Glock’s new Model V was supposed to be the company’s answer to politicians, lawsuits, and headlines about illegal “switches.”
Instead, if you believe two popular gun commentators, the pistol has already become the latest proof that you can’t regulate your way past determined tinkerers.
In a recent video, firearms manufacturer and YouTuber Brandon Herrera told his audience that Glock’s much-touted “unconvertible” V-series has already been turned into a full-auto machine pistol.
On the same day, gun-rights YouTuber Howard Gatch of Hegshot87 warned that the Glock V is now being used as a political and legal weapon against the entire gun industry – not because it failed, but because it exists at all.
Put together, their messages paint a picture of a gun company stuck between regulators who want proof of “safety changes” and a gun culture that can reverse-engineer those changes in days.
Glock’s Model V: A Gun Built For Courtrooms, Not Shooters
As Howard Gatch explains, the Glock V wasn’t born out of pure innovation.
It was born out of pressure.
Gatch says gun-control groups, state attorneys general, and new liability laws have been hammering Glock with claims that its pistols are “too easy” to convert to illegal full auto using small devices often called switches.
According to Gatch, those groups held up ATF and FBI trace data to show big spikes in Glocks that had been illegally modified. The message to Glock was simple: Change your design or we’ll keep dragging you into court.
So Glock rolled out the Model V – a slightly reworked Gen 5 with internal changes to make those back-plate auto sears harder (in theory) to install.
On the outside, as Gatch points out, it still looks like a Glock.
On the inside, Glock adjusted parts like the trigger housing and slide ramp in an effort to “future-proof” the pistol against switches.
Herrera agrees the whole project was aimed less at shooters and more at politicians and plaintiffs’ attorneys.
In his words, Glock was trying to get “the anti-gun crowd off of their back” by showing they could redesign their pistol to satisfy complaints about “readily convertible” guns.
Brandon Herrera: “You Can’t Stop the Signal”
If Glock’s lawyers were hoping for a long, peaceful rollout, Brandon Herrera’s reaction is brutal.
“Well, that didn’t take long,” he tells viewers at the top of his video, joking that it’s a good day for everyone “except gun grabbers and Glock’s PR team.”
Herrera says he predicted that if he could get his hands on a Model V, it would take two weeks at most for someone to figure out how to make it run full auto.
According to him, someone beat that timeline – and may have done it before most people even saw a V-model in a store.
He leans into the memes, calling back to the line “life finds a way” and joking that all Glock really did was challenge “one redneck with 10 minutes and a Dremel.”
Under the humor, though, Herrera’s argument is clear: if a gun is semi-automatic, and people have tools, knowledge, and 3D printers, there will always be a path to illegal modification.
Trying to engineer a pistol that cannot be converted, he suggests, is a political talking point – not a realistic engineering goal.
The Legal Debate Over “Readily Convertible”
Herrera also digs into the legal theory that helped drive the Glock V into existence.
He notes that the ATF has long held that if a firearm is “readily convertible” into a machine gun using commonly available, unregulated parts, that firearm can be treated – for legal purposes – as a machine gun itself.
That’s why things like drilled sear pin holes in an AR-15 receiver are such a big deal.
But Herrera points out that with Glock pistols, the situation is different.
The little “drop-in auto sears” (or switches) for Glocks are themselves legally treated as the machine gun under federal law. They are NFA items.
He argues that if the conversion device itself is already regulated as a machine gun, it doesn’t make sense to claim the base pistol is “readily convertible” in the same way as an AR lower that just needs an unregulated part.
In his view, California and other states latched onto the “readily convertible” talking point anyway, used it against Glock, and Glock caved by producing the V series instead of fighting harder in court.
Herrera also makes a point of reminding viewers that possessing an unregistered switch is already a serious felony, with penalties similar to owning an unregistered machine gun.
So from his perspective, the law already has teeth – and the Glock V is a political concession layered on top of existing, powerful bans.
Howard Gatch: The New Gun Control Is Aimed At Manufacturers
Howard Gatch steps back and looks at the bigger strategy.
In his Hegshot87 video, he argues that gun-control groups have shifted tactics.
Instead of relying on traditional bans that voters can see and push back against, he says they’re now going after gun manufacturers directly through lawsuits and liability theories.
The Glock V, in Gatch’s telling, is “Exhibit A” that this strategy works.
Gun-control groups can now brag that they forced one of the biggest handgun makers on the planet to redesign its flagship pistol because of their pressure campaigns.
But now that tinkerers have already shown the V can still be hacked, Gatch says the next step is almost guaranteed:
They’ll claim Glock didn’t do enough.
He expects more lawsuits, more state-level bans, and more “rosters” like California’s, where states can simply decide the V – or any future model – won’t be allowed for sale because of its perceived “convertibility” or past trace numbers.
In Gatch’s view, it’s a one-way ratchet.
Every time a company complies, regulators and activists use that compliance as proof they can demand even more.
History Lesson: When Government Blamed the Gun, Not the Policy
To explain why he’s so concerned, Howard Gatch goes back to the Prohibition era.
He reminds viewers that in the 1920s and ’30s, bootleggers, gangsters, economic collapse, and the Thompson submachine gun all collided.
Crime numbers rose from around 6–7 per 100,000 people to 9–10, he notes – a jump, but not the kind that justifies rewriting the Constitution.
Instead of focusing on the underlying policies like Prohibition’s black market and economic desperation, Gatch says lawmakers effectively targeted the gun.
The National Firearms Act of 1934 slapped a $200 tax stamp on certain weapons – the equivalent of several thousand dollars today – plus mandatory registration.
Functionally, he argues, that priced ordinary people out of those firearms and pushed them into a special, heavily controlled category, even as Prohibition itself was ending.
For Gatch, the lesson is simple: government made normal people into criminals with one policy, saw crime go up, then blamed the gun instead of the bad policy.
He sees the Glock V fight as a modern version of that script, with the added twist that activists now want to hold manufacturers responsible for what individuals do after a gun leaves the factory.
Manufacturers In The Crosshairs
The most serious part of Gatch’s warning is about where this goes next.
If Glock can be blamed for what someone does with a $20 3D-printed part or a cheap import, he argues, then no manufacturer is safe.
He points out that Ruger is already facing similar accusations over its RXM pistol, with gun-control groups calling it “too easily converted” despite little evidence of widespread full-auto conversions.
If courts and legislatures accept that logic, Gatch says states will simply start declaring, “We’ve seen conversions to your new gun; we’re not going to allow that gun into our state.”
Instead of a clear federal ban that everyone debates in the open, you get a patchwork of liability threats, insurance pressure, and state rosters that quietly strangle the market for certain models.
Gatch argues that rolling over is no longer an option.
He calls for gun companies to stand firm, form coalitions, push back with their own constitutional lawsuits, and work with insurers to say: we are within the law, and we cannot be punished for what a tiny minority does with heavily modified guns.
If they don’t, he warns, Glock won’t be the last company forced into constant redesigns to chase political demands that can never truly be met.
You Can’t Engineer Away Human Ingenuity
Both Brandon Herrera and Howard Gatch are blunt in their criticism, sometimes in colorful language.
Strip that away, and the core point is hard to ignore.
You cannot engineer away human ingenuity.
Any semi-automatic firearm, in theory, can be pushed toward automatic fire by someone with enough time, knowledge, tools, and zero respect for the law.
Trying to chase that reality with tiny internal tweaks and new model names feels symbolic more than practical.
At the same time, it’s easy to see why regulators are worried.
The explosion of cheap conversion devices, 3D printing, and online marketplaces has made it much easier for bad actors to find illegal parts – and that is a real problem for public safety.
The question is whether blaming Glock’s base design, or any other manufacturer’s, truly addresses that problem, or just creates a legal hammer aimed at companies while black-market parts keep flowing.
If the Glock V already has a full-auto “hack” floating around the internet before it even hits most shelves, that suggests that design-only fixes will always lag behind the people they’re supposed to stop.
A Test Case for a New Kind of Gun Control
What makes this story important isn’t just that one “unconvertible” pistol got converted anyway.
It’s that the Glock V is now a test case for a new kind of gun control: pressure the manufacturers, claim victory when they redesign, then use their failure to solve everything as ammunition for stricter laws and bans.
Brandon Herrera shows how quickly the technical side gets undermined.
Howard Gatch shows how that technical failure will likely be used to justify the next wave of restrictions.
For everyday gun owners, the result could be fewer choices, higher prices, and more states where entire model lines quietly disappear from shelves – not because voters banned them, but because lawsuits and liability theories made them too risky to sell.
And for Glock, the Model V may be remembered less as a safety innovation and more as a cautionary tale: once you start redesigning your guns to satisfy activists and attorneys, you may discover that the “fix” can be undone with a file and a 3D printer…
…but the political damage keeps piling up anyway.
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The article Glock’s model V designed to prevent full auto mods has already been hacked first appeared on Survival World.
A former park ranger and wildlife conservationist, Lisa’s passion for survival started with her deep connection to nature. Raised on a small farm in northern Wisconsin, she learned how to grow her own food, raise livestock, and live off the land. Lisa is our dedicated Second Amendment news writer and also focuses on homesteading, natural remedies, and survival strategies. Lisa aims to help others live more sustainably and prepare for the unexpected.
