Handgun Cook Off??

It did it from the get-go and was not a result of wear or anything other than an ill fitted part.
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I can't say for certain that this was the issue with your specific pistol, but there was a tolerance problem with some of the early Glock 19 pistols. Serial numbers with a two letter prefix of 'EH' or earlier. Glock made a special trigger bar to address the issue.
 
I saw an early 1990s Glock 21 have the same issue (burst fire followed by jam) due to a trigger issue. Which makes me think the tolerance problem was across more than one model.
 
JohnKsa said:
there was a tolerance problem with some of the early Glock 19 pistols. Serial numbers with a two letter prefix of 'EH' or earlier. Glock made a special trigger bar to address the issue.
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Interesting. First I've heard of that. We had a shooter at one of our matches in the late 1990's with a Glock 19 that about once per magazine would automatically double-tap so fast that it sounded like a single shot. The shooter could feel it but you couldn't hear the difference. I didn't believe it was firing two shots until I made him shoot at a clean piece of paper so I could verify the holes. It would put two shots within a couple of inches of each other at 10 yards.

He sent it back to Glock and he never had another problem with it when it came back. Must have been one of the trigger bar "specials"!
 
Primarily limited to MG's mostly. Usually with a red hot or close to it, barrel. Highly unlikely a hand gun could ever get hot enough. Users hand would be severely burnt.
Most likely operator failure. Failed to follow through, released the trigger too soon and had a double under recoil.
 
While I am with the accidental double tap crowd I have to give the guy some credit. In his mind something happened that wasn't supposed to. What did he do? He set the gun down stepped away and stated what he thought was the problem and waited for everything to cool down. At least he was considering safety, not like some I have heard on the range. Sounds like he may be a relatively new shooter so the next time it happens politely ask him if you could check out pistol out for his safety and everyone else's. He just might appreciate a more experience shooter helping him.
 
I have heard stories and reports of German MG42's "cooking off" due to their insane rate of fire when the gunners were unable to stop firing long enough to change out barrels. I seriously doubt that a couple hundred rounds in a Glock would do the same thing.
 
I have a Colt Gold cup with a light trigger (4 pounds) that several people have had multiple rounds go off, this is cushioning the trigger. For the life of me I have tried and have never been able to do it.
 
Another vote for too-light of a trigger job. There are several relatively simple modifications described in detail on the Internet showing how to tweak a G17 / 19 in particular to make it full auto, some with a switch.
One even claims it's fully legal.
 
larryf1952 said:
I have heard stories and reports of German MG42's "cooking off" due to their insane rate of fire when the gunners were unable to stop firing long enough to change out barrels.
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The MG42 fires from an open bolt. Cook-offs aren't an issue in an open-bolt machine gun unless you have a failure to fire and a round gets stuck in the chamber.

Often people claim that a cook-off can cause a runaway gun on an open bolt machine gun, but that's not possible due to the design.
 
not possible.

Nearly instantaneous firing of a second round?

Consider what would have had to happen. That chamber would have had to be so hot that either the powder spontaneously ignited, or so hot that the heat managed to conduct all the way through the entire cartridge case, with a high enough temperature to set off the primer.

I suspect that the steel would have to be almost at incandescent heat to set off the round right after it was chambered, and if that honestly happened, why only one round?

This thing was almost certainly a mechanical failure, which isn't likely, or the guy somehow goofed. It's possible that the gun had been tinkered with.
 
I'd like to ask a question, did you see him clear his gun before dropping it on the table? If not, these guys have got to qualify as the most reckless shooters I've ever heard of. It can fire on its own, you have to be stupid to leave it loaded and unattended.
 
I've never heard of a true cook off with a pistol. Now when I was working for the Air Force as a civilian instructor at an RTC, I played a lot of OPFOR and would go through a case of 5.56mm blanks during the final training exercise with about 3 iterations being the norm. On hot summer days in Wyoming, with 100+ degree temperatures, I would gauge how much fun we were having by how many cook offs I had during an iteration. Hey, government weapons, government ammo, a lot of full auto fire (gotta keep up realism ya know ;) ) and you would have several cook offs per run. Just watch the muzzle so it's not near your face or anyone else's and expect it to cook off after a while. Even then, every cook off I brewed up, it wasn't an instant sort of thing. It took several seconds of a round in a hot chamber to eventually pop off like that. If I didn't want a cook off, I'd rip off another burst and thumb down the bolt stop before I let go of the trigger to lock the bolt open. Came time to move again or reengage the students, let it go forward, step out and rip off another burst of just empty the magazine. Loved playing OPFOR where normal rules of a gunfight we would normally use don't apply.:D
 
I don't know what temp ignites powder, but I believe that it will be over 400degrees. Brass conducts well, but as you say, it's going to take a but of time for enough heat to transfer from the steel through brass and set off the powder.The barrel would have to be almost hot enough to give third degree burns on prolonged contact, and unlike an ar with blanks, I don't believe that you could heat a glock that much without sustained automatic fire, do you think?

Someone who has an ir/laser thermometer could heat up a pan, tracking the temp, in til a pinch of powder starts to spark. It should be about the same temp for every number, give or take twenty degrees.
 
A screw up is so easy. I was shooting my bodyguard. Da semi auto. Round failed to fire, since it does that. I spend a lot of time forgetting to rack in a round, because the hold open doesn't work. Firing pin strike is light, and I get a lot of light strike failures to fire. I always check the load indicator and work from there on what to do. One time, I was distracted, not at all up to speed, and I pulled the trigger again, and the round fired.

Piddled down my pant legs. Nothing really wrong with that, but as squirrelly as that gun is, there's no predicting what might have been wrong or what happened. It's not what should have happened. I shut Down and started cleaning.

My range is vacant a lot of the time. I keep my cell phone on the bench at all times.
 
Dont know about a Glock, But I for sure have had slam fires with my AR15 and SKS.
I was using too soft of primers. Firing pin slams forward and boom.
I have even had it happen while charging a round in the chamber.
Thats why we always keep the muzzle pointed in a safe direction.

For me it was a easy fix. Switched to a harder primer and has never happened again.

I have also had fun on the other side. Too hard of primers in my Smith and Wesson revolvers and pocket .380's. Fail to fire's enough to drive you crazy.
Switched to a softer primer in those packages. No more fail to fire from light primer strikes.

Are there any pistols that have a floating firing pin?
Most likely a limp wrist affair. My Son had surgery on his Gun hand wrist.
He will never be able to shoot some fire arms. So I have seen what " Limp Wristing" can cause. Most common is failure to eject or chamber events.
Pretty much figured out he is limited to full size 9mm or any combination to that effect. No 45acp's, 40's are way to snappy, or certainly no 357 magnums for him. Muzzle flip is to much of a danger.
Have been investigating some wrist braces, with some success.
He really likes shooting 45's so maybe.. But if I see it rise to much.. nope done..
 
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The glock won't slam fire for several reasons. The pin isn't floating, and the trigger has to be reset and pulled before the firing pin can even go into firing position.

At least that is what I remember. So no, within reasonable doubht, he can't even have the excuse of a slam fire. broken pin, high primers, a rock stuck in the firing pin hole, there are possible explanations. I'm not sure what happened, but it still may be a fault in the gun, and the fault in the gun may have been from unacceptable modifications.

A clear case of a factory pistol having an accidental discharge upon slide return seems pretty unlikely, doesn't it? I'm still betting on the shooter having messed up somehow, maybe his grip was wrong, I DNK.

That's one of the selling points of a glock. Safety. It is designed in a way that the firing pin can't hit the primer unless all of the safeties are engaged or bypassed. Even that trigger lock in the front. performs a task, keeping the trigger from being accidentaly pulled far enough to engage the pin.

It just seems crazy, but one way or another, it still seems to come right back to either the shooter or some modification.

God, I have a headache. THis may not have made any sense.
 
Could two duffusses shooting a few hundred rounds at an indoor range ever cause it to occur?
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The village idiots did not have a cook off:rolleyes: Glock has done the so called torture tests as well as a writer testing the Springfield XD. In testing the XD the writer doubled the amount of ammo used in the Glock test, and guess what no cook offs and as stated in an earlier post the writer had magazines loaded and ready to go. The article stated that the XD had to be placed in a bucket of water because the gun was too hot to hold even with gloves. Sounds like you were next to dumb and dumber.
 
If it was a cook off, would it stop after one round? I don't have the expertise of some folks here, but it seems to me that if the metal parts were hot enough to cook a round that quickly, the next round would be coming into an even hotter environment, even if only slightly, and the magazine would have emptied.

If I had to bet somebody a hamburger on it, I would go with a combination of a bubba trigger job and operator error.
 
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