Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at the
Glock booth at Enforce Tac 2024,
where they have a version of the Glock
that we are never going to see in the United States I don't think. And that is the Glock 46.
Now for those of you who are thinking every Glock is just the exact same Glock,
the 46 is the huge exception, because this is Glock's rotating barrel pistol.
They completely changed up from the standard Browning tilting barrel system
and they have a gun that for Glock, this is radically different.
Different operating system, it's got a thing at the back, and it's got an extra switch on the side.
So the rationale for this is that it was developed for German police trials.
The German police of course back in the 70s tested and approved the P5, P6 and P7,
the HK, the SIG and the Walther.
Well, those pistols are all starting to get pretty old
and the ... different German states are each starting to replace their service pistols.
So in 2017 Glock announced this.
There are number of differences between this
and the regular, say, Glock 17 that they have to make
in order to meet the technical requirements for German police pistols.
So while each German state requisitions, purchases, does its own trials independently,
they are all operating off the same technical requirements
that are set by the Federal German government.
So in particular those include you ... have to be able to disassemble the pistol
without pulling the trigger, which is a major thing that the Glock 17 can't do.
There are technical restrictions on the trigger pull.
There's a balance, a combination of trigger weight and trigger pull distance,
and ... there's an algorithm, you have to have a combination of the two deemed safe.
The regular Glock ... doesn't actually have a long enough trigger pull to meet those requirements.
And then interestingly, there's actually a ... technical restriction
on how ... slowly the unlocking system can process.
So it has to actually unlock more slowly than the Glock 17.
Now Glock looked at these requirements and for reasons that are still a little bit murky to me,
they decided to abandon the Browning system and go to a rotating barrel.
There are plenty of other rotating barrel pistols in production and in use.
Beretta has one, Grand Power has one, Steyr made one back in 1912.
The Austrians had a couple of other rotating barrel pistols before that, so it's a known system.
And there are a number of claimed benefits to the rotating barrel:
that it has less muzzle climb and it tends to be more accurate.
Now how significant these in fact are, I'm a little unsure of.
I think it comes down more to the individual pistol than it does to the mechanism in general.
But there is no doubt that the rotating barrel system
does give this particular Glock, the 46, a lower bore axis.
Well, one of the previous police pistols was the P7, that has a very low bore axis.
It's possible one of the thought processes here
(although Glock doesn't say that it was) it's possible one of the thought processes was
let's bring a lower bore axis to try and better match the expectations
of, for example, the Bavarian police who had been using the P7.
Anyway the gun was ... announced in 2017,
it was entered (thus far) in three German police competitions.
... Actually I think the first was Bavaria,
the second was the Berlin police, both of those they did not win.
The third one was Saxony-Anhalt, and they did win that.
So this is now a German-issued police pistol.
We'll talk about what Saxony did with it and where it's going in a minute,
but first let me take it apart and show you the most "differenty Glock" of all the Glocks.
Alright, so we have "Glock 46" right there.
These are only made in 9x19, and they use standard Glock ... 19 magazines.
Now there are two extra elements to this guy,
we have a disassembly lever here and we have a striker cover here.
... Because you've got this extra thing hanging off the back,
they actually extended the beaver tail on the gun to prevent this from biting novice users.
Now it's also worth pointing out that the trigger on the 46 is very heavy and quite long.
They have actually re-cut the profile of the trigger just a little bit
to maximise the length of pull that they can get.
This thing is ... argh ... there we go, it goes all the way back.
In order to meet that police requirement for trigger weight and trigger length,
they pretty much had to make this like the worst of the Glock New York triggers.
Looking at this here, it is definitely distinctive
because there is no top of the chamber locking into the slide, because we have a rotating barrel.
So you can see it rotating, right there.
Initial unlock, and then locking again when it closes.
Now the disassembly process is all based around police manipulation.
So you've got your gun, you are going to lock it open.
You have to remove the magazine, I think they would typically
remove the magazine first and then manually lock it open.
But once this is open we are going to take this striker cover plate and rotate it ... clockwise ...
It's going to go, I don't know, about 45 degrees and then we can sort of pull it back out that far.
That completely disconnects the striker. The gun is totally safe.
There is no way that this can drop and fire a cartridge if you somehow still had one in the chamber.
As an extra level of safety you now also have to pull this lever down and hold it down,
while you unlock the slide, pull it forward, and pull it off the gun.
My initial expectation was that this was preventing the slide from coming off, that's not the case.
... You can actually like reassemble the gun without this lever at all
and it'll work just fine and can be disassembled still.
But this forces you to confirm that the magazine is out of the gun,
because if you have a mag in that lever won't go down.
It also forces you to have the striker disconnected.
So this is just like the dummy switch, did you check all the boxes that you're supposed to?
Yes? Well then pull the lever down. If the lever doesn't go down you did something wrong.
So moving on to our next step here.
... This is actually a Gen 3 style of recoil spring from Glock.
And that's because moving the barrel down in the slide meant with a newer style of recoil spring,
they just wouldn't have room in the bottom of the frame. So a Gen 3-style spring.
And we have our rotating barrel, which we can rotate and then lift up...
and take out of the gun.
This is a display pistol for a trade show so the barrel is inert, the firing pin is inert.
The breech ... face isn't actually cut all the way through.
This is a deactivated gun for a show, that's why it's got the holes.
But you can see we have four barrel locking lugs right here.
Those lock into four matching lugs in the slide right there.
And then this cam is going to run in this track right there.
So the barrel starts in the locked position. As it ... slides backward with the slide
it's going to be forced to rotate as that lug rotates in the cam.
That unlocks the barrel locking lugs.
The barrel then stops here and the slide continues backward,
... extracting the empty cartridge, chambering a new one.
One more element of disassembly I can do ... with my universal Austrian disassembly tool here,
I can push that plunger in and then
there we go, we can pull out the whole firing pin.
Again the firing pin has been cut off on the end here because it's trade show gun.
But they've redesigned the firing system here
essentially to meet this German police standard
to be able to essentially disconnect the striker during the disassembly process.
So most of the set-up here is the same as a Glock 17
with the modifications first off for the rotating barrel and secondly for the special disassembly.
So there you go, there is the Glock 46 completely field stripped.
It's very simple as one would expect from Glock, and pretty cool.
The German state of Saxony-Anhalt has about 6,000 police officers,
they purchased 8,600 Glock 46s to arm those guys.
And by the way, this is for essentially the beat cops only.
The police special units like the SWAT teams, they are exempt from these technical requirements.
I think basically just because they are ... expected to be more firearms proficient
and you don't have to incorporate quite all of these idiot-proof safety features for them.
So they tend to use still all the regular Glocks, 17s and 26s I believe.
So that is so far the one police contract that Glock has won with the 46.
This is a pistol that they are only offering for police contracts.
And I think ... they'd probably sell them to international police forces,
but they are really aiming this at the German police market.
They are not ... offering it for military contracts,
and they are not offering it on the civilian market, either in Europe or in the United States.
Which is kind of interesting, I can certainly understand that hack in Europe.
I think in the United States they would sell a bunch of them
just to people in the US who think it's different, and therefore interesting, and therefore will buy it.
The American market has a lot more flexibility,
and sort of purchase on a whim opportunity for firearms than the European market does.
So I think they could sell these in the US, but we'll probably never find out
because Glock has been pretty definitive
about the fact that they're not going to offer this for the civilian market.
So, I honestly didn't know when I might have the chance to get my hands on one of these.
A big thanks to Glock for giving me the opportunity
to film this here at their booth at Enforce Tac.
They were extremely pleasant and forthcoming and informative and helpful about it, so thanks Glock.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. Thanks for watching.