I have checked with every Glock dealer and connection I know in several large Texas cities, and all of their are saying their suppliers are saying mid-to-late summers the long awaited single stack Glock 43 will appear in stores. Likely, the first several months will make them hard to get due to initial demand, as with the Model 42. But I have my name on the top o' several waiting lists and will be getting one and reviewing it here.
I think I've written before about how so many of my friends, particularly those who live in rural locales on acreage and have hog problems, have gone to the 10mm as their sidearm for dealing with hogs.
Most of these folks who are serious about hog control are carrying fully outfitted .308 bolt and semi-auto as well as .556 guns, all scoped and in many cases, "whispered" as they say with a suppressor. All legal of course, as this is Texas after all. Just pay the fed tax. My friend Cowboy's M-4 with a short barrel and suppressor (with separate tax stamps and fees for each of those features) is quiet quiet quiet...literally just the action cycling, as he whispers in the ears of hogs with his scoped gun.
Lots of these folks are the ranching and farming business, either full or part time. Lots of family places that are generations old. My friend Cowboy's place is just shy of 284 acres, sharing that with his siblings and parents, and has an adjacent place of his own that is about 20 acres or so. Land in that part of my world is hard to get if you're not from that particular community. He was lucky to get that 20 acre swath directly adjacent to his 150 year family place.
I'm gonna get to the Glock 10mm Texas story here in a minute, but let me set up the back story for you on why the Glocks in 10mm have become a big favorite with hog hunters. Many of my friends traditionally carried .357 or .44 magnum revolvers for chance hog encounters or for back up when hunting them. Now most have moved on to Glock 10mm pistols instead.
A retiree, Cowboy's dad runs a significant amount of cattle out there, as he has all of his life, maybe 250 head, and his working horses, and Cowboy, being a cowboy despite a family and a real life high dollar high prestige job, rides his own several horses quite a bit. I believe his mom and siblings each have several acre gardens that are quite productive with a variety of crops providing holistic food for their families. One of his brothers built a home out there and also has his own horses and a larger garden than the others since they just live nearby.
It can take a group of hogs, or a "sounder" or any other number of names for a herd or pack or group of feral hogs, just a few minutes to absolutely destroy a field that you've worked on for months. What kind of dollar value do you put on crops you will consume that have been organically grown and grown with tlc for the family.
Likewise, I know his mom and maybe his younger brother run sheep and goats on part of the property as well. All this is pretty common in lots of historic Texas families that still possess the old family place and cherish it and continue to respect their ancestors and the wild challenges they faced in this part of Texas in the early to mid 1800's to settle this land they now enjoy.
So most of my friends carry rifles with them on the place. One very successful friend, we'll call him Chris, with a large family ranch in the Texas Hill Country, has a mile long road on his place leading from the entrance to his place to the house itself. Usually, coming or going, he sees hogs. He keeps one of many different types of rifles in his truck and like every one else, tries to keep the sometimes huge hogs away from his gardens and livestock. Again, Chris and I believe his siblings carry on their family traditions despite having important business careers as their main job.
So the point is, all these guys have switched to the Glock 10mm for their gun of choice when hunting hogs. Chris tells a story of his wife being out of town one weekend, allowing him to roam his family place with his dogs and his new night vision scope on his high end rifle. As he approaches one of several large ponds in deeply wooded areas, and his family place is also many hundreds of acres, he said he heard a huge thrashing sound in the water.
Chris is also a big saltwater fisherman, hitting the bays of Texas as I enjoy chasing speckled trout and redfish. He likely well knows the sound of a huge school of tens of thousands of shrimp being chased and fed upon by a school of trout or reds, often times in the wee small hours of the early morning, just before sunrise.
Chris said the sound also reminded him of the jungle movies of our youth, which I've spoken about before, where a hunk of meat, like a quarter of a cow, was stuck in some third world tropical river and devoured by hundreds of thrashing piranhas in minutes.
Chris had his new big dollar high end night sight on some kind of .308 AR platform semi-auto rifle, and looked at the pond and found there to be about a hundred hogs, mostly small and medium with a few large ones. The good eating ones are the smaller ones but generally the big ones are the ones to go for. The big breeders.
Chris said they weren't feeding but bathing and wallowing around in the muddy edges of the ponds, trampled with where the cows and other wildlife normally come to water. But to his amazement, some were swimming and sort of bathing by swimming and just making a big amount of racket with all this wallowing. Chris grew up on this place, and is in his 50's, and had never seen anything like it before or since.
He began taking out the larger and most vulnerable hogs but his rifle was unsupressed and his well trained dogs, silent until the firing began, be raising holy hell. His rifle ultimately had some sort of real bad jam in it, and about that time the moonlight showed enough that a passel of those feral hogs were headed his way, despite his couple of dogs going crazy barking.
He had his Model 20sf and turned on the gunlight he has rail mounted on it and managed to take at least one out and wound another and with the muzzle blast, he surmised, managed to detour the rest around he and his dogs. He has well trained dogs, who despite every doggie instinct they possess wanted to tangle with those hogs, yet they followed command and stayed heeled. So well trained but they couldn't resist barking to attempt to repel the approaching hogs.
He's a big believer in the Glock 10mm. He recently upgraded to the new 6" barrel model Gen 4 10mm, coming optical sight ready. Several of my other friends have as well, and those who just don't care for the 10mm like Cowboy will opt for the .45 ACP version and just shoot some hot hunting ammo by Cor-Bon or Buffalo Bore or another like ammo out of the .45 ACP.
I've handled only the .45 ACP version, with a slightly less than 6" barrel as with the 10mm version. They are both Gen 4, and I don't quite understand the Gen 4 grip system in comparion to the Gen 3 SF versions of the .45 ACP and the 10mm. Although I shot a Gen 2 .45 ACP Model 21 for 15 years, and about 3 of those years on a weekly competitive combat shooting basis, I do prefer the SF fit for my hand.
All in all, feral hogs are a great problem to some residential areas as well as farming and agriculture in this state. The large capacity and reliability of the Glock and the hard hitting projectile of the 10mm have won over more than one of my friends living on farms and ranches with hog issues.
Let me close discussing those surprise hog situations, like my friend Chris above had when his rifle jammed and bunch of scared hogs came charging his way. That's when the sidearm came in handy.
Our family owned some hog infested land back from the late 1960's until recently. It had a large creek that traversed it, a year round creek. I never saw it get lower than six feet, in times of severe drought.
It was a magnet for all kinds of deep East Texas animals at the beginning and end of the day, and during the night time. Panthers, bobcats, several different types of feral hogs, deer, armadillos, raccoons, water moccasins, copperheads, gators and all other kinds of critters.
The property had some fairly deep ravines where runoff drained into the creek from the surrounding lands. A lot of different critters made their lairs in these ravines, which were often choked with brush and downed trees and mostly impassible.
But you could rummage around the edges of it, sometimes jumping a large feral hog. Well, one day my comrades and I, in our young teens, jumped several large feral hogs and unfortunately they were headed our way as we had boxed them into a corner, and our way was the only way out. Squealing, snorting and making noises as they smashed through downed brush and shall trees. We were under gunned. We had double barrel shotguns loaded with buckshot and finally took out most of them but not without some frenzied reloading.
I'd-a sure liked to have had me a nice Glock 10mm in a shoulder holster that day. With a laser guide rod and a nice little red dot scope on it, I suspect it would've solved all hog problems that day.
Some recent show I saw on cable talking about Mutant Hogs, and actually the show focused on areas in close proximity to where I dwell. One large toll road area, maybe 10 miles southeast of the Austin Airport, running through Central Texas had had several fatal and serious injury accidents from folks driving the posted speed limit of 80 mph at night and encountering 20 or 30 LARGE hogs blocking the road.
So in addition to being a threat not only to crops and livestock but to house pets and even a human, they're just reproducing at fast rates and causing all kinds of problems. Like those flying fish they have in the rivers up in the Mid-West U.S.
So we've got the M43 coming soon for those time when lightweight and very low profile carry are the order of the day. And that's good news.
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