Also, it now has an eight-round mag. In the non-fictional world.

It’s just like the current brouhooha over the M17; back when that idiot general made the statement that we should just go down to buy off-the-shelf Glock 19s, and call it good, I knew that meant Glock was screwed–After what he said, there’s no way the procurement geeks would have ever allowed Glock to win the contract, even if they had a product a thousand times better than the other contenders. I think Glock had a pretty good case to make that they’d been screwed by that little comment, and they should have made a damn protest over it.

Of course, that would have produced another lengthy re-competition, which they’d also have never won, because politics, but… Hell, I can see why they said “screw it”.

That said, I do not like the paradigm of the M17. I want a pistol like the Glock, which is inherently never, ever “safe”. I do not like the casual mentality that a mechanical switch safety tends to encourage. If I had a dime for every incident of negligent discharge that included some asshole making a statement like “…don’t worry, I’ve got the safety on…”, I’d be swimming in cash right now. Glock got that bit of user psychology completely right–No switched safety, the gun is always dangerous, and you’re going to inculcate a healthy caution in the user.

Which, to me, also argues that the idiot cops who manage to shoot themselves with a Glock probably ought to be fired, stripped of responsibility for law enforcement, and then sterilized for the good of the species. If you’ve got a good holster, which a cop should, there’s no damn excuse for a negligent discharge with a Glock.

Of course, they also need to take the European attitude about weapons and cops up; in Europe, you make a cop draw their pistol, you’re getting shot, and shot until you are no longer a threat. Here in the US, we tend to use drawn pistols as threat signals which European cops are horrified by, but that’s the culture here–A cop tells you something, and you find that a lot of idiots won’t comply until that gun is out and pointed at them. In Europe, in a lot of countries, there is a lot of paperwork that has to be filed each and every time a pistol gets drawn in the course of duty, and if you fail to comply with the police officer’s instructions, you’re probably going to get your ass beaten in as an intermediary step. Make them draw, and you’re getting shot, because you escalated the situation past “ass beating”, which is something you’d better accept with good grace, because if you start to win…? Yeah; you’re getting shot.

Even during my tyro days in the Army, during the early 1980s, we were doing the “two hands on the gun” thing. Which only makes sense, to me–The one-handed stances simply do not provide as much support, and the technique I was taught even back in the old days was to extend and lock both elbows, looking directly over the sights so that when you moved the pistol, you created a tank-turret effect, and everything above the waist moved until you had to adjust stance to square up to the target. Using that, I’ve always been fairly successful.

The times I’ve practiced one-hand shooting have been drills for dealing with an out-of-action arm or hand, and I’ve never been as successful with those as with the two-handed techniques.

Even with the few bullseye target shooters I’ve had to deal with, the usual run of pistol shooter in the Army has always done better using a Weaver or modified Weaver stance.

But, as you say: It’s all about what you were exposed to first, and what I got was Weaver from the beginning.

That’s how I learned, right out of the Army manual. And I still shoot that way.

I think it’s a matter of how you learn and what you get used to; I don’t shoot any better with Weaver, isoceles, teacup, or any of the other two-handed grips, and I figure if John B. had wanted me to use two hands, he’d have put two handles on it.

I admit I haven’t tried the latest new tacticool style where you bend your elbows until you bring the gun about a foot from your face; I don’t care what credentials its proponents have, it’s ridiculous, like the “hold it sideways over your head” MTV/gangbanger thing.

People should have gone to jail for that… but back then, with no internet, they were able to scam the system without even bothering to hide it.

Seriously–I think we’d be better off firing the entire small arms staff we currently have, and replace the lot of them with a randomly selected committee of SF weapons sergeants.

Granted, that might leave us with some really obscure and idiosyncratic choices being made, but the odds are that it would work, and it would be far cheaper than what we’re doing now for such crappy results.

A lot of experienced shooters don’t like the trigger, but for amateurs, it can’t be beat. Like you said, draw and fire.

Up here in Canada, we have been trying for several years to replace our venerable Inglis Hi-Powers without success. Part of the issue is that whichever one we choose must be manufactured by Colt Canada, and nobody wants to give their whole technical package to a potential competitor for a total contract that is less pistols than the NYPD has.

We should just do what the Dutch and British did, which was buy them off the shelf from Glock.

Tamara Keel commented on the recent U.S. pistol contract, that she could have saved a whole pile of time and money. Instead of the repeated and expensive trials, get a Glock, S&W M&P, H&K VP-9, Ruger, etc, put them in a paper bag ($0.25), go to the Pentagon, find the first E5 who walks by (cost zero, since he is on salary), put a blindfold on him (negligible cost), have him reach into the bag, and adopt whichever one he pulled out.

Until we get a quantum leap in technology, like lasers, a Browning tilting barrel, locking on the ejection port, polymer framed 9mm striker fired model is the best evolution of the handgun.

Meanwhile, if they actually need to shoot someone, then there’s nothing between them and doing that. It’s a superior way to design a pistol, in my mind, particularly one that’s intended to go to a bunch of less-than-well-trained people, like you find in a conscript army. Hell, any army, for that matter.

The Beretta 92 is just too damn complex, as is the M1911A1. With the Glock, it’s perceive threat, draw, shoot until threat is ended, holster pistol. An M9? LOL… Perceive threat, draw, try to remember whether or not the safety is on, put it off, pull trigger, oh, now it’s a lot lighter, pull again by accident…

With Glocks, every single “problem child” I had getting qualified on the M9 managed to overcome their issues, which mostly revolved around fear of the gun and the attendant confusion generated by too much “choice” when operating it. M9 has multiple different control interfaces to worry about–Double-action trigger, single-action, safe, and fire. The different trigger pulls will confuse the living hell out of the tyro, especially when coming to the gun from a rifle that only has one “pull”. I don’t know how many people I trained who accidentally dropped the safety while manipulating the pistol, which set the hammer down, and then they were like “Why is this trigger so heavy…?”. Seems stupid, but when you’re not a “gun person”, that kind of thing is inimical to making the trainee effective with the pistol. On a Glock, it’s consistently simple to get down to business. Is it loaded…? Then, it’s ready to fire, and the trigger pull is the same, each and every time. No confusing safety–It’s just like a fire extinguisher: Unholster, and start shooting.

Glock may or may not be a complete asshole as a human being, but he did do one thing right: He let the pistol shooters and engineers he sought out as advisers do their things, and as a result, the Glock is very nearly a perfect defensive weapon for civilian or military use. Not so sure about it for law enforcement, but that’s another rant, entirely.

A Hi-Power as issued, has a couple of deficiencies. The safety is too small to be efficiently used “cocked and locked”, the sights are too small, and the grips need to be a bit slimmer and with deeper checkering. Do that minimal customizing, and you have a world beater, unfortunately, as issued, you don’t.

When I carried it in the CF, we used it Israeli style. Ignore the safety, carry it with an empty chamber, and rack it as you draw, and for the same reasons as the Israelis, (the aforementioned too small safety).

The P-38 was reliable, had decent sights, average magazine capacity, but most importantly, could be brought into action by drawing and just pulling the trigger.

I have never found the .45 to be easy to shoot. It is easy to load and its slide is easy to work. The grip angle does not suit my hand or wrist. I have always found it ergonomically unpleasant to fire.