Glock: The Rise of America's Gun

Glock 7 on me! You know what that is? It’s a porcelain gun made in Germany. It doesn’t show up on your airport X- ray machines, and it costs more than you make here in a month!”

The Glock had its Dirty Harry moment. It didn’t matter that every single trait Willis/McClane ticked off about the pistol was incorrect: There never was a model called the Glock 7. The gun was made in Austria, not Germany. It did show up on airport X-ray machines, and the Glock didn’t cost more than what a police captain made in a month. “Everything Bruce Willis said about the Glock was made up,” Papac said. “You can tell them the truth on the set, but that doesn’t mean the director is going to change the script. They didn’t listen to me.”

Despite all of the errors—or, more likely, because of them—the Bruce Willis Die Hard 2 soliloquy on the Glock became an instant favorite of American gun enthusiasts. “Lots of people, whether they know about cars or World War II or the layout of New York, love to pick at errors in movies or television,” noted Richard Feldman, the former NRA operative. “Gun people are the worst. They love to go on and on about mistakes about guns in the movies. It makes us feel smart and special: we know guns, and those stupid liberals in Hollywood don’t know anything.” The faulty Die Hard 2 references to Glock “just got everyone talking again about this gun,” Feldman said. “You had Jack Anderson, and Congress, and now, Bruce Willis—everyone’s making things up about Glock. And gun owners, they want to defend the ‘porcelain gun’ or the ‘plastic pistol’ or the ‘hijacker special,’ or whatever the media are calling it. What fabulous publicity!”

Hollywood, in its growing love affair with the Glock, would go on to put the gun into countless movies in the 1990s, and screenwriters improved their technical accuracy, if not necessarily their literary sophistication. In U.S. Marshals (1998), Tommy Lee Jones, as US Deputy Marshal Sam Gerard, lectured Robert Downey Jr., who played a State Department security agent carrying a stainless-steel Taurus PT945. Holding the Taurus aloft with obvious disdain, Jones snapped, “Get yourself a Glock and lose that nickel-plated sissy pistol.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger, an Austrian native, took pride in his home country’s famous export and requested it by name for his movie roles, according to Washburn. Gaston Glock gave the actor a pair of complimentary pistols as a gift and showed off a framed photograph of the two men shaking hands. But Glock couldn’t persuade Schwarzenegger to endorse the brand publicly in the United States. Washburn calls Schwarzenegger “a closet gun guy, like a lot of Hollywood people.” But the former champion bodybuilder more than made up for this reticence with his characters’ on-screen pronouncements. In End of Days (1999), a supernatural thriller in which Schwarzenegger battles the Devil, he responds irritably to a priest’s lecture on religious devotion, “Between your faith and my Glock nine-millimeter, I take my Glock.”

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What set Glock apart from other handguns in the realm of pop culture was that it so quickly acquired a reputation as the firearm of both the cop and the outlaw. The former association had roots in reality; police officers from Colby, Kansas, to New York City had migrated to the Austrian pistol. The television police-and-prosecutor procedural Law & Order , which began its prime-time run on NBC in 1990, evolved into what some called one long Glock advertisement. Filmed in New York and outfitted by Rick Washburn, the show had its detectives and beat cops over the years move en masse from Smith & Wesson revolvers to Glock semiautomatics.

Glock’s link to the world of criminals was, at first, more fantasy than fact. The Glock has an intimidating profile. It does not look like the gun of a hero, in the fashion of the Colt Peacemaker in westerns. It had been introduced to the American public by its critics as a hijacker weapon (however tendentiously). Die Hard 2 portrayed it in the hands of paramilitary maniacs. But more important in terms of popular culture, the Glock was embraced by leading stars of hip-hop.

All sorts of major apparel, liquor, and jewelry brands took advantage of rap’s rapid rise to popularity, not just in the inner city but in predominantly white suburbs across the country. Big consumer-product companies sponsored concerts, bought advertising in music magazines, and used performers as spokesmen. “While virtually every other industry maneuvers to exploit hip-hop’s commercial influence, gun manufacturers have been saved the work,” Rodrigo Bascunan and Christian Pearce wrote in their rap history, Enter the Babylon System: Unpacking Gun Culture from Samuel Colt to 50 Cent . “Guns are a part of life, death, and status in the same neighborhoods that hip-hop grew up in. It only makes sense that firearm brands would come to pervade rap music.”

“Gangsta rappers” peppered their lyrics with references to firearms and gunplay. The gun represented manhood; it was brandished in response to punk street rivals and perceived challenges from the police. Some MCs adopted stage names alluding to favorite brands: AK-47, Beretta 9, Mac 10, Mikhail Kalashnikuv, Smif-n-Wessun, and Young Uzi. But no model was more popular than the Glock. The rhyming potential alone—“pop,” “drop,” “cop,” and, of course, “cock”—made it a lyricist’s dream. Rappers Glock 9 and Glokk borrowed versions of the Austrian name as their professional identities. Song titles incorporated the brand: “Mask and da Glock” by Three 6 Mafia, “Hand on the Glock” by Cypress Hill, “Ain’t No Glock” by TRU. The repertoire of rap works that refer to Glock is so voluminous in no small part because one of the most influential performers of the early 1990s, Tupac Shakur, featured the brand in “Soulja’s Story” on his 1991 debut solo record, 2Pacalypse Now . “I chose droppin’ the cop, I got me a Glock,” Shakur rapped, “and a Glock for the niggas on my block.”

Apart from accelerating Shakur’s career, the album sparked a national debate in 1992 when a Texas state trooper was killed by a teenager who allegedly listened to 2Pacalypse Now . Vice President Dan Quayle denounced the record and demanded that it be withdrawn from stores. Chuckling all the way to the bank, executives at Shakur’s studio, Interscope, refused. Shakur, whose mother, a former Black Panther, named him for a Peruvian revolutionary, defended his work, claiming it reflected the inescapable violence of poor urban black existence. Critics argued that he glorified such carnage. In the darkly poetic culmination of a life marked by real bloodshed, Shakur died in 1996, at the age of twenty-five, after he was shot four times by a drive-by triggerman in Las Vegas. The handgun used to kill the rapper was a .40-caliber Glock.

Shakur had firsthand experience with guns. For most rappers, Glock was just a weapon that rhymed. “Most people who talk about a Glock, they can’t tell you a model number or how many shots it holds. They’ve never fired it, they’ve never felt spent shells hit them and burn their forearm, they’ve never done any of that shit,” said Paris, an Oakland-based rapper. “Most people whose knuckles are draggin’ in the streets aren’t making records.”

Little of what the urban crime rappers sang about actually involved Glocks. Rick Washburn points to Juice , a 1992 film about down-and-out inner-city black life. It starred Shakur as Bishop, a young man who sought respect and credibility—“juice”—by means of firepower. Washburn was asked to arm the movie’s street figures. He went to the NYPD and asked what guns the police were taking from young black men at crime scenes. “The rappers would have you think it was Glock this, Glock that,” Washburn said. “That’s not the truth, at least not stickup guys and drug gangs in the ghetto. They used cheap revolvers and cheap American-made pistols, like they had since the 1960s and 1970s.” Glock, fast becoming the “it” gun in Hollywood, had a tough- sounding name that rhymed easily. It had acquired cachet. But in the early 1990s, it wasn’t common yet on the streets.

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Worlds away from the one Tupac Shakur inhabited, Karl Walter was stoking demand for Glock with other promotional methods. Glock, Inc., the US unit of Gaston Glock’s company, was growing rapidly, adding salaried employees and signing up independent regional sales representatives who worked on commission. Walter retained an Atlanta advertising firm called Indelible Inc. to generate stark, simply worded display ads, mostly for gun magazines. “Set your sights on the handgun of the future. It’s here.…” declared one early ad, a full-page, text-only spread in the Shotgun News . “The Glock 17 ‘Safe Action’ 9mm semi-automatic pistol,” it continued. “Unprecedented performance and reliability. Revolutionary concept and design. Unsurpassed shooting comfort and durability.”

American handgun makers offered many diverse models, in the fashion of the Detroit car companies. Gaston Glock saw that as competing with himself and resisted the temptation. The fully automatic Glock 18 was a rarity sold to SWAT units. The Glock 19, a compact nine-millimeter pistol that held fifteen rounds, was marketed to detectives for concealed carry and as a more manageable alternative for women police officers with smaller hands. But the original Glock 17 remained the company’s mainstay.

In 1988 Glock, Inc., had moved to larger quarters on Highlands Parkway in Smyrna that included firing ranges and classrooms to accommodate training programs. The expanded facility became a gathering place, almost a clubhouse, for visiting cops and federal agents. Deputy marshals transporting prisoners through Atlanta would stop