GLOCK and Slowly Developing Issues

As a GLOCK shooter, I have been watching the developments with the ongoing reliability issues that Gen4 and late Gen3 GLOCKs are experiencing. It is a shooter’s worst nightmare to have a handgun that fails at the worst possible time, so good shooters go to great lengths to verify that their handgun is reliable before carrying it. For many shooters, that means putting 200-500 trouble-free rounds through the handgun before it sees any holster or nightstand duty. Handguns that make it through this testing period can typically be relied upon but there is an interesting phenomena going on with GLOCK handguns that challenges this conventional wisdom.

Some shooters are finding that their GLOCK digests anywhere from 700-1500 rounds without issue before extraction/ejection problems begin to show themselves. This is well outside of the typical testing period so many shooters are finding that handguns that they once deemed “reliable” are now failing them. That is a scary thought.

These slowly developing issues have actually been caught on film. The YouTube channel TWANGnBANG set out to create a video about his Gen4 GLOCK 17 and how it was one of the ones that worked but found that it suddenly developed, while he was filming, the dreaded brass-to-the-face behavior that is seemingly common among new GLOCKs. As the video goes on, you can clearly see the ejection pattern getting more and more erratic, even with high quality, full power ammunition.

It seems that there is no end in sight for these issues. Hopefully GLOCK can come up with a solution so that shooters don’t have to turn to the aftermarket to get their handguns up and running. In the mean time, companies like White Sound Defense and Apex Tactical Solutions are offering solutions that seem to be working for many shooters.