"The continued sales triumph of the Glock pistols demonstrates the virtues of skillful marketing. The Glock pistol is okay. It is generally reliable, it is comparatively inexpensive, and it is available in respectable calibers. Above all, its after-market service is superior. The great part of its sales comes from police departments where maintenance and quick service are of primary importance. It may not be the best choice for the private pistolero, but such people are not in the majority. For those who feel that only the police establishment should be interested in sidearms - which includes all of the socialist states of Europe - this is a major advantage."
Ah, but the Colonel stumbles. Badly. Skillful marketing and after-market service are two, far removed, and separate things. Glock has been long known for horrible marketing...click in to their official web site and see if you can find ANY of the GAP models...and their response to what officers and the general public have been clamoring for has been abysmal.
They were first out of the box and ran with it. They kept the production lines moving and their customer service is the best imaginable.
And The Colonel is dead wrong about where the pistols are going, too.
Sales are split 50-50 between law enforcement and the man on the street. The enthusiast looks to the PD's for the lead, and the more cops that carry Glocks, the more private citizen's carry Glocks. Monkey-see, etc. But they are slipping badly. New kids on the block have taken the idea to the next level or two and old Gaston seems happy to rest on his laurels.
Not that he's done all that badly, don't get me wrong. The armed forces of a dozen or so countries use his product, and as much as I love the 1911, it didn't exactly take the world by storm. To American shooters it is a thing of veneration, but tell me how many European, or Asian nations have adopted it for duty, or for that matter, how many American states issue it as the preferred sidearm to officers of the law.
However, it does appear that something big is in the offing. Glock is reported to be working on .223 and .308 caliber carbines, and might even be readying an entry for the upcoming service trials intended to replace the horrid 9 mm Beretta.
That's where the big bucks will come from. Filling an order for half a million sidearms will actually make Glock some profit, as the law enforcement end of the business makes far less money than the consumer side. Cops get 'em a lot cheaper and are constantly fucking them up. Must be a nightmare to supply the police with anything. I mean, think about it for a second. The lower 11% of all workers described as professionals. In I.Q. And they cracked the 10% barrier only because human resource departments started calling janitors Custodial Engineers. Can you imagine carrying your gear, day in, day out, and not knowing a bloody thing about any of it?
A sure sign of intelligence, science tells us, is in the amount of inquisitiveness a species has.
Case closed.
Where was I...
Oh yeah; click into the Colonel's site for the full monte. He's old, he's rambling, he's hopelessly out of touch...please now, to him $3000 for a working Model 1911 is chump change but how does he expect the rank and file to cough up half a lung for a good sidearm...but we owe him.
Jeff Cooper's Commentaries
3 comments:
We do owe him.
And you can get a good 1911 for less than $3000. I'm building one with Wilson parts and I think I'll have around $1500 or so in it when I'm finished.
Glock stumbled badly when it put those @#^%*@! finger grooves on its guns.
I've owned and shot plenty of good 1911's in the $1200-$1500 range. I don't think a one of them would have pleased old Jeff. His dictum was, and is, they must digest everything on the market without a hiccup, give under 2" at 25 yards, preferrably 1 and a half, and while I've seen and had guns that came close, invariably it weas a tradeoff for one thing or the other. Dead-on reliability or accuracy. Spend a fortune and maybe get both, but I've never been lucky in getting the perfect .45 acp for the price I was willing to spend. Not knocking the gun, just reality, and the random chance that never married me to the perfect 1911 for a reasonable price.
Good luck on your build.
And the grooves, yeah. The Europeans love 'em. Go figure.
LMAO. The .380 is just about the same size as the Glock 26, or at least that's how it felt in my hands. Nice little BUG. Under-loaded ammo, too, and it's so soft when it goes off that it wouldn't wake the baby.
What Gaston's got to bite the frickin bullet and do, is crank out some more molding machines for the states. The Euro's GOTTA have those grooves or the blast from something as powerful as a .380 is a wrist-breaker for them.
I was hoping that the plant in Georgia was going to be a real gun manufacturing facility, not just fit these frames on those slides sort of thing. Make us the guns we want, the ones we like to shoot, and why is that concept so difficult.
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