How Glock Accessories Can Make You A Better Shooter

By Kristen Baird


The Glock 9 mm semi-automatic pistol is regarded by many as America's favorite handgun. Using the right Glock accessories can make shooting easier. First, it is essential to understand the basic principles underlying all firearms. At its simplest, a gun is a closed metal tube with one end open and the other end, which is rounded, drilled with a tiny hole to accommodate a flammable length of fuse. Gunpowder, a mixture of potassium nitrate, charcoal, and sulfur, is placed into the closed end of the tube (the breech). The earliest functional model of this apparatus was the cannon.

When the fuse is lit, the gunpowder ignites, creating a large volume of very hot gas. The pressure on the cannon ball as a result of the gas is greater than the atmospheric pressure coming in through the open end, so it is propelled out of the tube at a high rate. Note that it is the momentum of the cannon ball (mass times acceleration) that causes the damage at the other end; the projectile itself does not ignite or explode.

The problem with early handguns was they could only fire one shot at a time, after which the operator would have to clean and reload the weapon in order to fire the next shot. Enter the revolver, which only had to be reloaded after every fifth or sixth shot. The bullets sat in a revolving chamber, which advanced one shot each time it was fired. The revolver came along in the 1800s.

Revolvers were great, but people wanted to kill each other even faster. This is where the semi-automatic pistol comes in. In these devices, the ammunition sits in a holder called a magazine residing in the butt (handle) of the gun. Some of the larger magazines were capable of holding up to 15 bullets.

The pistol had the advantage of a lighter trigger action than the revolver, too. However, semi-automatic pistols had a disturbing tendency to jam at the most inopportune moments, something to which the revolver was not prone. Automatic pistols remedy this by feeding bullets into the chamber automatically.

The Glock is a semi-automatic pistol developed in the late 1970s by an Austrian engineer named Gaston Glock. The Austrian army found itself in need of a new sidearm and so invited manufacturers to submit designs in response to a 17-point request for proposals (RFP). Glock owned a manufacturing company and led a team of engineers and designers to put together a design incorporating a plastic frame as well as metallic components.

Satisfied with what the Glock team came up with, the Austrian Defense Ministry ordered 25,000. Widely considered America's favorite hand gun, the Glock is made in all major calibers, of which the 9 mm is the favorite. Among the accessories available for the sidearm is the magazine. The Glock magazine holds more ammo than magazines of other gun manufacturers.

What makes the Glock magazine so interesting is the complete polarization between European and American users of the gun when it comes to whether or not the magazine should drop automatically onto the ground, sometimes partially loaded, or require the push of a button. In Europe, allowing the magazine to drop is not the done thing; in America, the magazine is almost considered disposable.




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