If you have been following firearms news, you may have heard that Glock is finally releasing the .380 ACP Glock 28 in the United States. (See, e.g., this article from Gun Digest or this video from TFB TV). For those that don't know, the Glock 28 is basically the Glock 26 but in .380 ACP rather than 9x19mm, and was apparently designed to be marketed and sold in those countries where civilians were not allowed to use military pistol cartridges.
For some reason, it was not sold in the United States prior to this release. The articles and videos discussing the weapon have all asserted that it was because the weapon did not pass the "sporting purposes" test used to keep certain military and "Saturday Night Special" types of weapons out of the country. That doesn't really make sense to me since G28 is the same size, weight (I think it is 1 oz. less) and configuration as the Glock 26, including finger grooves and a thumb rest to make it more sporty. But maybe the caliber played a role of which I'm not aware or that 1 oz. made all the difference. I suspect that Glock simply made a decision not to import it to the United States for some reason, and that was that.
In any event, it is now being manufactured in the United States in limited numbers, so that whole issue of the "sporting purposes" test is moot. But I nevertheless find it interesting that the G28 is being sold is a third generation weapon, rather than being updated to the newer 4th and 5th generation designs, and apparently lacks any provision for mounting an optic. Maybe this is for the California market, but I don't know.
In any event, because it is an older generation of Glock it seems somewhat obsolete compared to Sig's P365-380 or, even, Beretta's new 80X Cheetah. This, combined with the fact that it is only being distributed through TALO Distributers makes me believe that it is intended for the collector market--those people wanting copies of each model of Glock ever produced--rather than the defensive shooter.
But it highlights something that I've seen with Glock being behind the curve on innovation. Glock was slow to come out with a single stack 9mm when those were popular (and when it did come out with a single stack, it did so in .380). In the military pistol trials, it played it so safe that it didn't even deliver features specifically requested by the military. And now that there is growing interest in higher capacity .380s, Glock's response was to throw an old design onto the market and see how it does rather than developing a new design or updating an old design.
Finally, while most people seem to have liked it during testing, Mrgunsngear had significant enough issues with extraction that he was sending it back to Glock for repairs:
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