Glock: The Rise of America's Gun

course. Like there’s a telephone for calling people, there is the gun for self-defense.”

Ayoob counts himself as the third generation in his family to stave off mortal danger with a handgun. His grandfather, the owner of a bowling alley, once shot and wounded an armed would-be robber. Ayoob’s father, the jeweler, was accosted one night on a Boston street. The mugger fired a shot that zipped past his ear; Ayoob’s father pulled his own handgun and killed his assailant.

Massad Ayoob himself started carrying a gun as a boy of twelve. Later he served for many years as a part-time police officer in several small towns in New Hampshire. He pointed his service weapon at threatening arrestees a few times but never fired. He became a private instructor and a champion shooter, passing along his skills to his two daughters, one of whom, he told me, once had to use her handgun to scare away a pair of men intent on raping her.

In his GUNS magazine piece, Ayoob noted that the Glock “didn’t have as many accidental discharges as I’d feared it would when it came into common police use.” He speculated that cops and civilians were being extra careful. “Any intelligent person who handles a loaded Glock,” he wrote, “handles it gingerly.”

But caution wasn’t enough. “Two design features of the Glock concern me,” he wrote: “the short trigger pull and the lack of a manual safety.” Glock’s official specifications say that from a resting position to firing, the trigger travels half an inch with resistance of five or five and a half pounds. Ayoob measured the trigger travel as more like three-eighths of an inch. “However,” he noted, “with the standard trigger, much of that pull is a light take-up like a military rifle before the firm resistance of the final pressure [is] encountered.” By his calculation, “real resistance is only felt in less than a tenth of an inch of trigger pressure. A tenth of an inch is not a lot.”

Glock introduced a modification in 1990 called “the New York Trigger.” The New York State Police had bought the Glock 17 on the condition that the manufacturer would replace its regular trigger assembly with one that offered firmer resistance from the beginning of the pull. The substitute trigger module and spring result in a steady eight pounds of resistance. Having installed the New York Trigger on his own compact Glock 19, Ayoob wrote: “I feel much more comfortable.” He suggested in the article that Glock make the heavier trigger standard. But the company never did—five to five and a half pounds remained the norm.

Yet even the New York Trigger wasn’t sufficient, in Ayoob’s opinion. He thought the Glock should have an external safety lever, as well. Glock warned users to keep their index finger off the trigger until they intended to fire. “But that answer is too pat, too ignorant of the dynamics that can occur under stress,” Ayoob wrote. “For a manufacturer to say, ‘You don’t need a safety, just keep your finger off the trigger and there’ll be no accidents,’ is as if General Motors were to say, ‘You don’t need seat belts or air bags. Just avoid collisions and you’ll be fine.’ Guns are made to be held with the finger on the trigger. That’s why the Glock shoots so well when you do fire it intentionally, and because everything from childhood cops n’ robbers to television habituates you to hold the gun that way, that’s how it’s going to probably happen under stress.”

If Glock routinely provided a thumb safety and the New York Trigger, Ayoob concluded he would “volunteer to be the Glock Poster Child. Until then, much as I like it as a shooting gun, I’ll still carry it on the street with feelings of reservation.”

CHAPTER 13 Pocket Rockets

In June 1995, Advertising Age magazine named Gaston Glock one of its “Marketing 100.” The Austrian businessman, then sixty-seven, was honored for having taken on “some of the biggest guns in American firearms.” “It was a conscious decision to go after the law enforcement market first,” Glock told the premier advertising industry periodical (in English so fluent it suggested vigorous polishing by an editor). “In marketing terms,” he added, “we assumed that, by pursuing the law enforcement market, we would then receive the benefit of ‘after sales’ in the commercial market.”

“Ten years ago, there wasn’t a single Glock pistol in the US,” Ad Age noted. “Today the company sells more than 20,000 a month at an average cost of $600 apiece,” the retail price for civilians. “The lightweight frame, reliability, and easy maintenance quickly made this semi-automatic handgun a favorite with cops.”

By the time the advertising industry paid homage to Gaston Glock, more than 500,000 Glock pistols were in use in North America, according to a company brochure. The bulk of sales had shifted from law enforcement to the more lucrative commercial market. Four out of five Glocks produced in 1995 were purchased by civilians, who paid much higher prices than police departments. Retaining law enforcement business and winning new public contracts remained essential, however, for the reasons Ad Age suggested: credibility and name recognition. Sam Colt had taught that lesson a century and a half earlier.

Gaston Glock learned it so well that at the time he was named to the Marketing 100, he had taken a hiatus from buying advertising. The factory in Austria could not make pistols fast enough to meet demand, so Glock ceased for a time purchasing space in gun magazines. “They were one step ahead of everyone else in the semiautomatic pistol revolution,” said Cameron Hopkins, a former editor of American Handgunner magazine.

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Glock’s training sessions in Smyrna, capped off with the Thursday evening bacchanals at the Gold Club, had become legendary among police department shooting instructors. Bills for those outings ranged as high as $10,000 a night; quality champagne and Atlanta’s best lap dances did not come cheap.

One Gold Club attendee, a former law enforcement trainer, recounted how he and Karl Walter were admiring a particularly acrobatic pole dancer one Thursday in 1992. The trainer mentioned to Walter that it was his birthday. “Later that night,” the retired cop recalled, “I’m just standing there, and someone taps me on the shoulder. I turn around, and it’s the pole dancer.… And she says, ‘Karl Walter told me it’s your birthday, and I’m the gift.’ That’s the kind of guy Karl was, very generous.” (The beneficiary insisted the transaction remained entirely lawful.)

One way or another, Glock continued to persuade police departments to trade their old Smith & Wesson revolvers for discounts on new nine-millimeter pistols. In 1993, Doug Kiesler, a major gun wholesaler in Indiana, estimated that police departments nationwide exchanged two hundred thousand revolvers during the previous year to acquire pistols made by Glock and rival manufacturers. A Newsday survey published in December 1993 found that of forty-five police departments in large and mid-sized cities, all but two had converted to semiautomatic pistols, or were doing so. Thirty-six of these agencies had exchanged or sold their old revolvers in the process, putting the used handguns onto the commercial market.

By 1994, Glock had updated their offer to some cities: Police could trade in the Glock 17s they had acquired in the late 1980s for new versions of the same pistol, at no cost. Used Glocks for fresh Glocks. How could police departments go wrong?

These deals may seem peculiar. Why would the company give away valuable merchandise? The Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, DC, agreed in 1994 to exchange more than five thousand Glock 17s purchased in 1989. The new Glocks the DC cops received were identical to the old ones except that they had textured, as opposed to smooth, grips—a minor improvement. Sergeant Joe Gentile, the agency’s spokesman, said the new guns, worth an estimated $3 million at retail, were donated by the manufacturer “as a public service.”

The real story was more complicated. The accidental discharges that accompanied Glock’s arrival in Washington were beginning to receive media coverage. While senior department officials didn’t blame the pistol, some street officers were murmuring that there had to be something wrong with the Austrian gun. There were also reports that Glocks were jamming. The malfunctions and mistaken discharges stemmed from similar causes, although not from mechanical flaws.

As noted earlier, Washington had hired legions of raw recruits around 1990 and then failed to train them adequately to handle firearms. Until late 1994, range time for experienced officers wasn’t mandatory, and less than 50 percent bothered to show up. Poor technique can lead not only to accidental shootings, but also malfunctions. For example, if a semiautomatic pistol isn’t held with the hand as high as possible on the grip and the wrist firmly locked, unchecked recoil can cause the slide to fail to cycle properly. When that happens, a cartridge can jam as it