Look. I’m old. And Old Guys tend to be hide-bound and obsessed with yesteryear. It’s a huge weakness on our part. But that doesn’t mean we are always wrong or missing the point. We know things. Mostly through observation. Sometimes through pain. So what do I know here?
Extended mag tubes on 1911 pistols, without some kind of stop or bumper-pad, will cause reliability problems. At least over the medium-long term.
And the worst part, the damage is insidious. Meaning not obvious. It manifests across multiple parts: feed-lip damage, magazine hole wallowing out, mag-release button damage, ejector damage, slide drag, erratic brass ejection.
The responses defending – ignoring this will be as follows: “Don’t over-insert the mag”, “I’ve carried this gun for years without a problem”, “X SWAT team does it”. (aka an appeal to authority) So let’s address some of these responses.
In a world of striker guns and mass-produced Glock culture, people will over-insert these mags. Either out of habit or under duress. Total force is calculated as pressure over time. Time being defined as how many hundreds or thousands of reloads are performed. Over time, these insidious problems will develop. Reliability and function will suffer.
This begs the question: is the problem the user or the gun? Actually it’s neither.
The problem is organizational. If a professional SWAT team is running “extendo-mags” like this, that tells me they don’t have any old dogs back in the school house. There is little to no 1911 institutional memory in the building. These people just bought cool guns because some other agency (appeal to authority) did. And I would not be surprised to eventually see some of these teams abandon the 2011 and go back to Glock. The reasons cited will be reliability and maintenance concerns. Finicky mags. Breakages. And mean time between malfunctions.
Glocks will start to look pretty good to them again.
But it’s not the 2011’s fault. It’s their fault. The SWAT team. The armors. The command staff. In some cases even the manufacturers themselves! All guilty because they didn’t take some basic advice from grandpa on how to keep duty 1911 running. These unsupported “extendo-mags” are ticking time bombs for high-round count shooters.
Don’t. Do. It.
Sincerely,
Marky
www.John1911.com
“Shooting Guns & Having Fun”
Areas of focus: Defense and National Security, Modern Light Weapons, Small Arms, Weapons Training.
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