It’s been around 13 months since Umarex issued a press release announcing a license agreement with GLOCK. It’s been just over a month since a GLOCK Airsoft gun, from Umarex, arrived here.
What’s the big deal about an air gun? Training. How does that relate to the audience of this newsletter?
Training is costly, time consuming, difficult to do at the best of times. Live fire has its unique issues. Among these, having a range where you can do adverse light training can be a huge issue. Square range training, critical for a grasp of shooting skills and gunhandling, isn’t really enough to get us ready for the ‘dreaded event.’ At the same time, using guns configured to use ‘nonlethal marking cartridges’ means gear that’s costly, potentially hard to get and still can’t be used in some places where damaged property can be the result of misses.
Live-fire houses bring their own set of issues. As always in force-on-force or in live-fire shoot house training, strict security has to be observed to keep live weapons out of the equation.
Besides, what if you just want to work “singles from the holster” for a few minutes before you go on the road?
An analog gun using a laser or air-propelled rounds can be very valuable to help round training out. As someone long gone from doing agency training, I can only imagine what we could have done with a dozen or so Umarex-GLOCK pistols in terms of force-on-force in just about any (closed to the public) venue.
These are cost effective, good up close (meaning that distance shooting won’t be a thing), and fit the holsters for the issued guns.
As good as the Umarex-GLOCK guns can be, there are times you must have full-caliber live fire work. These don’t fill that need. An Airsoft “Bill Drill” isn’t going to get you the work that the same drill with your service pistol will get done.
It appears from the Umarex website, that there’s a GLOCK 19 Gen 3 analog in CO2 for steel BBs at around $75 as well as a GLOCK 17 Gen4 CO2 “Airsoft” for around $170. They list the Gen4 G17 and Gen3 G19 in GBB Airsoft for around the same cost.
The G19 airsoft replica is the one we have here. An analog of the G19, a licensed product of GLOCK, it is close in all details including weight. The factory says it’ll fire the .20 gram 6mm BBs – the magazine holds 19 of them – at around 290 feet-per-second.
The new gun features a metal barrel and the GLOCK “ball-in-the-bucket” sights.
I’ve checked it for fit in a holster I was wearing the other day – a Comp-Tac Warrior – and I have little doubt I’ll be using it for “first hit from the holster” and trigger control drills in the garage during the winter.
We’ll check back in after I get a few rounds through it -- to keep you posted.
- - Rich Grassi