BORELLI CONSULTING: Tactical Equipment Reviews

Glock 17C 9mm
By: Frank Borelli, 18 April 2005

Those of you who have read my reviews for any period of time know that I prefer two handguns: Government Model 1911 .45ACP pistols, and just about anything Glock. Now I have a confession to make: for all the time I've been a Glock fan - and I've been carrying one off-duty for better than ten years now, I've always avoided the Glock Model 17. Why? Because I was narrow minded. That's being blunt. In the late 1980s when the agency I was with began investigating high-capacity 9mm pistols to find a new duty weapon was when I first handled a Glock 17. At that time I thought highly of some other manufacturers' weapons and I hadn't given the Glock much consideration. When I did, my very first reaction was, "Too blocky; feels funny."

Some years later I was sent to Glock armorer's school and actually became educated (somewhat) about Glocks. Across that couple of years I'd also been exposed to veteran officers / firearms instructors who actually liked the pistols and encouraged me to check them out. I took their advice and (obviously) became a Glock fan. But for some reason, my appreciation for the weapon just never extended to the Model 17. In the back of my mind I still carried that original distaste for it that I'd gained in the late '80s. Blackwater will cure any open-minded individual of a dislike for the Glock Model 17 - as it did mine.

Let's get through some of the basic stuff first, and then we can discuss some of the practical applications I put the Glock through during that course at Blackwater. There are those who think that the Glock 17 carried the tag number "17" because it held 17 rounds of 9mm ammo. I was taught in armorer school that is incorrect. I was told that it was simply Dr. Glock's 17th patent and therefore became the Glock 17. That aside, the weapon's magazine capacity is 17 rounds. The barrel length is 4.5" and, like all Glocks, uses the "safe action" system. Now I've heard it argued that the safe action system is all single action. I've also heard it argued that it's double action. Let's think about this for just a minute... With a single action handgun, you have to manually cock the hammer because pulling the trigger performs a single action: it drops the hammer. With a double action handgun, pulling the trigger does two things: it cocks the hammer and drops the hammer - thus it performs a double action. Since there is no hammer on a Glock pistol, how do you qualify it?

When you pull the trigger of any Glock, the trigger bar applies pressure to the back of the firing pin, moving it rearward and loading pressure into the firing pin spring. When you reach a certain point, the trigger bar runs into the connector. As you continue to pull the trigger, the connector forces the trigger bar down so that it releases the firing pin which moves forward under the pressure of the firing pin spring to fire the cartridge. I never understood why Glock called that one piece the "connector" when it actually disconnects the trigger bar from the firing pin, but who am I? Back to the topic at hand: to my way of thinking, the "safe action" system closely resembles a double action trigger system: by pulling the trigger you essentially cock the firing pin and then release it, performing two actions with a single pull of the trigger. So, if I have to refer to it as one or the other, I'd call it double action.

So we have this safe action 9mm pistol with a 4.5" barrel. What else do we need to know about it? Empty it weighs just under 22 ounces - or about a pound and a half. With a full magazine it weighs in at just under two pounds. It has a sight radius (distance between front and rear sight) of 6.5". That matters because as the sight radius increases we humans tend to make less mistake in our aiming. Typically, more sight radius means greater barrel length, but in this case, Glock has maintained that 6.5" sight radius (which is pretty good on a service pistol) with a 4.5" barrel. Just as a comparison, the Beretta M9 has a 6.2" sight radius over a 4.9" barrel. That's a shorter sight radius by .3" over a barrel that's .4" longer. The efficiency of the Glock design is easy to see in that area.

The standard trigger pull on a Glock is 5.5 pounds. That is a constant that only changes in two circumstances: on their weapons specifically designed for competition, or if the end user wants a higher weight trigger pull. Now, way back in the late eighties when agencies started adopting Glocks, there were some "accidental discharges" that ended up being blamed on the trigger pull. Some twenty years later I hope we can be more honest than that: no respectable contemporary pistol "accidentally" discharges. In fact, they are all specifically designed so that they only fire when the trigger is pulled - which is what you want it to do in the first place. If you, the user, pull that trigger without having taken all proper safety precautions and something bad happens, don't blame the gun. It wasn't accidental. It was negligent. However, way back when, the knee-jerk response to those "accidental discharges" was to increase the trigger pull weight. Making the trigger harder to pull would solve those issues, right? Of course, so would proper training, but we won't go there for now. The past is the past.

So, what's the difference between a regular Glock 17 and a Glock 17C? Well, the 17C is five grams lighter - and that five grams is due to the compensator system that Glock has cut toward the front end of the barrel and slide. As you can see in the picture below, two holes have been milled into the barrel and corresponding holes have been cut into the slide. The idea is that as the bullet passes those holes, but before it leaves the barrel, still-expanding gasses exit the "compensator". For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. So, for whatever pressure is created by those expanding gasses shooting up out of the barrel, there is an equal pressure pushing the barrel down. That results in a reduced arc of recoil.

Alrighty: eighteen rounds of 9mm ammo (17 +1), a 6.5" sight radius, and a built-in compensator. How can you make it any better? Well... here's how. One thing was obvious and two improvements were learned courtesy of the Blackwater Instructor Corps.

Item 1: We installed night sights. The standard Glock sights are a front white dot that you line up in the rear white U. While this is great for day work, it's not so great for low light conditions. Glocks are available with night sights as an option. Due to the plethora of night sights available "after market" it may be to your advantage to get the Glock with the stock sights and select your own night sights to install. Any competent Glock armorer can do it for you.

Item 2: Put "+2" magazine base plates on your magazines. What's better than eighteen rounds of 9mm in your handgun? Twenty rounds of 9mm in your handgun. (Yeah, yeah: I here you die-hard .45 fans screaming that ten rounds of .45 is better than 20 rounds of 9mm. I'm not hosting that debate here. If I were on the streets of Iraq today, having 58 rounds of 9mm on my belt in the form of a loaded pistol and two spare magazines would not be a bad thing)

Item 3: No matter whether you have a second generation or third generation Glock, apply grip-tape to the slick spots that can be found on the curves of the grips. The Glock grip design is very good and the incorporated finger grooves assist a great deal in maintaining a secure hold on your pistol. However, polymer is polymer and wet is wet. Anything you can do to help you hold onto your weapon when your hands are wet, sweaty or bloody is a good thing. Grip tape is cheap. Go to any hardware store and get a roll 3" wide by 45' long and you have enough to do all the pistols in your squad. If you look carefully at the top picture in this article you can see the grip tape pieces in each finger groove, on the side panel of the grip and along the curve at the side of the backstrap.

So, how's it shoot? I spent a few hours at the range with this particular test model putting a couple hundred rounds of various types of 9mm ammo through it. No malfunctions were experienced. One of the things I love about Glocks is that they shoot whether they are lubricated, dry, dirty, clean, slick or whatever. The only time I've ever seen a Glock fail to fire was when the, ah, uneducated owner decided to spray a miracle lubricant into the firing pin channel through the breach face. Then he squirted graphite (or some variant thereof) in after that. What he ended up with was a jelly in his firing pin channel that kept the firing pin from moving free. If you take care of the gun - even just a little bit - it will perform.

If we took our time firing groups, we could easily produce ten-shot groups that averaged three inches or less from the twenty-five yard line. That's free hand. Repeat shots in rapid fire were easy to keep tight due to the reduced recoil and the pistol's natural tendency to recoil back to somewhere close to the original point of aim when the shot was fired. In previous reviews you've seen that I consider anything inside eight inches at twenty-five yards acceptable for a combat pistol. After all, it's only got to hit a man-sized target in the torso. The Glock 17 is easily capable of that; the Glock 17C makes it even easier to do.

During the Blackwater Tactical Pistol course, I learned that the "splits" (the time between shots) should be roughly equal every time. So, whether you shoot three shots or ten shots, the time in between each shot should be about the same. That time is spent recovering from the shot (follow through), bringing your sights back into alignment and on target, and beginning your trigger squeeze for the next shot. The strength of having a shooting rhythm was displayed when we shot on steel plates followed by engaging a moving plate. It also showed us how easy it was to develop and maintain a rhythm on static targets, but how much more difficult it was to do that on a moving target. (What happened most of the time was that we maintained our rhythm but missed the moving target). Prior to working on our rhythm and splits, we had to learn the relationship between our point-of-aim (POA) and point-of-impact (POI). That relationship was learned on paper targets with three-inch bullseyes. Our shooting distance was about ten yards. That may not seem like a challenging thing to do, but you'd be surprised. Once you've learned that relationship between POA/POI, you can apply that to the plates and moving target.

Keeping that in mind, and recognizing that missed shots were still cartridges spent out of your magazines, we soon became thankful for high-capacity mags. More capacity meant less down time; less time lost to reloads; and more fun shooting time. The bottom line? The Glock 17/17C is a reliable combat-accurate 9mm pistol that will serve you well.

One handgun, two magazines (39 rounds of ammo), a decent flashlight and a good knife: for off-duty carry, it's hard to beat!

I have a comment on this article.

New American Truth eMagazine
Dedicated to ALL citizens who oppose terrorism and injustice.
Subscribe Today!

Subscribe To New American Truth