finish is all but impervious to corrosion.

Chuck Taylor, a weapons ex-pert and Special Forces veteran, set about testing the Glock with the express purpose of proving it was inferior to his favorite pistol, the Colt 1911A1.

One of the many torture tests to which he subjected it was leaving it in the ocean for a few months. After retrieving it, the only rust on the pistol was a small spot on the slide stop lever. That is a major ad-vantage for those of us residing in western Oregon.

Another engineering aspect that contributes to the pistol’s durability is that the “core” of the steel used is not really any differ-ent than most other quality pistols but the surface rates up to 69 RC (Rockwell Scale hardness). An industrial diamond rates at 70 RC.

The metal is the perfect compound for a pistol: hard on the outside and “tough” on the inside.

Mr. Taylor also did all of the obligatory torture tests that every gun writer seems to have to do to the Glock. He froze it in a block of ice, buried it in the sand and mud, ran over it with his pickup, shot it until the slide was too hot to touch and then immersed it in rusty water, and a bunch of other ridiculous things.

All of these reasons have al-lowed Glock to take over the police market. They are the benchmark for law enforcement use.

Glock is the standard-issue weapon of the Oregon State Police, and  (until not long ago, Linn County Sheriff’s Office), Albany, Lebanon and Sweet Home police departments. Not to mention the FBI and virtu-ally every other federal agency that packs heat.

There are two additional things that really prove Glock’s worthiness to me.

I am a big fan of the 10mm Norma pistol cartridge, which has the most power you can get out of a conventionally sized automatic pistol. However, it is known for rattling the foundation of about any handgun it has been chambered in except for the Glock.

The Glock Model 20 is a favorite of noted rock ’n’ roller, hunter and gun rights advocate Ted Nugent. His hands must be much larger than mine, as I can’t get mine comfortably around the large-framed Glock 45s and 10mms, so I don’t own either, unfortunately.

Here’s the most impressive thing of all: The Glock factory in Austria and Hertenberg Ammunition, also of Austria, both have individual Glock 9x19mms that have fired more than, or approaching, 500,000 rounds each without major parts breakage or replacement. That’s half of a million rounds – about 10,000 boxes of ammo with a cost of  around $150,000!

The ammunition cost 278 times what the gun did or another way: the gun is worth .0036 percent of the ammunition it has fired.

So do the rare and endangered (insert sob here) gunsmith a favor and please quit buying Glocks!