The New Ruger RXM
Different, But Familiar
The Ruger RXM, a new hybrid take on the venerable GLOCK.
Note the well-shaped slide grasping grooves fore and aft.
I knew Bill Ruger, Sr., first as an idol and eventually as a personal friend. He told me once, when I called him a great gun designer, he saw himself more as someone who refined and improved the designs of others. This legacy is carried on by those who now lead the company bearing his name.
The Single-Six of 1953 and the Ruger Blackhawk series, born in 1955, were improved reincarnations of the Colt Single Action Army. The hugely popular LCP series owes its original design to George Kehlgren’s (SP) P3AT. Now comes homage to Gaston Glock’s modern classic pistol in the form of the Ruger RXM.
Testing within the Free State of Florida, Mas couldn’t resist
running the RXM with a 33-round GLOCK magazine. It ran fine.
The slightly flared mag well of RXM (left) mirrors the Gen5 G19.
Mixing It Up
The name stands for Ruger blended with MagPul, which provided the frame. Picture a Gen3 GLOCK 19 with the frame of a Gen5 — the front strap of the grip straight without finger grooves, the butt lightly flared to speed reloading. MagPul put a lot of thought into the stippling, with enough to provide traction in the right places but not aggressive enough to aggravate the shooter’s hand during a heavy shooting schedule.
A welcome feature is matching lightly stippled niches complete with little ledges on either side of the dust cover. This provides a felt index for the trigger finger in register on one side, and the thumb on the other side for shooters who prefer the popular straight-thumbs two-hand hold. There’s a rail for light/laser attachments. The RXM comes with two MagPul 15-round magazines and is, of course, chambered for the currently dominant 9mm Luger cartridge.
There are differences in the design, though. The slide is milled for the red dot sights, which are all the rage, three of them specifically — the Leupold Delta Point Pro and Trijicon’s RMR and RMSc. A Torx wrench, which comes in the box with the pistol, removes the cover plate screws. Dowel pins are also provided with the pistol, two for attaching an RMR and four for the RMSc or DPP. An ingenious setup, really.
Our test sample, serial number 094—27729, came out of the box with fixed sights high enough to work and co-witness with a carry optic, and in my opinion they’re one of the pistol’s best features. A big front sight houses a good-sized green Tritium dot surrounded by a white circle, complemented by a serrated rear sight with a generous notch. Sight picture was simply excellent. And, yes, these “iron sights” are made of steel.
The RXM is not entirely a GLOCK clone. Explains Mark Gurney, Director of New Product Innovations at Ruger, “This pistol is a collaborative effort. It was Ruger teamwork on the internals, while MagPul designed the frame. All GLOCKs have embedded rails, while the RXM is one of the first if not the first to have a serialized component, which contains the rails, similar to the SIG P365 and P320. A tip of the hat here to Mark Willson, who was product manager on the RXM project.
Parts are largely interchangeable. I took one of my Gen3 GLOCK 19s, and swapped its top end onto the Ruger/MagPul frame, and vice-versa. Both cross-bred Ruger/GLOCKs worked fine with each other’s top and bottom halves, and each of course worked fine with the MagPul mags and OEM GLOCK magazines. And, yes — I couldn’t resist running the Ruger with 33-round GLOCK mags.
The frame has thoughtfully placed memory pads for the trigger finger to register on one side, thumb of support hand on the other.
RXM comes with two of these 15-round, G19 compatible MagPul magazines.
Reliability
We all recommend shooters take apart their brand-new gun and lubricate it before shooting. I also know the vast majority of gun buyers don’t, so I just shoot test guns out of the box without prepping them. The Ruger felt a little dry, but it ran fine in my hands and others: 100% with steel-, brass- and nickel-plated cases, round nose as well as flat nose FMJ, and hollow points. I’m told by folks at the factory the sample RXMs have been tested for up to half a million rounds successfully.
Gail Pepin’s small hands had no problem keeping RXM’s
sights in the middle. Note position of spent casing.
RXM controllability — Mas still has the pistol on target with spent cases from the last three shots still in the air.
Shooting the RXM
Though some of the RXM’s design follows the Gen3 GLOCK, the trigger pull is closer to a Gen5 though not exactly the same. You can feel firm resistance to the trigger finger from the beginning of the press, and then there’s a smooth roll rather like a double action pull in microcosm. We didn’t feel any “backlash,” or rearward trigger movement after the striker is released. Measured on a Lyman digital trigger pull scale, pull weight averaged 5.54 lbs. I would subjectively describe the trigger re-set as “medium-long.”
Recoil was predictably mild — 9mm, after all … On the 25-yard bench with a matrix rest I tested with 3/3/3: Three brands, three bullet weights and three projectile types. Each five-shot group was measured overall center to center to show what the gun can do in experienced hands under perfect conditions, and again for the best three hits, which testing has shown about equals what the gun/ammo combo would have done with all five.
The 147-grain subsonic was originally developed in the 1980s by Winchester for maximum accuracy, and their jacketed truncated cone training load proved to play well with the Ruger. The five shots centered on the 3″ Shoot-N-C aiming dot in a 2.20″ cluster, with the tightest trio in 1.40″. The RXM was dead-on at this distance for point of aim/point of impact, right out of the box.
The 124-grain SIG V-crown jacked hollow point edged the 147-grain Winchester by 0.05″ with another 2.20″ five-shot group, the tie-breaking best three 0.05″ tighter in 1.35″. However, the group centered slightly left of point of aim. The 115-grain full metal jacket is today’s most popular 9mm Luger practice round and MagTech’s steel case version is about the cheapest such good-quality load today. It delivered a 3.45″ group overall with the best three in 2.00″ including a “double.”
The straight-front grip — well, there’s actually a very shallow niche for the middle finger under the trigger guard — and the MagPul stippling on the frame felt great. The edge of the trigger guard on some striker-fired pistols can tend to cause a “hot spot” on the middle finger. After a long string of shooting I was aware of very mild discomfort there.
This is a subjective thing and doesn’t seem to affect most shooters. If I was shooting a thousand-round-a-day course like the MAG-30 class David Maglio teaches (http://massadayoobgroup.com), I’d put a prophylactic Band-Aid on the middle finger. Shooting hundreds instead of thousands of rounds with the RXM, my arthritic fingers told me I didn’t need it.
To test “shootability,” I ran the RXM on a 4-15 yard revolver-neutral 60-shot qualification course, running at the triple speed we would be demanding from our students in a third-level MAG-120 course in a few days. Working out of a Phoenix Kydex hip holster and running to the edges of the allowed time stages — six, reload, six at seven yards in 8.3 seconds, one-hand only shooting with either hand at a pace of six shots in 2.67 seconds from four yards, etc. — and using a mix of GLOCK and MagPul magazines, I was able to score 298 out of 300 possible points. Given I’m old and slow, I’ll take it.
My takeaway: The RXM ran smoothly. The sights were wonderfully easy to see. The trigger was very controllable, and the two points down were all on me, rushing my shots when I thought I might be running out of time at the longest distance.
Bottom line on this aspect: The RXM is easy to shoot well at speed.
Top and bottom of RXM, left, and Gen3 G19, right. Not exactly the same, but close.
RXM’s innovative RDS mounting system, per the owner’s manual.
Perks & Quirks
Good news — I loved the sights and the overall feel of the gun. Trigger pull was excellent for a “street” striker gun. I really liked the “resting places” built in for support hand thumb and trigger finger. It simply feels good in the hand.
Quibbles? It fit all my leather GLOCK 19 holsters, but not all of my Kydex ones due to slight dimensional difference in the slides. The MagPul magazines ran fine, but unlike OEM GLOCK mags they only have one witness hole, for cartridge number 15. This can be a pain in the butt in a class or qualification or drill where you must have a specified number of rounds in the gun; the same if you’re shooting an IDPA match or GSSF match.
Overall, with an MSRP of $499 — about $150 less than the equivalent GLOCK — I think Ruger is going to sell a great many of these new RXM pistols. They’ve already sold the test sample … to yours truly.
