We often say that guns save lives…well here’s an example where that proved to be true, only not in the way you might expect. The picture shows what’s left of a Glock 22 that belongs to a friend of mine. A great guy, but sometimes bad things happen to good people. While he was at work his house caught fire. His wife was asleep away from the point of origin of the fire, blissfully unaware of what was happening.
According to the CDC, most fire fatalities are the result of smoke and toxic fume inhalation, not from burns themselves. During a sleep cycle we are particularly vulnerable to inhaling lethal amounts of smoke.
That’s where the Glock comes in. Under the intense heat of the fire, the ammunition in the Glock cooked off, and the resulting noise woke my buddy’s wife in time to realize what was happening and get herself out of the house.
People make jokes about combat tupperware all the time, but it actually takes quite a bit of heat to melt the frame of a Glock…not to mention all the metal fire control bits inside of it like springs and the trigger bar. In the picture you can see the metal liner from the inside of the magazine, the slide, the barrel, and the recoil spring. Everything else is just…gone. A testament to how hot a residential fire can get.
That’s certainly not how anyone pictured a Glock coming to the defense of a homeowner, but the world is a very strange place. And if you think you had a bad week, maybe take a look at that Glock and think about what a bad week really looks like.
Where was the Glock at the time? And how does he know the cook off sound came from the Glock and not some random box of ammunition he presumably also had in the house at the time? Why did he have a loaded handgun stored in a room he wasn’t going to sleep in? Was his wife the only one in the house at the time?can we see the pictures of his other burned guns? can we hae more detail for stories like this?
Heh, everyone’s a critic.
good grief, there’s no hope
Great story. But if things got that bad and the smoke detectors didnt wake her, I want her sleep habits, I wish I could sleep like that.