I recently bought a stack of gun magazines from the late 1980s and early ’90s off of eBay. See, way back when I first started working in a gun store back about 1993, I got the job because the owner was impressed with the amount of nerdy firearm knowledge I possessed. I, on the other hand, had a classic case of imposter syndrome. As a result, I asked my boss to subscribe to a handful of gun magazines (the store already got a monthly copy of American Rifleman, natch) for me to read cover to cover so as to stay current on the realities of the market.
As time went by, I sold, gave away, or just trashed most of those magazines. You can’t keep everything, after all. Where would you put it? But, we’re all eventually victims of nostalgia and I wanted to re-read some of those formative columns and articles from my novice years in the gun biz.
Anyway, looking through that stack of magazines spanning most of a decade or two, it was almost startling to be reminded of how novel and controversial polymer frames for handguns were.
These days, it’s safe to say that injection-molded polymer of some sort is the most prevalent material from which to construct a pistol frame. A quick glance around the counters of your local gun store will back me up on this.
As someone whose entrée into the professional gun biz straddled this polymer frontier, I had an interesting viewpoint on the whole shebang. From the consumer perspective, there were a host of objections, some more rational than others.
The silliest was that “plastic” just wasn’t up to the chore of being a material for firearm frames. Yet Heckler & Koch had been making extensive use of it in its P9S and VP70 pistols for quite some time, and Remington’s Nylon 66 rifle was already a generation old by then. The Glock wasn’t even the first.
Then there was the pearl-clutching in the media about how the Glock was supposedly the hijacker’s pal, undetectable by X-ray machines or magnetometers, which was silly since the bulk of the pistol was metal and showed up on X-rays just fine. That didn’t stop Congress from drafting a pointless and phony-baloney law, banning things that didn’t exist. Even the ATF(!) tried pointing out in hearings that it was a bogus accusation, and the whole to-do mostly became a mainstream-media brand-awareness seminar for the then-new Austrian pistol.
Other people online were absolutely convinced that polymer frames just wouldn’t hold up over the long haul. They claimed the frames would wind up cracking or degrading like the dashboard of a ’77 Camaro left parked in the Arizona sun for a decade.
While there’s a practical limit to our actual hands-on knowledge about their maximum longevity, I think it’s safe to say that most of those fears have proven overblown. The most senior Glock in my possession is a Gen2 Glock G17 customized by Robar. I bought it secondhand back in 2016, and its serial number dates the production to January of 1992.
While that’s not old by the standards of my personal collection, which leans heavily to 19th and early 20th century Smith & Wesson revolvers, it’s an almost 35-year-old pistol that’s been rode hard and put up wet since I got it—having been used in numerous training classes everywhere from swampy Indiana summers to the deserts of New Mexico—and it’s holding up just fine. It’s more likely to get worn out from normal use than to crumble into plastic dust or whatever the naysayers thought would happen to these “Tupperware” frames.
Then, there were the benefits of the poly- mer frame as hyped to me by our regional Glock sales reps every time they got a chance. They touted its durability and resistance to rust. The latter is indisputable, and the for- mer? Well, the polymer frame does seem to tolerate rather a lot of banging around. Back in those days, Glock reps had an array of standard “stupid pistol tricks” they’d perform to show the gun was tough enough. They’d fling it downrange against the berm, beat it on the sidewalk until the slide popped off, and then reassemble the pistol and fire it, park a squad car atop it; if the department had a helicopter, they’d drop it out of it. None of this had much to do with anything you really needed a pistol to be capable of, of course, but it sure sold some Glocks.
They touted the material’s flexibility, claiming it helped absorb recoil, which is theoretically a thing, but not very perceptible. They hyped the gun’s light weight—and that definitely is a thing. Going back to a metal-framed pistol after toting a polymer one is like strapping a boat anchor to your hip.
By the end of the ’90s, almost every manufacturer had a polymer-pistol line. From Smith & Wesson there were Sigmas and USPs from HK, while Ruger had the P94 and P95 and SIG Sauer had the SIG Pro SP 2340 and SP 2009.
While all the manufacturers hyped the positive features of the polymer frame in the same terms as Glock, the real reason was simple: Price. With polymer frames, the cost of manufacturing was almost all in the front end. Once you had the sunk cost of the injection molds, all you had to do was squirt goop into them to make as many pistol frames as you wanted.
And there things remained for nearly two decades, practically in stasis as manufacturers ruthlessly competed on price, selling very similar polymer pistols.
You might have noticed, however, that the trend appears to be reversing. Well, not completely reversing, but there’s a larger variety of metal-framed pistols hitting the market, like the Walther PDP Compact I reviewed for our former sister publication, Shooting Illustrated, not long ago.
There are a handful of reasons for this, two of which are obvious and one less so. For starters, the metal-frame guns are popular with competitive shooters. Indeed, many are marketed specifically as gamer guns precisely because of their weight. When you only have to carry a gun at a match, the weight isn’t much of a problem, and every added ounce helps soak up recoil and tame muzzle flip.
There’s also some cachet to the metal-framed guns. There’s a residual “Metal = Expensive; Plastic = Cheap” subconscious vibe at work in the mind of the American consumer.
The hidden reason is how far computer-controlled multi-axis machining has come since the ’90s. This has narrowed the production-cost gap considerably, especially when you factor in the up-front cost of the molds needed for polymer frames. (Of course, most of these larger manufacturers are just doing the metal guns as an adjunct to an existing polymer model, such as the M&P or P320.)
It’s not much of a nostalgia fad, per se; there’s nothing remotely retro or throwback about that PDP Steel Frame, for example. Still, it’s nice to have more choices—and my shot timer says those extra ounces are appreciated with every split time.
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