Photo Forensics: The “Glock’s First Ever Single Stack 9mm” Ad

If you’ve been anywhere on social media during this afternoon/evening, you’ve probably seen this picture:

It’s pretty convincing, although it looks suspiciously similar to a Glock 42. Conveniently I still had all of the images from yesterdays post about the Glock slide opened up on my computer, so I decided to see what I could find by comparing the above picture with some of the images I used yesterday in the other post.

First, the above picture. This is the image of the Glock slide from yesterdays post after I did some photoshop magic to it to change the color and make it transparent. I laid it over the slide from this new picture, and found that it’s pretty close, but this new slide was also pretty close to the Glock 42 from yesterdays post as well. The biggest thing to look at here is that the slide serrations don’t appear to line up very well. Strike one.

Next I wanted to see how a Glock 42 worked when I laid the entire gun over the suspect ad, and that’s what is in the picture below:

I trolled Google Images for suitable pictures of Glock 42’s and after trying several, I found one that was taken at a very similar angle to the one in the suspect ad which made it the best option for the overlay. The two pictures are an almost perfect match.

But Luke! What about the engraving on the slide????

Ah yes, it’s very convincing. I don’t have much to say other than yes, the engraving on the slide of the suspect ad, and the little bit of engraving that Glock left for us to see on the slide picture do appear to line up. Given that there are other Glocks that have 4’s and 3’s engraved on the slides, I can’t imagine it would be too troublesome for someone to alter that and make it look good.

So, is it fake?

My opinion: It’s fake. The Glock 42 is too small for a 9mm cartridge, so unless Glock scaled up a G42 in every dimension (EVERY dimension) to fit a 9mm cartridge, which seems silly, I don’t believe it.

Furthermore, we don’t know where this picture came from. It hasn’t been posted on the Glock Facebook page, it’s just making it’s way around social media from a whole bunch of pro-gun pages. is there a single stack 9mm Glock on the horizon? All signs point to yes, but I don’t think its pictured in this ad.