Triangle Tactical Podcast and Blog on Guns, Gear, and Competition Shooting
Here we go again! Today Glock dropped this picture on their Facebook page:
As soon as I saw it, I ran to the computer to begin chopping it to pieces with image editing software. Here’s the new slide cropped out of the picture from above, and the same picture of it after I did some Photoshop magic to it to change the colors:
My first thought was to line it up with a slide from a Glock 26, so that’s what I did below:
Just like last week with the Glock “This Spring” ad, I’m working off of assumptions when making these images. I’m assuming that this slide in the picture is the same length as a Glock 26. Whether it is, or it isn’t, we don’t really know.
After looking at the above picture something didn’t seem right. Notice that the slide profile isn’t the same as a Glock 26 near the muzzle, it’s much more like a Glock 42. It also turns out there are only 6 slide serrations on this new Glock pistol, but just about every other Glock has 7. All except for one, the Glock 42.
That lead me to the next idea, which is obviously to compare it to the Glock 42. Once again, I’m assuming that the length of the G42 slide is the same for this new slide.
In the above picture, the sights are pretty close, the slide serrations are pretty close, and the profile of the slide near the muzzle is also pretty close. A much better fit than the G26 overlay above. If you look at what I have circled in the picture, you’ll notice that the chamber on this new Glock seems to be a little teeny bit longer than the chamber of the Glock 42.
What cartridge is a little teeny bit longer than a .380ACP? Could it be the 9mm Luger?
The next thing I wanted to look at was what would happen if I were to scale the new image down until the chambers were about the same size, and that’s what is pictured below:
Possible, maybe, but pretty improbable that Glock would go make a micro .380 when they already have the G42.
What did we learn from this? Not a whole lot, but based on this, I’m starting to feel a little more confident that we might see a Glock 43 singlestack 9mm at the NRA show later this spring.
As always, let me know what you think in the comments below, and be sure to share this post with your friends.
Update:
Today another ad is going viral, but I think it’s fake. Detail here.
I knew you’d be on this right away with your photoshop conjecture. Nice forensics. Now let’s hope you’re right.
Interesting forensics, but you are helping Glock stir up a lot of noise about a gun that’s at least a couple years late to market. I’ve done my share of mystery marketing; lots of smoke, no fire.
Interesting. Is the size of the sights standard across all models? If so you could determine the likely size of the slide in the teaser by matching the size/scale to front and rear sights on existing known Glock models.
If I had a higher resolution image from Glock to work with I could go that route, but being that I’ve only got about 480 pixels to play with, its not a good measurement.
I think it was clear a long ago that the only reason of “starting” with 380 in a single-stack format was to make people buy it immediately (as there were no alternatives) and then buy the second/third one in 9mm / 40 / 45 / 357sig / name the other caliber when it is sold.
If they started with 9mm in the first place, they would’ve seriously cannibalized their future 380 / 40 sales. They will now have to continue with 9mm, because if, let’s say, Glock 43 is a single-stack compact-sized handgun in 40, everyone will buy it and then buy a conversion barrel to 9mm, so they basically need to present 9mm now and 40 a year later…
This way they can achieve much higher penetration into the same client base (=sell 2 or 3 guns to the same folks who otherwise would’ve only bought 1).
I’d say it’s pretty much “Marketing 101” without any forensics 🙂