All good things must come to and end, and it’s time to wrap up my ongoing review of the Glock 43. I kicked this series off last July with my first impressions of the G43, and then followed that up with a report on the gun’s reliability and accuracy with several different loads. Late last year I also offered a few thoughts on optimizing the G43 as a defensive tool. After that last article, I slowed down the testing process in order to work on some other stuff, but I took a couple of range trips in the past few weeks so I could officially pass the 3000 round mark. Today, I’m offering a few final thoughts on Glock’s single stack 9mm pistol in the video below.
Compact 9 mm Luger pistols designed specifically for concealed carry are nothing new. But sometime around the start of this decade, a growing segment of the self-defense market began demanding single-stack 9 mm pistols that are even easier to carry and conceal. Such pistols offer a flat profile and small footprint comparable to the now-ubiquitous pocket .380s but with a level of stopping power on par with the standby J-frame revolver in .38 Spl.
Is it too much to ask from a mouse gun to be at least 9mm, reliable, and shootable? Based on various other offerings on the market, it could be argued that the combination of the three was a tall order. Various weapons in .380 were good, but 9mm was a beast that the form factor had a hard time dealing with.