[The video above is] a good watch generally, and we want to zoom in on a particular aspect. At 6:54, Isaac explains why Glock’s critical innovation that changed the entire industry is … the slide stop.
Hang on. The slide stop is a tiny piece of metal, and shouldn’t affect a gun’s overall design or manufacturing process.
But that’s exactly the point. Isaac points out that (with some exceptions), pistols pre-Glock were designed such that the slide stops had to be robust and precisely machined. That single design choice — requiring tight tolerances for the slide stop to work properly — cascades into the engineering and manufacturing steps. It limits the materials you can make the slide stop from, creates a pretty high minimum time to produce the part, and requires tighter quality control.
Multiply that by every part in the gun and you end up with a gun that’s expensive and slow to build, and difficult to repair. And forget about iterating quickly on the design for future updates.
So what Isaac identifies is that Glock’s magic wasn’t in making its precision great. The magic was in making its precision not matter. Stamp your slide stops out of sheet steel. Make the frame out of plastic. Make the design so good that those things don’t matter.
Execution matters, but the best designs can tolerate a lot of faults in execution. If your design is great but impossible to execute well, then your design isn’t great.
This is a mirror for gun rights and gun control. We all start from the premise that if someone’s trying to hurt you, you have a right to stop them. Gun control then delegates that right to the police. But for that to work, every step of the process has to go right.
One bit of imprecision — one violent person who isn’t apprehended, one 911 response that’s too slow, one police officer being too quick to shoot at a shadowy figure in your home — and the overall system stops working for you. Whereas gun rights are the opposite — everything else can fail you, and gun rights still work as a backstop for your self-defense. Flamewar version of this analogy: gun control is a 1911, gun rights are a Glock.
