Marswolf

Strangest place I saw one was in Shanghai along the Bund. I've also seen them in Colombia and Panama.

While I don't see a reason good reloads shouldn't work with a Glock, the swelling of the cases at what I'm reasoning is the unsupported part of the chamber is measurable. I'd mark that area and make sure the rounds are loaded into the magazine with that part of the case up, away from the ramp.

Have to agree that the 92 has a good DA trigger action, but I still cock it when possible.

From The Crime-Statistics Con Job (FOXNews) The Crime-Statistics Con Job Monday , March 26, 2007 By John Lott It is a remarkable con job. Over the last six months, the Police Executive Research Forum, the chief executives of primarily large police departments, has gotten the media concerned that the country is threatened by a sudden upsurge in violent crime and murder. A New York Times story on March 9th started the current round of hysteria with the headline that "Violent Crime in Cities Shows Sharp Surge." An earlier front-page story in January in USA Today caused a similar ruckus. One wonders whether the reporters ever thought of getting a critical comment for their story. The Police Executive Research Forum report sounded the alarm: "The FBI statistics reflect the largest single-year percent increase in violent crime in 14 years." It becomes a lot less scary when one realizes that the violent crime rate fell for 13 straight years, a total drop of 39 percent, before increasing in 2005 by less than 1 percent. The Forum even referred to this minuscule one-year increase as a "trend." Murder rates did rise from 5.5 per 100,000 people in 2004 to 5.6 in 2005, but they were a little higher a couple of years earlier — 5.7 in 2003 — and 5.6 in 2001 and 2002. Murder rates have essentially remained unchanged since 2000 after falling from a peak of 9.8 in 1991. With crime numbers such as these, it is strange that the Forum could get so many people talking about a surge, whether it be nationally or just in cities. But what the Forum does with the numbers is instantly recognizable for anyone with even a little training. With the national data, they report the change in the number of crimes, not the change in the crime rate (see their Box 1). Of course, the total number of crimes may go up in some years, but so has the population. Further, the Forum very selectively picked what crime categories to report. For example, they reported murder, robbery and aggravated assault, but not rape. Why? Could it be that the number of rapes, as well as the rape rate, fell? But the worst is their mangling of the data for city crime. They selectively pick 56 jurisdictions (mainly cities, but some counties) with populations over 70,000. There are 253 cities with over 100,000 people. The news bite that the media focused on is the claim that murder rates increased by 6.8 percent from 2004 to 2005, 10.2 percent from 2004 to 2006. Six of the top 20 most populous cities that they just happened to leave out had smaller increases, or even declines, in murders from 2004 to 2006. There is absolutely no excuse for leaving out these or other cities. After all, local newspapers regularly report how many murders their city had the previous year during the first week or two of each January. A few hours of Web searches will easily get you virtually all the 50 most populous cities. Many other cities are available as well. But how could any researcher reasonably pretend that they didn't know the number of murders in New York City? New York City, because of its large population, has the most murders in the country. If the Forum had also included just that one additional city, it would have brought down their estimated murder growth rate by an entire percentage point. The crime data for all the cities over 100,000 people are readily available from the FBI for 2004 and 2005. If you look at them all, not at only the small group the Forum selected, the murder rate rose by only 2 percent, less than a third of what their selective sample implies. Surely some cities do have serious crime problems, problems that are indeed getting worse. But there are also cities where crime rates have plummeted. The problems that particular cities face are more local than national in nature. Some cities, such as Philadelphia, have poorly managed police departments and have seen big drops in arrest rates. It is not surprising that violent crime and murder rates have also gone up. Not surprisingly, last fall the Forum ended its hysterical claims of a gathering crime "storm" with a call for more money for its members' police departments. There may be good reasons why cities should spend more money on police and prisons, but it should be justified by real numbers. The one victim of all this ruckus over the crime wave should be the Police Executive Research Forum's credibility. John Lott is the author of the forthcoming Freedomnomics and the Dean's Visiting Professor at the State University of New York at Binghamton.

I think we are getting on the same track. My point is not to offend any of you, but to get you thinking critically. I am very critical of all of my guns and look realistically at their problems - and they all have them. I could improve on all of my guns. In some cases, I have improved them. As I've said, Glocks are fine for duty weapons for LE. They are also fine for MPs but not general military personnel. Glock came around when LE was going through an early fit of political correctness. Those nasty cocked hammers on duty weapons scared the public. Basically, a 1911 with a cocked hammer is the same thing as a Glock as long as you don't use the safety but a less safe Glock for some reason doesn't bother the brain-dead public as much. I'm sorry guys but I'm not going to say that a handgun intentionally designed with a unsupported section of the chamber is anything but a dumb design. I don't care how reliable it makes feeding. If it was on a Saturday Night Special, all of you would be saying it was a gun only a retard would carry. Now be honest.... And this is only one of its bad design features. Ghostdog, you are correct that I specifically mentioned the SA mode on the Beretta and USP as being repeatable. Actually, both are also repeatable in DA mode too, but the USP DA mode pretty much sucks although it did smooth out pretty well with a few hundred DA trigger pulls. I really use it as an emergency mode only, but it is a mode I insist on. My procedure is to de-cock the USP for normal carry (can't do that with a Glock - can you? ) but cock it, in the holster, as I'm going into any expected confrontation. If something happens that I'm not expecting before it is cocked, I can always fire the handgun from the hammer down position (can't do that with a 1911). Typical "panic" trigger pulls are around 50#. Best of both worlds as far as I can see. It gives safe carry but can always be fired. BTW, not having a safety on the handgun is something that Glock did right and is another reason LE carries the guns. Cops panic too and you don't need a safety to prevent them from firing when they need to do so. My USP is variant 3 - de-cocker but no safety. That was a simple modification I made. The Glock design goes back about 20 years and in my opinion was a bad design even for back then. I understand why it became popular but the design needs updating to fix its bad aspects. And it seems to me that today there are better handguns available. That really is my point. There are better handguns available for every single thing a Glock is used for.

Yeah, but you like those other things.

I like Fords.

Unfortunately (for me) I agree with you. I'm sure I'd die, but I'd get my quota, and they probably wouldn't be grunts.

Lets see if I can dig my hole a little deeper.... It's not just first gun buyers. I did that. [hiding face in shame]. I had used a Beretta 92SB for years in the field and decided to "update" to a modern weapon. Went out and bought a shiny new black Glock 26 because so many of my LE friends used them. Even after I traded it for an XD-9 sub, I bought a G23 for a carry gun - duh! I view Glocks as acceptable but not preferred for a LE duty weapon. I think most people buy a Glock because they want a gun like the cops carry. I think they believe there is some sort of inherited mystique and professionalism that goes with the Glock. But the top professionals I know don't carry Glocks. It's one of those things you look for when sizing up someone in law enforcement. Maybe it's snobbery. Maybe it's experience. Sort of like years ago when I bought a Mazda RX-7. Renaissance Red and a real babe magnet. Nice vehicle, until you put it up against a "real" sports car.

Hell, American citizens aren't willing to fight for their freedom even when someone else is doing the killing and dieing. I wouldn't go into armed rebellion against the government with the current US populace as my ally. I think that day is past. The reason for us to have military-style weapons is that the criminals can get them and it makes no sense to expect good citizens to protect themselves from these thugs with inferior weapons.

I love Berettas too, especially the 92. Quality all the way. USPs are not priced outrageously. Well, maybe they are, but the H&K folks are Germans. If you buy, you buy. If not, they don't care. Customer service? Hahahahahaha. If they weren't such damn great guns, I'd love to hate them. For fun, sometime take a magnet and find all the metal under the plastic that you didn't know was there. They really are a quality product.

Hi GhostDog. This is just my day to PO other people. Well, yes and no. I find that consistency in the trigger helps make the bullets land where they are supposed to. I added a dual stage Jewell trigger to my Remington 700 VS because I know exactly when it will fire. My USP and Beretta are very repeatable in SA mode. It doesn't have to fire easily, it has to fire consistently. I have said all along that Glocks can be very accurate. But something, whatever it may be, makes them go off more often than other guns when not expected. That, in my view is not good. I'm well familiar with this. I've carried a 92SB for a couple of decades. I know a LE guy in Bristol that can remove the slide from a 92 before you know what is happening. I use the 92 as a long-range handgun or make sure any potential BG doesn't get close. Of course guns should be checked before disassembly. The point I keep making is that for one reason or another sometimes they aren't checked. In Berettas, or H&Ks, or SIGs that does not result in the gun firing. In Glocks, it does because you have to pull the trigger to un-cock it in order to remove the slide. You may not consider this a design flaw, but I do. It should be fixed. It's the same design "feature" that drove Jennings into bankruptcy. But the Jennings is considered a cheap crappy gun, while a Glock is revered as professional. Factory ammo works fine in a Glock. I strongly suspect Glock (Gaston and the rest) decided that feed reliability was more important than additional safety factor. My contention is that other quality firearms have that same reliability with additional safety. It's possible to blow up any handgun with sufficient overpressure. But rounds that would be easily handled by other handguns blow up a Glock. There is really no reasonable excuse for this. This is a needless danger. I owned Glocks but took a hard look at design and function. I didn't like what I saw. With so many better guns out there, I easily found some that have equal reliability and more safety. I just can't understand this loyalty so many people have to what is in my view an inferior handgun.

Sorry Jackdog. I'm having a lousy day.

My view is simply that while it is the responsibility of the user to prevent ADs / NDs. The design of the Glock makes that event much more likely with a lapse in concentration and I think empirical evidence indicates that. I'm not trying to beat up on Glock lovers. As I've said, it is a perfectly adequate duty weapon. I do think it has three problems: 1) It is too easily fired inadvertently. 2) The design that requires it to be dry fired in order to field strip it is poor. 3) The partially supported chamber is unnecessarily dangerous. And these are all problems other quality handguns do not have. So why on earth buy a Glock?

Jackdog, I have other things to do than argue minutia with you. So quickly: 1 fighting our government and military. I think my response is sufficient and obviously valid. If you don't understand it, sorry. 2 the Cato institute A conservative non-profit that makes its money by frightening the politically non-astute. If someone from the Rand Corporation said it, I'd listen. . 3. if it ain't broke don't fix it. It ain't broken now but it might get broken if the whiners keep going.

How many kabooms were caused by the unsupported chamber and would not have happened in any other gun? It's a lousy stupid design. BTW, in the nuclear power industry we used to have DBAs - "Design Basis Accidents". Someone decided that this was bad PR and so DBAs became "events". I'd say blowing up the barrel in a Glock is more than an "incident" to those it happens to.

Hey, my aunt bought me a magic set when I was about five years old. I used to do stuff for the kids in elementary school. Bought a few professional grade tricks over the years (nothing recent). These days if I do anything, it's card magic. There is always a deck of cards around. Don't have much time for that though.

Yeah, we may need to divide it up by Tri-Cities area and Knoxville area.

The conviction (not a precedent) in the Ken Lay case was vacated by legal precedent after the defendant died before sentencing. Verdicts in proceedings are based upon law and often refer to precedents. Nothing to do with this issue. The concept of vacating the decision of the court under the "Munsingwear doctrine" is beyond what I want to get into. Suffice it to say that the courts do not have to vacate a contested decision. This idea seems to have come from Eugene Volokh who is more than a little squirrelly at times. Even if the decision was vacated, that does not mean that the precedent no longer has effect. BTW, if you want to get more into the nitty-gritty of the Munsingwear doctrine, I suggest you see BENNY BAILEY, ET AL., PETITIONERS V. LYNN MARTIN, SECRETARY OF LABOR, UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF LABOR

Yeah, drag and drop only works for getting pictures uploaded from your computer to the picture hosting site.

Have to be honest guys. I can't see many folks driving from the Tri-Cities to Oak Ridge to shoot. It would be great for a Knoxville shoot though. I still wonder if we can't find someone with some property in the sticks. I have a neighbor who used to let people shoot on his farm but they kept doing stuff like shooting up his silo. Plus it matters where his livestock is. I lived in Raleigh for a few years after college. I'd carry a roll of half dollars with me because 50 cents was how much a beer cost at a tavern back then. If you got caught drinking and driving, the cops would probably just tell you to drive straight home and not stop at another bar. You could smoke with your beer (although I'd stopped smoking by then). Dear me...I'm getting nostalgic for the olden days.

It will take some preventable tragedies for it to ever happen. One concern I see is that a lot of parents probably don't trust the teachers all that much. I do know a lot of teachers who are - well - different.

A car isn't designed by the manufacturer so it normally has a child behind it that you have to remember to remove before backing up. I'd love to hear a tape of the meeting when they decided to actually design in the unsupported part of the Glock chamber.

I use Flickr, but it only allows jpgs. They have some nice software to help your uploads. Drag and drop stuff. Very handy.

We had an incident in a law school up in Grundy Virginia where a guy shot and killed some people. The spree was stopped when some students ran to their car and got their handguns. That's the extremely short version of the story, but the basics. Someone in the schools should have a weapon for defense of themselves, other school personnel, and the students. This "there will be blood in the hallways" is the cry of the anti-gunners every time letting people protect themselves is proposed. It doesn't happen. While there obviously should be training, remember that this is for an emergency situation that probably won't happen at any given school. You make the training regimen too onerous and you won't do any good. My feeling is that if you have a handgun permit, that's enough. Encourage additional training, but don't require it. My concern is more that the handguns be sufficiently locked up that students couldn't get at them. They would need to be locked up properly in some sort of handgun safe.