Who Makes The Best Handguns? These 5 Pistols Show Why It's Glock

Kyle Mizokami

Technology,

These can't be beaten.

Key point: Glock has developed original handguns to compete across the market.

The Glock 17 handgun shook up the gun industry in a big way. Gaston Glock’s polymer pistol masterpiece, with its emphasis on ruggedness and reliability, swept the military and law-enforcement world and conquered the civilian market. Slowly, the company has introduced new handguns, all based on the original design, to compete in virtually every niche of the handgun market, from large-bore semiautomatics to discreet concealed carry. Here are five of Gaston Glock’s best designs.

Glock 17

The handgun that started it all, Gaston Glock’s first handgun was originally designed to win a contract to supply the Austrian Army with handguns. It is a remarkable piece of engineering for someone who had only studied, but never designed, handguns of his own. The polymer lower receiver reduced the handgun’s weight where metal was unnecessary while keeping a traditional all-steel frame. The G17 can stand up to a wide array of physical abuse, including being run over by a car and frozen in ice, as well as dust and other environmental factors while remaining completely reliable. The Glock’s seventeen-round magazine had the highest ammunition capacity of any commercially available pistol of its time.

Glock 21

One of the first Glock variants, the Glock 21, was simply the original Glock 17 scaled up to accept the .45 ACP round. The result was a high-capacity .45 pistol, something that wasn’t exactly common. The Glock 21 could carry thirteen .45 ACP rounds while the standard .45 pistol, the Colt 1911A1, could carry seven or eight. The use of weight-reducing polymers was particularly useful in the G21, as it offset the weight of a magazine full of .45 rounds. The introduction of the Glock 21 early in the company’s line proved that Glock understood many American shooters were skeptical of what they considered the relatively low-powered nine-millimeter round, and that the basic design could scale up to accommodate more powerful, higher recoil ammunition.

Glock 19