Trigger Time With a Glock 18C

G18C

Throughout my 19 years as a cop, I’ve got to do some pretty neat stuff.  I’ve driven all sorts of cop cars, chased bad guys on foot and in cars, flown in several different helicopters, done CPR on a guy who lived to tell about it, treated gunshot victims while waiting for the real medical guys (fire) to arrive, arrested some very bad people and sent them to prison for a very long time, all kinds of neat stuff that I am proud to have done.  Some of them were scary, some gross, some exciting, some fun, and most were a mixture of two or more of those, but none of those put nearly as big and stupid a grin on my face as what I recently had the opportunity to do; shoot a Glock 18C!

The Glock 18 is not a new gun by any means.  In fact, the Glock 18 has been around since 1986 so it is not remotely something new.  That said, it is also not remotely common a firearm to encounter, and the reason for that, for the few of you reading this who may not know what a Glock 18 is, is that lever on the side of the slide.  That is the fun lever, the giggle switch, the selector.  Yes, the Glock 18 is a selectfire handgun, which means it has both semi-auto and full-auto fire modes.  The only difference between the original Glock 18 and the 18C is that the C is compensated to help fight muzzle rise.

As someone who 1) has lived in California his entire life and 2) never served in the military, I don’t have much experience with firing full-auto weapons.  In fact, this encounter was only my third time playing with one, and the previous encounters were very limited.  So, while I do have 30 years of experience shooting, and extensive trigger time with Glocks, I am by no means an expert with machine guns, or in this case, machine pistols.  Even so, neither my partner nor I found the Glock 18C hard to shoot.

To my surprise, the Glock 18C was actually quite controllable in full-auto mode.  After firing a few short bursts to see what it was like, I started running full mag dumps and was able to keep a decent group on the paper from 7 yards.

With that in mind, I have a hard time picturing a scenario where a Glock 18C makes practical sense when compared to other firearms available.  About the only scenario I can imagine where it is “practical” is in a dignitary protection role, but even in that role, there are other weapons I would likely choose.  Still, not everything in life is about practical.

Getting beyond how fairly controllable it is to shoot, the fun factor is impossible to measure.  After every single turn I got shooting it, I would start giggling like a young school kid, and the goofy grin on my face may not ever leave.  The other two occasions in which I got to fire a full-auto weapon were fun, but the Glock 18 is just plain stupid fun in comparison.

Some things we do “just because,” and in my mind, that is all the justification this gun needs.  Why build it?  Because we can!

Let me just end this by quoting a young man who was wise beyond his years, Ferris Bueller:

“If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up.”

Have fun out there and be safe,
Matt

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