How Glock Accessories Can Make You A Better Shooter

By Kristen Baird


The underlying principle behind all firearms, everything from cannons and muskets to shotguns, rifles and hand guns, is the same. Take a sealed metal tube with an opening at one end (called a bore), drill a hole in the sealed end (the breech) and pack it with gunpowder. Thread a flammable length of material called a fuse through the hole and into the gunpowder. Place a cannon ball on top of the gunpowder. Understand how this works and it will be easier to understand what Glock accessories are used for.

Lighting the fuse ignites the gunpowder, a mixture of charcoal, sulfur and potassium nitrate), which suddenly generates a huge volume of gas, exerting a tremendous amount of pressure on the cannon ball to fly out the bore of the metal tube. It is the product of the mass of the projectile and the acceleration due to the gas pressure that blasts the target to Kingdom Come. More portable firearms in the form of flintlock pistols evolved out of this same principle. Now, they use detonators instead of fuses.

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 trigger action in a pistol is also lighter than that of a revolver. The down side of the semi-auto pistol is that it has a capacity to jam, a feat that is nigh impossible for the revolver. Lastly, automatic pistols fire bullets automatically as soon as they load into the chamber.

Today's Glock is a semi-automatic pistol and probably America's favorite hand gun. It was developed by a team of Austrian engineers and designers led by a man named Gaston Glock. Inspired by an open request from the Austrian army for designs of a new sidearm, the team came up with the Glock. Because the company was already making hand grenades out of plastic, the design team naturally incorporated the material into the new firearm.

The Austrian Defense Ministry approved of the design and initially ordered 25,000 of the semi-automatic plastic pistols. Made in all major calibers, the Glock 9 mm has become America's most popular hand gun. One of the most important accessories for the weapon is the magazine. Glock magazines are designed to hold more ammunition than other gun designs.

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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