No, silly. Civics can't fire bullets. Common misunderstanding, happens all the time. Once, I tried to do target practice at the range, but I was actually high in the bathroom at a Costco with a cucumber; same thing really.
Have you read the article? The difference is how Glocks can easily adapted to fire full auto with an accessory.
Can others be adapted to full auto? Probably. But the adapters aren't as easilyinstalled and commonly available.
By being a super popular gun for the reasons you mention and by being a relatively simple gun certainly helped it become the host of choice for such a modification.
One model of Glock being full auto from the factory probably set the blueprint for the illegal mod.
Have you ever heard of a Shoestring Machine gun? A little creativity goes a long ways and a Glock is nothing special aside from being an excellent self defense weapon.
Then the throw in some weaseling : turning up increasingly, police think it was used this one time, this anti-gun commission says. Spraying bullets.
Glock has a reputation for quality, they're cheap and reliable, not having a safety adds nuance of danger for those idolizing them.
I'm sure there are some people using full auto Glocks, but they're extremely rare. It's not this new impending threat. They could have easily done the article detailing the full auto device or given real numbers of use. They're in it for the clicks.
It is surprisingly difficult to make any handgun fire full auto controllably.
Not the Glock, the irony is that their safety mechanisms provide a brilliant exploit for full auto conversion. No other striker fired handgun is anywhere near as easy. The 18C was in no way a guide for conversion because the mechanisms of operation are entirely different and far more complex, the conversions are brilliant in their simplicity.
The second easiest one is the 1911, but you need to modify the frame and slide and make some fairly precise parts that have to be hand fitted to each gun. You can make a 1911 uncontrolled full auto, as some find out by accident when they modify the gun for legal reasons.
Glocks are, and were already, very popular guns. This means that accessories manufacturers will target their devices at these guns, so they target as large of a market as possible. Thus, more manufacturers are wanting to produce automatic adapting devices for Glocks than other guns.
Yes. You can make pretty much any semiautomatic pistol (or reciprocating rifle) full auto with a fucking shoestring. There are other mods for other guns that are not even remotely complicated. I won't get into any specifics for the sake of public safety but Glocks are not very unique, they're super common which is why parts and mods are so abundant.
Glocks are among the most popular handguns, period. That's because they work, and they work consistently, even with poor maintenance and cheap ammunition.
If you try running your expensive Staccato 2011 without cleaning it every few hundred rounds, you're going to be guaranteed to have jams. A Glock? You can get about 3000 rounds at a range between cleaning.
My range had a rental CZ75 they never cleaned. Probably had 15k rounds or more through it, the owner figured. He'd check it periodically to make sure it was safe, but he was curious to see how long it took to crater it. It was still the most accurate 9mm in the rental fleet. I sold my M&P to buy a Shadow just because that gun blew it out of the water for multishot accuracy.
IIRC there's one part on the Shadow II that's known to fail at regular intervals, I think the extractor? It's something that's well known to competitive shooters, common enough that they keep spares on hand the same way that most competitors keep spare optics batteries on hand. I don't know that I'd try running a Shadow or Shadow II for thousands of rounds without cleaning, just because it's got closer tolerances than a CZ-75B. But that's just me.
Oh, and if you like CZ, check out KMR Arms. KMR does some of CZ's manufacturing, and also does their own line. Sadly, they aren't yet generally available in the US due to the general difficulties in importing pistols, but I've heard they're trying to work out distribution. These should be viewed solely as competition guns though rather than tactical or duty firearms; you should probably not be using any of them as a carry gun.
EDIT: A range can probably get away with a little less cleaning, because they limit the ammunition that people can use; they can only sell very clean burning ammunition that won't leave a ton of powder and copper fouling. Most people that practice on their own use whatever is cheap, which may even be shitty Russian surplus Wolf ammo with lacquered steel cases, and corrosive Berdan primers.
I don't own one. Can someone objectively confirm a few things about Glocks? Is the following true?:
They don't really have a "safety". They have several mechanisms that prevent accidental fire when a finger isn't on the trigger, but if you have a round in the chamber and pull the trigger, it's going to fire (which sounds obvious, but I mean it doesn't have a safety switch like a bb gun usually does)
You have to pull back the slide to chamber a round and fire. And once it's chambered, the trigger just needs a light squeeze to fire (as opposed to a full motion squeeze - in other words, the trigger is partially pulled back once racked and easier to fire)
If the above is true, these two things in combination seem like an irrisponsible design to me. You are asking for accidental fires like the one that happens recently where a guy pointed a gun at some kids in his driveway and claims "the gun went off". You should either have a real safety, or it should be harder to squeeze the trigger accidentally.
No its not true. Glocks have a safety its just not your traditional safety. Its not going to go off on its own, cam be dropped on the ground and its not going magically go off. Modern glocks arent double action, so it wont take 15 pounds of pressure to fire the bullet, but more like 4-6 pounds. Thats still quite a bit and way more than what you need to fire a bb gun, paint ball round, laser tag gun.
The four basic rules of gun safety are:
Treat every gun as if it's loaded: Always assume a gun is loaded, even if you think it's not.
Point the gun in a safe direction: A safe direction is one where the bullet will not cause injury or damage if it accidentally discharges.
Keep your finger off the trigger: Keep your finger off the trigger and outside the trigger guard until you're ready to shoot.
Know your target: Be certain of your target and what's in front of and behind it.
The irresponsibleness in your situation is the fact a gun was pointed at kids at all. You simply dont take your gun out to have a cowboy monologue of getting off my property and you certainly dont have you finger over the trigger unless you intend to fire. There is no irresponsible design here, only irresponsible owners.
They do have a safety. It's a trigger safety, not a thumb safety. This means that you have to have your finger in the trigger and pull it for the gun to go off. If the trigger snags on clothes or the gun is dropped or whatever, the gun will not go off.
The glock is a striker-fired gun. That means the trigger pull to fire will always be the same. There is no double VS single action, which is probably what you're thinking about when you say "light squeeze to fire" as a double action gun like a Beretta 92FS will have a noticeably shorter and much easier pull if it's cocked VS uncocked. There is no "partially pulled back" with a glock. You always pull the trigger the same amount with the same force to fire. You cannot "decock" a glock.
Now how much force does it require? That is up to the trigger spring. Some jurisdictions like NY force glocks to have a really heavy trigger pull but as far as I am aware there is no data supporting that it makes them any safer.
I will say if I had to criticize the glock, it is that you need to pull the trigger to disassemble the weapon. Of course you should only be trying to disassemble it after you've cleared any rounds from the chamber but it is one minor flaw with the design and one reason why the glock wasn't eligible to become the US Army's sidearm.
The NY Glock trigger is, IIRC, for NYPD, so that cops aren't "accidentally" shooting unarmed people. Because clearly it was an accident that they shoot unarmed people multiple times...
To me their trigger safety is a joke. It's a bit of metal that sticks out of the trigger a couple mm than gets pulled when you pull the trigger. It does prevent accidental discharges from being dropped but if you've got a Glock racked and ready it doesn't take much force on the trigger at all to fire.
That's why I got my wife a Ruger. It has a proper safety.
But... That is the safety. A safety is intended to prevent ADs/NDs. And that's what it's doing here. If you have your finger on the trigger, then yes, it's going to do off, and maybe you shouldn't have your finger on the trigger unless you're pointing the gun at something you intend to shoot?
Yes for most glocks, although there are some glock models that do feature a manual safety.
Glocks have a half cocked striker once you rack the slide, and this gives a factory glock a trigger pull weight that is directly in between a cocked single-action trigger and an uncocked double-action trigger.
Glock's trigger safety is more secure than no safety although it is not as secure as a thumb safety, and the half cocked striker is easier to pull than a double-action trigger but is harder to pull than a single-action trigger.
Presumably this compromise was intentional and is one of the reasons why Glocks have become popular through their balance of reliability and ease of use - nowadays most striker fired pistols follow the same design principle.
From what others are saying, the trigger pull is always the same. I'm not familiar with the intricacies of Glocks specifically, but this seems to match with my experience as well.
Also a drop safety to prevent the gun from going off if you drop it.
That said it doesn’t have a safety that most people would think is meant by the word, which is a switch that prevents the trigger from being pulled (that is not built into the trigger itself)