Want to see compact elegance?  Want to see flawless function captured in as few moving parts as possible?  Here you go:

There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.
― Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles

 

I don’t range with the geniuses, but I have been a student of elegance and design for several decades, I have read the masters and the classics, and I know good thinking when I see it….when I hold it.  You walk this earth and see some things and hear some things and, well, some ideas are just better than others, and sometimes the power of simplicity driving through to clean function is so evident that it is startling, even to an old, crusty engineer.

 

I’ve written this before, but I’m a mechanical beast:  my favorite uncle was a farrier; my infant fist turned its first wrench on a car in the 1960s.  I tip my hat to the kilowatt, the megaton, and the integrated circuit, but I love the heft of a sweet pen or razor in my hand:  I am a monkey poking in a hole for sweet sweet ants.  I respect the volt and the byte, but I cannot feel them (narrator interrupts:  he has felt a volt or two); manipulation starts in the mind but comes alive, literally, with the hand:  manus.

Guys like me are old hat.  My preferred century is over, ending around 2000, and, Gaston Glock’s recent passing is something of a punctuation at the end of that paragraph.  I never heard of the guy; he was outside my orbit; and then he was suddenly there.  I had carried a huge, reliable revolver for a decade and then moved to a place where I didn’t; quieter decades followed.  When I moved back to a place where I carried again, I was outgunned, and the techniques had passed me by.

I’m an industrialist.  I’ve been a rifleman for over half a century.  I learned to take my time with a bullet and never waste one, but my quarry never shot back; I had the naive tactics and tools of a gentle woodsman.  Needing an everyday carry in a zone where the hoard could magdump dozens of rounds in seconds, six was no longer the answer; hell, it wasn’t even a good decoy in the multiple choice answer list anymore.  Chuck Connors was walking the streets of Fast and Furious, and it was time for him to evolve.

Based on familiarity, comfort, accuracy, and popular support in customization and service, I started my search with a bias for an ancient design, the Automatic Colt Pistol.  Who had the answer for the new me?  I saw through a glass, dimly; the masters of cordite and lead spoke to me from my closing age:  Browning, Garand, Kalashnikov….hell, even Stoner.  I needed reliability, speed, simplicity, and safety.   I went to the range and tried a few things, mostly HK, ACP, Sig, Ruger, and the automatic offerings of S&W….all honorable and workable choices.  Tomato/tomato, pick your poison.

I found the range of options bewildering and overwhelming, the claims too many to read much lest test.  I ended up deciding it would be Colt or Glock; I would either remain a dinosaur or evolve into maybe an eagle, but I would not make it to mammal:  I didn’t trust the tits on anything less than twenty years old.  In the end, my answer simply came down to capacity and safety.  I completely respect 9mm for compactness, but I went with 45ACP for old school knockdown and charming controlability; I only have 10+1, but I think my first hit will matter more (I know, all this research and upset to only go from six to eleven in a world of 20).  Why not 1911:  I just couldn’t bring myself to carrying cocked and locked.

Everything else had at least one C on its report card.  The Sig trigger is too light; I don’t like the mechanism on it or the HK.  I’m 6-2 and don’t have small hands, so the M&P was too small for a comfy length of pull.  Ruger was pointlessly cheap and brought nothing new to the table; if I prioritized tiny, I’d go P365 instead of LC.

There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.  When you sit at the head of the table surrounded by experts and you can truly get them to work together, you can put something together that works well, is easy to tool up, is hard to assemble incorrectly, minimizes chances for misuse and malfunction, and lasts forever, but you won’t score A+ on every point.  Gaston Glock might have sat at the head of that same table; maybe he made some of the design decisions….maybe his hand drew every detail; maybe he just put a good team in motion; I leave it to others to retell a story I don’t know; I don’t know anything about the man because Elmer Keith didn’t write forty articles a week about him in 1975.  But I know the process, and I know when someone has delivered a solid answer.  When I handled the Glock, I recognized that process from the product.

Turns out there are probably better answers now; a legion of me-too typing in the basement did churn out better Shakespeare…take nothing away from them…but I wanted decades of proof and experience and writeups and customizations, and others came too late to have as much of that.  I grew up shooting designs that were never less than seventy years old; my rifle’s design was eighty on the day I found it under the tree.  I had loved and learned using ideas the predated not only The War, but predated the Great War.

Enter Glock:  it doesn’t have my favorite grip angle, but it is very much in the range.  The barrel is not the lowest, but it is reasonably low.  It certainly isn’t the smallest, most concealable frame; I dare say the slide tends to be the widest and heaviest in class.  It does not have the best trigger, but it is the correct pull weight for combat and amongst the most consistent.  It doesn’t have an active, selectable safety, but it is plenty safe.  The finish is not beautiful, but it is durable and reliable.  The Glock is uglier than a sack of assholes:  no lovely knurling of walnut; no bottomless bluing.  The mag release is marginal:  I should probably consider upgrading.  It might be heaviest in class, but I find light pistols too neutral and twitchy (I positively hate a Luger); I prefer the weight to hold me on target, so it’s not a demerit; I’m not some dainty damsel who can’t easily rotate a three pound pistol to acquire a target. Tear-down and maintenance are epically easy; frankly, I suspect that cleaning is entirely optional.  The report card is a string of solid B:  nothing perfect, but nothing wrong.

And this bitch runs.  It has never misfired or jammed or malfunctioned in any way, no matter how dirty it got or how crappy the ammo I fed it got.  This is probably the most important thing to me, so I would probably never change to anything that wasn’t also perfectly reliable with decades of proven performance.

I am not a Glockboi, but Glock is my EDC.

My son’s EDC is Glock.

I trust it with my life.

 

 

Gaston Glock was 94.