consequences.”
Mary’s experience had not caused her to rethink the prudence or propriety of carrying guns.
That very night the three of us attended a lecture on Second Amendment rights, followed by blueberry pie at the Davises’ home. I joined John and Mary on other occasions at shooting ranges in Florida; she certainly never seemed timid on the firing line. She claimed the accident with the Glock made her more careful, the way a car crash might make a driver more careful.
Later, she had powerful misgivings about revealing this episode. The accident remains a source of emotional pain within the extended family. I agreed to use Davis, rather than their real name, and to refrain from identifying their hometown in Florida. The rest of their story is unchanged, and they are the only people in this book referred to by pseudonym.
CHAPTER 9
“Copy the Motherfucker”
By 1990, the predicament at Smith & Wesson headquarters over what to do about the ascendance of Glock had gone from worrisome to alarming.
Smith & Wesson built its storied reputation on revolvers. Horace Smith, an employee at the federal armory at Springfield, Massachusetts, and Daniel Wesson, an apprentice to his older brother, a leading New England gunsmith, had joined forces in the early 1850s to make a repeating rifle that could fire metallic cartridges. Smith and Wesson were part of a long-standing New England tradition. The government armory in Springfield had its roots in the Revolutionary War and spawned a gun industry in Massachusetts and Connecticut that went through cycles of boom and bust for more than two centuries. If Sam Colt was the most colorful character in what became known as Gun Valley, Smith and Wesson were sturdy rivals.
As with Colt, success at first eluded Smith and Wesson. Eventually they found a source of steady revenue by supplying the Union Army during the Civil War. Like the Colt, Smith & Wesson’s guns also found their way into some famous frontier holsters. Jesse James, “Wild Bill” Hickok, and members of the Younger gang carried S&W. By the 1930s, police departments around the United States were increasingly arming their patrolmen with Smith & Wesson .38s, and the company grew into the world’s predominant manufacturer of handguns. Its most famous designs included the powerful .357 Magnum and .44 Magnum revolvers, as well as the first American-made nine-millimeter pistol.
Constructed after World War II, the S&W plant in Springfield is an art deco fortress designed to withstand aerial bombing. In 1990, the company employed two thousand people and was a mainstay of the western Massachusetts economy. Prepared for a Soviet military invasion that never occurred, Smith & Wesson didn’t anticipate commercial incursions from Brazil, Switzerland, Italy, and, most threateningly, from Austria.
Foreign handgun makers looked toward the United States in the 1980s and saw a domestic industry in disarray. The dollar value of firearm sales was falling as economic hardship devastated the farm belt, oil-producing states, and other gun-friendly parts of the country. Fear in the insurance industry of product-liability litigation had made corporate policies far more expensive for firearm makers, even though few verdicts of any size had been imposed on gun companies. Similar anxiety hit mass retailers like JCPenney, which phased out gun sales, citing litigation risks, low margins, and criticism from gun-control activists. Smith & Wesson and Colt had another set of problems: aging plants, expensive workforces, and a failure to introduce new models that piqued the interest of consumers, law enforcement, or the military. Colt fumbled away several lucrative Pentagon contracts. Smith & Wesson, which had endured a series of destabilizing ownership changes, suffered an embarrassing falloff in the quality of its revolvers.
Sensing S&W’s vulnerability, Brazilian firearm manufacturer Forjas Taurus, which at one time was affiliated with S&W, expanded distribution in the United States of its moderately priced handguns. Beretta made its move in 1984, when the US Army invited bids for a nine-millimeter semiautomatic to replace the heavier, higher-caliber Colt .45. European allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization preferred the smaller nine- millimeter, which accommodated more rounds in its magazine. The Pentagon decided to follow suit on the theory that, in combat, the ability to fire more bullets quickly outweighed the advantage of ammunition that punched larger holes in an enemy. The Army demanded that delivery start within six to nine months after a contract award. Neither Colt nor Smith & Wesson could meet the tight schedule. Italy’s Beretta and Switzerland’s Sig Sauer said they could. After spirited bidding—colored by the Reagan administration’s desire to reward Italy for its willingness to host nuclear-tipped missiles—Beretta won a five-year contract for more than three hundred thousand pistols. Sig, although frustrated in the Army competition, carved out the high end of the US pistol market, selling guns in the $700-to-$800 range (and later won an American military contract to supply compact pistols).
But of course far more threatening to US gun makers than Beretta, Sig, or Taurus was Glock, the Austrian upstart. Glock was aimed directly at Smith & Wesson’s stronghold: the police.
While Gaston Glock hadn’t been prepared in 1984 to respond to the Pentagon’s solicitation of bids for a new pistol, his company benefited indirectly from the military’s switch to the nine-millimeter. The change gave added credibility to a caliber previously little appreciated in the United States, and to pistols over revolvers in general. Police chiefs concluded that if the high-capacity nine-millimeter met Pentagon specifications, it was suitable for fighting urban violence. And the fact that Glocks were less expensive, lighter, simpler, and more durable than Berettas or Sigs gave them a significant competitive edge in the marketplace.
Astute observers of American gun commerce noted with dismay that foreigners were moving in on the firearm business, up to then arguably the most American of any industry.
Sherry Collins, a former copywriter for the marketing department of an insurance company, stepped unknowingly into the American firearm debacle. In the mid-1980s, a corporate headhunter recruited her for the post of head of public relations and advertising at Smith & Wesson. She had next to no experience with guns; as a woman, she was a rarity in the executive ranks in the firearm business. “I just admitted to everybody that I didn’t know squat, but I wanted to learn,” she said. Collins spent her first month being tutored on how to assemble and disassemble revolvers.
Slim, brassy, and not averse to an after-work drink, Collins was a fallen-away English literature graduate student in her thirties. She smoked enthusiastically and slung profanity with the guys. She also wrote clever ad copy.
When she arrived at the monolithic Springfield facility, she found that “Smith wasn’t that concerned about Glock, as far as inroads into the law enforcement area. They were convinced at that time that the police were going to be very slow to switch to semiautos, because of their reputation for unreliability. What they failed to factor in was the Glock goes ‘bang’ every time.”
In fact, Smith & Wesson executives were obsessed with the wrong foreign challenger. In 1965, the Wesson family had sold S&W to a conglomerate called Bangor Punta Allegra Sugar Co. Five years later, Bangor Punta bought a controlling stake of Forjas Taurus in Brazil. The two gun companies operated as affiliates, sharing equipment and technology, with Taurus focusing on sales in Latin America. But in 1977, Brazilian owners bought the Bangor Punta stake in Taurus, splitting it from Smith & Wesson and making it a potential rival for sales in the United States. According to Collins, some of her superiors at S&W feared that they would lose the American
