Glock (eBook)

Officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) line up with their Glocks alongside Alaskan State Troopers (AST) during a shooting competition.

Development of the Glock

To understand the Glock, you need to comprehend the market that it entered in the 1980s, and something about the products against which it competed. The key categories of handgun had been settled during the first decade of the twentieth century, and by the post-war years there had been little seminal advance in the basic technology.

Handguns fell into two types—revolvers and semi-automatic pistols. The revolvers were the old guard, with an ancestry dating back to the days of the Wild West. In military use, revolvers had largely been replaced by pistols, but up until the Glock era the same could not be said for law-enforcement service. In the United States, for example, six-shot .38, .357 Magnum and (less commonly) .44 handguns were dominant among police forces until the 1980s and 1990s. Classic examples were the Colt Detective Special, the Ruger Speed-Six and the Smith & Wesson Model 10.

As with all types of firearms, revolvers had their pluses and minuses. One of the great virtues of the revolver was its reliability. Revolvers would rarely ever jam, and if there was a misfire all the operator typically had to do is simply pull the trigger once again to turn to the next cartridge; with a pistol, the user has to clear the jam manually, and sometimes empty and reload the gun. Unless the revolver’s hammer was cocked, the gun also had the mechanical advantage that no parts (such as a firing pin) are held under spring tension, thereby reducing the possibility of mechanical wear. There were also some bonuses in ergonomics, particularly considering the fact that within a police force one gun would have to be used by a variety of human hand sizes. Because revolvers don’t need to hold a magazine in the stock, they can be used more easily by individuals with small or slender hands.

So far, so good, but revolvers had a major deficit—ammunition capacity. The maximum number of cartridges they could hold was six, and six rounds could be burned through with frightening speed during an actual armed engagement. Speed-loading devices were developed, in which new rounds could be dropped into the empty chambers in one go, once the spent cases had been ejected, but revolvers still required frequent reloading, and in these moments the user was exposed and vulnerable.

The striking virtue of pistols, by contrast, was that they could offer greater ammunition capacity, and that meant greater firepower and less downtime between shooting. Instead of the rotating cylinder of the revolver, they had a detachable magazine inserted (usually) into the pistol grip—reloading was a simply matter of pressing the magazine eject button, then inserting a new magazine into the grip. The weapon then used the forces generated by firing—usually in either a blowback or recoil mechanism—to work through the cycle of extraction, ejection, and reloading.

Handloading a revolver chamber by chamber is a slow business compared to the rapid mag reload of a semi-auto handgun.

US soldiers conduct building-clearance training with their Beretta M9 handguns. The Beretta M9 has been the main handgun of the US military since 1985.

First Automatics

The first automatic handguns had been developed at the end of the 19th century, and by World War I they had achieved acceptance. Some landmark weapons had been developed by 1914. In the United States, the Colt M1911 had set a design that was so successful it is still replicated and copied to this day. A short-recoil weapon firing a powerful .45 ACP cartridge, the M1911 used a swinging-link system to facilitate the locking action between barrel and slide. When the slide was forward, and a round chambered, lugs on the top of the barrel locked into corresponding grooves in the slide wall. When the gun was fired, the blowback forces drove the slide and barrel back together until the swinging link mechanism, attached to the rear of the barrel, pulled the barrel down and the lugs/grooves disengaged, allowing the slide to run through its complete recoil cycle and reload the gun.

The M1911 was undoubtedly the landmark US handgun of the twentieth century, one that would be the standard US Army issue pistol from 1911 until its replacement by the Beretta 92 in 1985. In Europe, pistol design took some different directions. The Soviets produced short-recoil workhorse handguns such as the 7.62 × 25mm Tokarev TT30, based heavily on the Colt system of operation, or 9mm weapons like the Makarov and Stechkin. But some of the greatest advances in handgun design took place in Western Europe. In Germany, for example, the two defining handguns of the world war era were the Luger Parabellum P-08 and its eventual replacement, the Walther P-38. Both were 9mm (0.354in) weapons, but while the Luger worked on a toggle-lock mechanism, the P38 used a wedge-shaped locking plate to secure barrel and slide together at the moment of firing. (Although the 9mm Parabellum that both weapons fired was perfectly suited to straightforward blowback operation, at this moment in history the German authorities did not trust a handgun that didn’t have positive locking, hence opted for short-recoil weapons.)

A West German trainee fires a 9mm Walther P1 during training in the 1980s; the P1 was a post-war version of the Walther P38.

The P38 was an enduring success—it was the standard Bundeswehr firearm until 1994 (as the P1), served with dozens of other armies and police forces, and remains a popular civilian weapon to this day. Nor was it the only pistol in the Walther range. Pre-1945 weapons included the Walther PP series, which included James Bond’s infamous PPK, and some diminutive blowback models such as the six-round .25 ACP Model 9. But there were alternative stirrings in Belgium, courtesy of the liaison between famous US gun designer John Browning and the Belgian gunmaker Fabrique Nationale de Herstal (FN). This liaison had begun in the early 20th century with the FN Browning M1900, a 7.65 × 17mm (.32 ACP) blowback handgun, but culminated in the 9mm Browning GP35 Hi-Power, which Browning began to design but which was completed after his death by FN designer Dieudonné Saive. Despite the “High Power” title, derived from the French Grand Puissance, the GP35 was actually no more powerful than any other 9mm handgun. However, it did break the mold in several important regards, and set a pattern that would have a direct influence on the future of gun design, including the Glock. Browning based the action on that of the Colt M1911, although made some modifications to the trigger mechanism, and used a shaped cam mechanism instead of a swinging link control the slide and barrel engagement. What was really ground-breaking about the P35, however, was its 13-round magazine capacity, courtesy of a double-stack magazine. The GP35 might not have had the physical punch of an M1911, but it had nearly double the ammunition, and that could give a soldier a crucial advantage in a close-quarters firefight.

The GP35 went into production in 1935, and did well from the outset—35,000 guns were made before 1939, and during the war it was put into production by Canada (for Canadian and Chinese forces) and also by Germany after its occupation of Belgium in 1940. But this was nothing compared to the success of the GP35 after the war, once FN had reestablished indigenous control over the production. Reliable, fast-shooting, and offering a then-unrivalled magazine capacity, the GP35 appealed to a post-war generation of armies wanting to upgrade personal firepower. The pistol was therefore adopted by the British Army in 1954 as the standard replacement for the .38 Enfield/Webley revolvers, and it served in this capacity until 2013, when it was chosen for replacement by the Glock 17 (more about this later). Some 55 other countries took it on board in various official roles, and it remains in prolific use.

The Browning Hi-Power ushered in the age of high-capacity handguns, with its 13-round detachable box magazine.

New Types

During the 1950s to 1970s, the European manufacturers especially began to roll out numerous new pistols, with more attention to the ergonomics of gun design and improvements in production quality. Companies like Steyr (Austria), Sig-Sauer (Switzerland), Heckler & Koch (Germany), Beretta (Italy), Star (Spain) and çeská zbrojovka Uherský Brod (CZUB) (Czechoslovakia) produced dozens of new models between them, advancing the type in terms of design, ergonomics, and safety. In Germany, for example, Heckler & Koch introduced the HK4 in 1967, a gun that looked back toward the Mauser HSc in terms of overall design, but which had interchangeable barrels so that caliber could be changed between 9mm Short (.380 ACP), 7.65mm (.32 ACP), 6.35mm (.25 ACP) and .22 LR (5.56mm). It was a double-action to single action pistol, meaning that the trigger pull alone cocked and released the hammer for the first shot, and the subsequent blowback action of the slide cocked the hammer for subsequent shots.

H&K subsequently upped its game with guns such as the double-action roller-delayed blowback P9S and the P7 (1976), the latter featuring a squeeze-action cocking handle integral with the pistol grip. SiG-Sauer, meanwhile, produced two landmark weapons—the P220 (1974) and the P225 (1978). The P220, for example, came in numerous calibers—9mm Para, 7.65mm Para, .38 Super, .45 ACP and .22...