Let’s go back to the year 2003. The .40 S&W cartridge introduced in 1990 skyrocketed to first place in popularity among American police service pistols. The almost decade-old .357 SIG cartridge also seemed to be ascendant. It was clear that law enforcement wanted something more powerful than 9mm. This was a trend led by the FBI itself following a 1986 incident in Miami where a lethal 9mm hit failed to stop a determined gunman from murdering two Special Agents and severely wounding many more. Many departments still favored the .45 ACP but bemoaned the large grip frames required to carry greater than eight-round magazines. The big Glock 21, the most popular police .45 at the time, was simply too big for small-handed shooters to do their best work with it.
Glock approached ATK to create a cartridge with .45 ACP ballistics, but short enough overall to fit a “9mm platform” handgun. A team led by Ernest Durham produced the result, the .45 GAP (Glock Auto Pistol). Durham and company had worked some magic with powder and primers to get that power level into the shorter casing, but a 200-grain Speer Gold Dot bonded hollow point at 1000 foot-seconds or better duplicated the devastating stopping power proven on the street by Speer’s older 200-grain .45 ACP. The Gold Dot bullet performed much better than its predecessor and fed better. The price, however, was a “+P” pressure level.
This allowed Glock to use the same size frame as their 9mm service pistol, the G17, but with the wider, heavier slide of the G21 in .45 ACP. Cartridge capacity was ten rounds in the magazine of the full size (4.6” barrel) G37, eight in the compact (Glock 19 footprint) G38, and six in the “baby Glock” size G39.
Initial Success
New York State Police had lost a trooper when his 9mm bullets failed to perform against his killer as expected. They traded their Glock 17s in for the GAP, the first big department to adopt the new cartridge. Now, state police agencies are bellwethers: what they adopt is looked at closely and often likewise adopted by other law enforcement entities within their jurisdiction.
Soon other state police agencies had followed, as well as county and municipal law enforcement. The state troopers of Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Georgia, and finally Florida adopted it. I touched bases with all of them. The Florida Highway Patrol instructors had found in their intensive testing that the .45 GAP outperformed not only .45 ACP but virtually every other caliber in auto body and window glass penetration.
They found, as expected, that small-handed troopers shot it better than the big G21, which was also tested, but that even the troops with bigger hands often shot it better because they could “get more hand around the gun.” When the G37 was adopted as a standard issue, troopers were given the option of carrying three spare magazines instead of the usual two that they had worn with their 12-round Beretta .40s.
In a very short time frame, ten percent of America’s state police agencies had adopted the GAP. It looked as if the cartridge was on a roll.
.45 GAP in the Field
By all accounts, the round performed splendidly in the field. I debriefed an NYSP trooper who dropped a prison escapee – a desperate convicted murderer – with a non-fatal hit from a considerable distance: proof of both the cartridge’s potency and the G37’s shootability. In Florida, I was told that after a trooper won a gunfight with another vicious criminal, the doctors in the emergency room were impressed with the magnitude of wounding the .45 GAP had inflicted. In both cases, the round was the 200-grain Gold Dot, the overwhelming choice of issuing agencies even after Winchester discovered that they could make 230-grain bullets work in the GAP.
Even today, the agencies that subsequently traded the .45 GAP for something else told me that when it was in the field, “stopping power” was never an issue. The cartridge had always delivered.
So, What Happened?
Today, a little more than twenty years since its promising introduction, the .45 GAP is moribund. I don’t know of a single law enforcement agency issuing it at this time, though a surprising number of cops who were working then are still carrying it now for off-duty or in retirement. .45 GAP ammo is all but impossible to come by. No manufacturer besides Glock still offers the GAP in their catalog, and even at the GAP’s height of popularity, only Springfield Armory produced pistols in that caliber. Around 2004 I shot prototype Springfield EMPs in .45 GAP in San Diego, but I don’t know how many if any left the factory.
I do know they made the XD pistol in that caliber for a while. My wife and I each own one, just as we each own Glock 37s. The most accurate .45 GAP I ever shot was my long barrel XD-LE with Winchester 230 grain. My wife, petite with small hands, regularly uses either her Springfield or her Glock .45 GAP at The Pin Shoot (www.pinshoot.com), and our dwindling supply of 200-grain flat-nose Speer Lawman takes the heavy bowling pins three feet back and off the table decisively.)
What accounted for the precipitous decline of the .45 GAP? There were several factors. Some were real…and some were just BS.
Let’s dispense with the bunk first. Some on the Internet proclaimed, “It’s just Gaston Glock’s ego trip to get a cartridge named after himself.” Really? The guy’s name is on the most popular handgun on the planet, he became fabulously wealthy in doing so, and someone thinks he needs an ego feed with his name on a cartridge?
The same anonymous internet voices proclaimed, “It’s the answer to a question no one asked, an ingenious solution to a non-existent problem.” To which I can only reply, BS! The record is clear that it was law enforcement – and shooters – themselves who asked for a striker-fired .45 with a shorter cartridge that would reduce grip size front to back and allow better control of shots, especially for those with smaller hands.
But there were also genuine issues. The “ammo droughts,” particularly the one in 2012, forced ammo makers to concentrate on producing the most popular cartridges, the foremost being 9mm. I remember during that time my own agency had to accept a second choice of ammo for our issue .45 ACPs because our first choice was simply unavailable. .357 SIG and 10mm Auto all but disappeared from the marketplace. The same was true, in spades, for .45 GAP.
In the twenty-teens, the FBI’s declaration that implied all service cartridges were the same so we might as well all just go to 9mm had a tremendous impact on law enforcement, the private armed citizen sector, and of course, the ammunition industry. Increased mass production of 9mm ammo was accompanied by a reduction in the manufacture of less popular rounds, such as the GAP.
Finally, Glock themselves had a lot to do with killing the GAP, a fact which puts yet another stake in the heart of the “Gaston Glock ego trip” BS. Let us remember, the genesis of the .45 GAP was .45 ACP potency in a gun with less grip girth and a shorter reach of finger to trigger. Having attacked this very real problem from one front with the GAP, Glock then proceeded to attack it from two other fronts with their larger pistols chambered for .45 ACP. One approach was the SF series large frame pistols (10mm and .45 Auto), the SF standing for Short Frame or Small Frame depending on who you listen to. The other was the Gen4 series across the board including the large caliber guns, with modular backstrap panels and a shorter reach to the trigger than before, which continued through the Gen5 series.
Will .45 GAP rise again? The future is unpredictable, but those of us who own them and like them will stock up on ammo at every opportunity because they did exactly what they were designed to do.
