Glock

Sunday, January 22nd, 2012

Daniel Horan reviews Paul M. Barrett’s oddly subtitled Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun:

In February 1980, the author tells us, Mr. Glock chanced to overhear a conversation between two Austrian colonels as they expressed the need for a new army sidearm. He asked them for a chance to bid on the contract. The colonels merely laughed, regarding him as little more than a garage tinkerer. Undaunted, he sought an audience with Austria’s defense minister and asked him for a chance to compete for the business. The minister agreed, and the rest, as they say, is history.

“That I knew nothing [about guns] was my advantage,” Mr. Glock said in an interview. He bought a number of handguns and disassembled them in his workshop, examining each component for its function while weighing potential improvements. He made prototypes and test-fired them with his left hand; if he was maimed by an explosion, he could still draw blueprints with his right. The product of his efforts was a nine-millimeter semi-automatic pistol that he designated the Glock 17 because it was his 17th invention.

Most notably, the frame of the new Glock pistol was built of industrial plastic, making it lighter and more resistant to corrosion than the conventional all-steel guns in use up to that time. The handgun’s various parts were housed in separate subgroups, making them easy to remove and replace. There was no safety or decocking lever to confuse the user. (The safety was built right into the trigger.) All told, the Glock 17 was a revolutionary new version of a weapon that had remained largely unchanged for a century.

The Austrian army tested the Glock 17 against pistols from such established European arms makers as Heckler & Koch, Sig Sauer, Beretta and Steyr. On Nov. 5, 1982, Mr. Glock received the news that his pistol had bested all the others. “Glock started with a blank sheet of paper,” writes Mr. Barrett. “He listened to his military customers. He made adjustments they requested. As a result, he came up with something original—and, as it turned out, he did so at precisely the right moment.”

It was not the last of Mr. Glock’s right moments. In 1984, an Austrian expatriate in the United States named Karl Walter, who sold firearms out of his motor home as he traveled the country, returned to Austria for a visit. While there, he came across a Glock 17 in a gun shop. He found its squared-off, plastic appearance ugly, but he was curious about the upstart designer who had somehow won the approval of the Austrian military. Mr. Walter visited Mr. Glock and proposed marketing the handgun in America. “This pistol will sell,” he told Mr. Glock. “But it must be sold.”

And sold it was. Mr. Walter arranged for the Glock 17 to be featured in the October 1984 issue Soldier of Fortune magazine, and product placements in films and television shows soon had Glock pistols showing up in the hands of Hollywood’s biggest stars. Innovation had spawned fascination. Once Glock pistols were adopted by the FBI, the Secret Service and major American police departments, sales to the public began to eclipse those of even Smith & Wesson, the venerable American gun maker, which nearly went out of business as a result.

Glock is the world’s leading manufacturer of handguns, with annual revenues of more than $100 million.

Comments

  1. It would have never caught on if his last name was Schucklegruber.

  2. Isegoria says:

    Well played, Fouché.

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