While factory magazines are typically best, there are some great—and not so great—aftermarket brands. Learn to be a discriminating shopper.
When you purchase a new semi-automatic pistol, odds are good it’s going to come with two magazines. It’s so common that it’s practically customary. Sure, a high-priced, bougie model might come with three, five or more, and a bargain-basement blaster billed to buyers on a budget may shave $10 or $20 off the MSRP by including only one, but two is the norm.
There’s a reason for this, and that’s because without a magazine, a semi-automatic pistol is a clunky and awkward-to-operate single shot. Lose one of those two magazines and at least you still have the other.
If you’re a clued-in shooter, one of the first things you do after adding a new pistol to your stable is to go and add to that magazine total. It’s the old principle of “If some is good, more is better, and too much is just enough.” I, personally, don’t start feeling a little de-stressed and Zen-like until I have at least five.
This whole discussion of bolstering stashes of spare magazines brings us to the topic of whether or not you should be looking at magazines supplied by third-party aftermarket suppliers.
Sometimes this decision is out of your hands. For example, if you’re a 1911 shooter and your pistol isn’t a Wilson Combat or a vintage Colt or similar, odds are good that even the magazines that came in the box with your sidearm are sourced from a third-party vendor.
Furthermore, most longtime 1911 aficionados have their own personal faves (mine is the Wilson 47D, at least for my .45 ACP guns, but you do you) that they’ve found play well with their own pistols and ammo choices. Because of this tendency, 1911 shooters were among the first to realize that not all aftermarket magazines were created equal. On the one hand, you had highly reliable Wilson Combat and Chip McCormick (now one big happy family) and Metalform, and on the other you had those suspicious-looking “genuine G.I.” magazines the guy at the gun show was selling, three for $20, wrapped in dingy brown paper that had probably stopped serving as a barrier to any vapors during the Nixon administration.
Another population sector with some unwanted familiarity with aftermarket magazines is Glock owners from the Baby Boomer/Gen X/elder Millennial demographics. During the decade-long dark age of the federal ban on so-called “assault weapons” from 1994 to 2004, standard-capacity, grandfathered “pre-ban” Glock magazines suddenly got ridiculously expensive.
Even the most common ones, for the G19 and G17, commonly traded for $50 if they weren’t completely knackered. The scarcer ones brought stupid money. Back in the late ’90s, I acquired a Glock G29, the compact 10 mm version of the Austrian pistol. I wanted a standard-capacity, 15-round G20 magazine with which to feed it. Now, the G20 had been introduced only a few years before the ban went into effect and it could never be described as a high-volume seller for the Austrian company.
I am too lazy to go look for the receipt to see what I eventually shelled out for it, but it was more than $100. I want to say it was $125, which my handy-dandy inflation calculator tells me is $230 in today’s shriveled currency. With standard-capacity magazines priced like this, it’s no wonder that Glock shooters hoarded them and saved them for carry duty and looked for alternatives for classes and practice and games.
The ban-compliant, single-stack 10-round factory Glock magazines were not known for being terribly reliable, at least when compared with the originals. An aftermarket manufacturer, U.S. Magazines, churned out a bajillion Glock mags in the months running up to the ban’s going into effect in an attempt to beat the clock, but those sheet-metal magazines had a rep for not being very trustworthy, either, during the ban years. One of the weirdest aftermarket Glock-mag incidents during that time was the appearance in the early 2000s of G17 and G19 magazines sourced from South Korea, whose importers swore up and down on a stack of Bibles were pre-ban, but turned out to be super sketchy. (As magazines aren’t serial numbered, the date of manufacture was always uncertain. Also, it was and is legal to purchase parts to endlessly refurbish your existing magazines.)
It wasn’t just Glock owners dealing with questionable aftermarket magazines during that era, though. Back in the 1980s, as larger magazine capacities in handguns were coming into vogue, the aftermarket accessory manufacturer Ram-Line—largely known for 10/22 stocks and mags—stuck a toe into the pistol-magazine market. Aftermarket Ram-Line maga- zines for pistols like the Ruger P85, Smith & Wesson Model 659 and Beretta Model 92 used a coiled, flat-ribbon mainspring that unspooled down the inside of the mag tube as the follower was depressed, It turned out to be fragile and extremely sensitive to dirt, sand and other debris. If you encounter one now, it’s best to treat it as an historical curiosity and collector’s item, rather than a functional, reliable magazine.
Obviously, pistol manufacturers intend their products to work most reliably with magazines as close to the ones that shipped in the box with the gun as possible. These can, however, be expensive, so if you need to save a couple dollars to fill your magazine stash, I’ll offer some pointers.
For starters, companies like Mec-Gar and Metalform are commonly used as OEM suppliers for magazines. With many pistols, if you can save a buck or two by buying one of those for your spare-mag stash, you’re not giving up anything in quality control or reliability, because the same machines are making the aftermarket mags and the mags that came with your pistol.
With straight-up aftermarket mags, the better-known brands are often your safest bet. Shooting a Glock? Magpul makes magazines for the U.S. military as well as Ruger’s new Gen3 Glock clone. If I, for some reason, had to carry aftermarket magazines in a Glock to which I planned to trust my life, Magpul would be my pick.
If you are constrained by budget and need to round out your maga- zine stash with aftermarket units of questionable provenance, then by all means hew to the lessons learned by those Glock shooters during the ban years. Thoroughly test out your factory carry magazines for reliability, and then set them aside for serious business use. Take those aftermarket magazines you got for a screaming deal and use them for practice sessions, tin-can shooting or going to classes where you can afford to get in some time working on malfunction-clearance drills.
Lifesaving equipment is not a place to save a buck.
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