(Content warning: The entire linked video is in French. You can turn on YouTube’s translated captions to get the gist of what they’re saying.) What happens when you take a bunch of crazy Frenchmen, a Gen 5 Glock 17, and 2,000 rounds of ammo? You get a bona fide Glock torture test.
Haven’t We all Seen a Glock Torture Test Before?
Certainly by this point, every gun enthusiast on the planet has seen someone take a Glock of various generation and blaze a bunch of ammo through it. And while given 2022’s ammo prices, it might be slightly painful to watch the video, it’s still worth checking out. Why? Because it demonstrates two things: the incredible durability of the Glock design, and that we are living in the golden age of semi-automatic striker fired pistols.
Legendary Glock Durability is Legendary for a Reason
Guaranteed that someone will read this post and say “oh well I had a Glock and it was a POS, it jammed all the time and Glocks suck,” because there are always haters. But the fact is, even if that guy is telling the whole truth, his Glock is the exception rather than the rule. This video is the first we’re aware of that tests the Gen 5 in such a potentially destructive manner. However, a search for “Glock Torture Test” on YouTube will reveal all sorts of shenanigans on all types of Glocks. The video has another neat aspect in that it’s a test on the Glock 17 Gen5 FR Coyote, aka the French Army Glock. As specified by the French, these guns have a coyote tan frame and the standard Glock slide finish.
A Golden-Age of Striker Fired Pistols
The video also helps illustrate that there really is no better time than now to own a semi-automatic striker fired pistol. In the 30+ years since Glock pistols arrived in the US market, the technology has thoroughly matured. Every major manufacturer offers a high quality, reliable, striker fired service pistol. In a recent Facebook thread in a gun group, a poster asked how to get his agency to allow individually officer purchased weapons. Another member asked why, because even if it isn’t perfect, the Gen 5 Glock does everything you need a service pistol to do. All of them do, and it’s quite likely that all of them would survive the 2,000 round test depicted in the video.
Glock Torture Test Results
If you don’t want to sit through a 13 minute video in French, we’ll spoil the ending. The Glock survived, unsurprisingly. The slide got too hot to touch with bare hands, the trigger heated up, but nothing broke. The only “damage,” if you can even call it that, is that the dust cover got so hot it started to droop away from the slide ever so slightly. That doesn’t impede the function of the gun at all, and our industrious Frenchmen probably could have kept shooting.
Tests like this do have value. Guns do weird things when they get super hot or super cold. Is shooting 2,000 rounds in 20 minutes a reasonable replication of a normal use case? Absolutely not. But the point of testing things in extreme conditions is so that we know if a gun survives the worst we can toss it, it will definitely hold up the rigors of daily concealed carry or duty work.
