I get a lot of questions as to how different guns work. One of the most common questions goes something like this…”So how does that fancy plastic Tupperware Glock work?” It’s no wonder, since this gun was the first popular weapon to use something other than the traditional hammer and firing pin system for a pistol. No other gun has created such love-hate viewpoints as the Glock. I think it is because of its sheer popularity. No pistol is more popular in law enforcement and there is not a gun shop in America that does not keep a healthy supply based purely on steady consumer demand.
There was a deluge of negative press about “plastic pistols” when the Glock first hit the American market. Some of it was about the plastic itself, because Glocks were cheaper than most steel and aluminum alloy guns of the era. Prior to polymers (plastic), the “cheap” material to make guns out of was something called “pot metal.” It melted at a lower temperature than the metal that made up the frames and slides of “quality” guns and a few states adopted laws banning guns based on melting temperature, labeling them “saturday night specials.”
So along comes the Glock made out of plastic and it is the safest and most reliable out of the box gun anyone has ever seen, blowing the whole “melting point equals quality” argument out of the water. Stories came out that you could carry one through an airport metal detector (you can’t because there is lots of metal in a Glock in addition to the plastic) and the anti-gun media fed a feeding frenzy about the dangerous Glock that actually fired every time you pulled the trigger, and that was safe and reliable.