Les Jones posts about a torture match between 1911’s and Glocks.
1. If you pull the trigger and your gun does not go bang, you are out of the match.
2. There is no maintenance on any gun after the match starts. You can’t lube the gun and if your sights fall off, either you quit or you shoot without sights, but you don’t get to put them back on. You don’t get to tighten screws or tap back in pins that have “walked” during the match.
3. A gun may not be hand cycled after chambering the first round of the day. You can sling shot or mag release to send the gun into battery after a reload, but you cannot cycle a gun already in battery in order to feed a new round into battery.
Nine Glocks and seven 1911’s started the match. One of each finished. The Glock was decided the winner because it’s times were faster.
How about this test: Most number of lives saved in the service lifetime of the pistol model, civilian and military use. The Glocks can extrapolate their total saved numbers out until their years in service equal out to the 1911’s.
TYVM. 1911 wins. Have a good night and don’t forget to tip your waitress.
There, can these insipid tests be done and over with now?
And if I’d had never seen a peened 1911 front sight fly off, I’d be asking who the hell has their sights fall off. And I’m still tempted to ask that, since that was one time in 25 years of shooting and with a rental pistol.
I guess I could probably be arrested by the Mounties just for thinking about guns, let alone writing about them while I’m in Canuckistan (BC, the Left Part).
Here is the bottom line: a handgun will perform to design specs if it is taken care of. Handguns which are in military arsenals are designed to a higher standard than are those that are never offered to the military. Both of these pistols are military firearms, and both of them passed very stringent qualification tests before being adopted by whatever militaries adopted them. That’s good enough for me, and I own both of them.
To put pistols through tests that are designed to make them fail, then castigate the manufacturer when they do is childish, to say the least. First of all, no soldier or airman is ever going to do much combat with a pistol, but if they do, it will probably not be over a couple dozen rounds. Unlike military rifles, pistols get carried in holsters which protect them from dirt to a degree, but that degree is usually enough to insure that they will fire when called upon. The military tests reflect this.
Your mileage may vary, but carrying a full-size combat pistol, as is my right (except up here in Canada) does not expose my weapon to much dirt.
The bottom line is that you should expect your weapon to function during YOUR carrying of it, not during someone else’s idea of how to make it fail deliberately.
Let’s get everyone to carry, then we can worry about how many of those carried weapons will function during a mud wrestling match.
I find it interesting that both Kimber and Wilson Combat dropped out early, while a Colt 1911 rode it all the way to the finish… Also note that I’ve had all sorts of failures/hiccups with all my pistols, my Springfield 1911 A1 being the worst… I’m not a Glock believer, but I’m not a 1911 worshiper either. I think both camps tend to believe their own hype a little too much… nothing wrong with being loyal to your model, but let’s be realistic. Hell, I even had a failure to feed one time on my HK USP! No gun is perfect, and these tests remind me of the age-old Ford vs Chevy debate: pointless.
oh, and I like your point, RIVRDOG. Let’s get everybody to carry first, before we start nit-pickin the weapons…