Everybody always says Glock. Either that or 1911. I don't own either, and for my own personal use, my next pistol is going to be a Springfield Arms XDM; which is pretty much a Glock clone with a few extra things I like. All that said, I've got to say that the 1911 faithful have one thing up on the Glock faithful: Proven results. You can come up with whatever test you want, bury it on an asteroid, stuff the bore with goldfish scales, yada, yada, yada; all you're really trying to do is replicate all the crap the 1911 has spent the last 100 years powering it's way through. (You might say....the 1911 powers through that shit with rage?
Still makes me laugh!) Mr. Browning's venerable old design has slogged through swamps, swam around with frogmen doing beach recon, jumped out of airplanes, and gone without a proper cleaning for months on end-but for a hundred years now, it's come out of the holster, rusty and ugly and looking like hell, and killed that dirty Communist when one of our boys really needed it. It doesn't mind a nice scrub with some Hoppe's or Breakfree CLP from time to time, but all a good 1911 really needs is a quick dunk in the diesel fuel tank, and maybe a dab or two of used motor oil here and there. Durability? If you're willing to put up with some cosmetic defects, you can still find a 1911 that stormed Normandy, or helped hoist the flag on Iwo Jima, and that baby'll still shoot.