What Glok can't seem to understand is that Glocks are combat pistols. They come from the factory ready to go to war or work on the streets. People complain about little things on the Glocks like the plastic guide rods breaking, so they urge people to go out and by a aluminum one or a titanium one. However in my years and years dealing with Glocks, not only my own but other officers from around the metro Atlanta area I have only seen a handful of guide rods breaking and that was due to the officers failure to fully seat the guide rod after cleaning.
Glocks have become a very popular firearm. Rightly so in my book. As such there are about as many custom touches you can find out there to "mod" your Glock pistol as you can find to "mod" a 1911 pistol. What the end user of the pistol has to decide is whether or not they want to use the weapon for competition or combat. If carry and defense is their goal, then keep the weapon stock. The weapon was designed from the ground up as a combat pistol. Lots of little touches were made and added to help the weapon adapt to any environment.
Here are my reasons for not adding an assload of stuff to my Glock for carry. For the record, I carry a Sig 229 9mm for carry normally. There was a time when I carried the Glock 19 for carry and on occasion I still do.
Extended magazine releases. The reason these don't belong on a carry gun are simple. Getting in and out of vehicles puts pressure on the holster which can squeeze the weapon. An extended mag release protrudes out from the weapon by a good bit. Getting in and out of a car, standing up or sitting down can cause to you drop your magazine. Now chances are you will hear it hit the floor, but there is always that chance you will not and then you will be carrying around a weapon with one bullet like Barney Fife. This scenario is much more likely with Glocks now drop free mags that pretty much spit the magazine out from the gun, loaded or not if you hit the mag release.
Extended slide releases. This is pretty simple. I do not use the slide release anyways. Hitting the slide release is a "fine motor skill". In a shooting when you are shaking like a leaf and no amount of cussing yourself telling yourself to pull it together is going to help manipulate those small muscle groups. Instead in training/practice, just reach up and pull the slide back after reloading. Get into the habit of doing this and if you ever have to fire your weapon to save your life, hopefully you will get the bad guy with the first few shots, if not and you find yourself reloading, this action will come naturally to you and under the circumstances will be much easier to perform.
Grip plugs. The bottom of the Glock's grip is a little hole next to the magazine well. That hole is a thumb hole. It is not a place to snap in a nine dollar piece of plastic or a neat little Glock Armorers tool or any number of OEM stuff out there to place in that hole. It is a simple thumb hole. It is there so that if your weapon is covered in sand, dirt, mud, blood, grit, Dr Pepper..ect and your magazine does not drop free on the reload, you can reach up, and pull the magazine out. Simple as that.
Lasers. To me lasers are laughable. They really serve no real purpose. In fact at the range when I see someone with one of those little grip lasers or lasers on the rail of their weapon I chuckle to myself. Lasers have to be one of the most bad habit forming pointless devices the gun world has ever seen. This is of course my own opinion, but I bet if you took a pole you would find more than a few agree. The problem with lasers is, they are washed out in the sunlight, at night they are bright as hell, but most likely you can't see the bad guy to aim at. So what do you do? Use a flashlight, which then washes out the laser again. Awesome, at least some people think so. Pointless is the first word I think of.
Extended barrels. Oh man, where do I start. I can't understand why someone would want to add an extended barrel to a duty weapon. When you could just step up to the next largest size and gain a few extra rounds of ammo with out much of a weight change. In fact it most likely would weigh less then one of them lasers added to a gun.
I can go on and on about this, but truthfully I am bored with it. Glok, you continue ohh and ahh-ing over Race Glocks and adding pointless pieces of crap to a combat ready pistol. I will continue taking out of focus photos and taking my wife out to dinner regularly with all the money I save not having to buy a bunch of pointless crap to hang on my pistol to look high speed. Cheers.
