Is the Gen 6 Glock 45 worth it?
Glock debuted the new Generation 6 models late last year, and we’ve evaluated the popular G45 variant over the past few months– with some interesting takeaways.
Any conversation about the Glock 45 that is longer than a fortune cookie scroll needs to start with the G19X.
Debuted in January 2018, the Gen 5 (ish) G19X was originally developed as Glock’s submission for the U.S. Army’s Modular Handgun System trials before being adapted for commercial sale. The company’s first “crossover” design (hence the “X”) blended a full-size G17 grip with a compact G19 slide assembly and a hybrid frame with a G19-length dustcover to accommodate it.
Just nine short months after the debut of the G19X, Glock delivered the Gen 5 G45 to market, which was basically a black G19X with some very minor tweaks.
Announced at the International Association of Chiefs of Police Conference, the G45 was billed as the perfect duty gun, blending all the best attributes of the G19 and G17 while adding Gen 5 features to boot —front slide serrations, ambi controls, a modular backstrap system, and the Glock Marksman Barrel. It soon became a smash hit in Glock’s catalog, especially after optics-ready MOS models were introduced in 2019.
Then Glock ended its Gen 5s in place of the transitional Gen V last November, then announced the new (and MOS-less) Gen 6 guns just a confusing month later.
We’ll get into it more below, but in a nutshell, the Gen 6 brings a different slide, internals, and trigger system but keeps everything dimensionally the same (so legacy holsters still work) while delivering a much better optics mounting system than MOS while retaining the same manual of arms and being reverse compatible with existing 17+ capacity double stack 9mm mags.
Full 1,800-word review over in my column at Guns.com