Glock: The Rise of America's Gun

moves from the magazine to the chamber, or a spent casing can fail to eject. Known as limp-wristing, the dangerous habit is not unusual among insufficiently trained Glock users.

The police leadership in DC defended the Glock. “It is not an unsafe weapon, and it does not have a mechanical problem,” Max Krupo, assistant chief for technical services, told the Washington Times . But the negative media attention was a source of embarrassment for both the department and the manufacturer. Glock was especially sensitive to its image in the nation’s capital. In October 1994, Paul Jannuzzo wrote a letter to Krupo to formalize an offer to exchange the weapons “one-for-one, free of charge.” Jannuzzo asserted that “this offer is not being made for any other reason than Glock’s dedication to our law-enforcement customer base.” The Washington department, he added, “is one of our oldest customers and therefore a flagship of this corporation.” Both sides hoped that the exchange would underscore Glock’s good faith and reassure Washington’s cops and citizens. The department announced separately that it would get serious about firearm training.

If Glock’s dedication to law enforcement didn’t fully explain the Washington gun exchange, neither did the company’s concern about potential harm to its reputation. Glock had an additional motivation. As a part of its trade with the Washington police, Glock received the agency’s sixteen thousand used high-capacity clips, as well as its five-thousand-plus older pistols, which could accommodate the big magazines. After 1994, there was a finite supply of “pre-ban” Glock 17s and their seventeen-round clips. The company had filled warehouses with large magazines during the run-up to the assault weapons ban but had to discontinue manufacturing them as of September 13, 1994. Post-ban, this gear gained an astounding cachet among gun owners, and prices jumped accordingly. Trade-in deals in Washington; Hartford, Connecticut; and many other cities allowed Glock to augment its inventory of perfectly legal and hugely profitable pre-ban pistols and magazines. With the porous federal law in place, the secondhand plastic morphed into gold.

Opponents of firearms quickly realized what was happening. “Even for the gun industry, it’s amazingly cynical to get the police to help you circumnavigate the assault weapons ban,” Josh Sugarmann, head of the anti-handgun Violence Policy Center, told the Washington City Paper in April 1995. “Glock has the notorious distinction of being the first to find a way to do that.”

Paul Jannuzzo sounded indignant about the allegation that Glock and its wholesalers were undermining the spirit of the ban or behaving in anything other than an entirely upright manner. “It’s not a way around the crime bill. It is well within the law,” Jannuzzo said. “I’m not sure what the spirit of the crime bill was. I think the whole thing was an absolute piece of nonsense.”

An intelligent and politically sophisticated lawyer, Jannuzzo knew very well what the purpose of the ban was. He relished the opportunity to emasculate the law and its liberal backers. Jannuzzo gloated in an interview with Gun Week in January 1995 that he personally had been doing his part to thwart the ban by stockpiling forbidden firearms before the law went into effect. “I’ve bought more guns than I have ever bought in my life,” he said. “My plan always was to buy everything that was on the ban list … and I got a bunch of them. And they became more precious this year.”

One Glock trade-in episode, involving the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, showed how insistent the company’s marketing of police weapons could get. New York’s 260 conservation officers had full police powers and carried handguns. Occasionally they put down a deer injured on the highway or a rabid raccoon. Armed encounters with humans were rare. Nevertheless, in 1990, the conservation department joined the move to greater firepower, trading its Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum revolvers for 325 higher-capacity Glock nine- millimeter pistols. Scarcely three years later, Glock regional sales representative Milton Walsh, a former Massachusetts state trooper, urged the New York environmental cops to make another trade, this time for what he called the “new toy”—the more powerful Glock 22 .40-caliber pistol.

“Glock did whatever it could to curry favor” with department officials, a subsequent state inspector general investigation found. Among other questionable tactics, Walsh arranged for the chief conservation law officer to obtain Glock pistols for his personal collection at a large discount. In 1993, the department allowed the chief and other officers to buy the agency’s 325 used Glock 17s, and their magazines, at very low prices. Many of the conservation cops turned around and resold the guns at a profit. The inspector general concluded that after enactment of the federal assault weapons legislation, some of the self-dealing officers benefited from the sharp rise in prices for pre-ban Glock equipment. The department’s officers collectively netted more than $60,000 in profits. “Their actions,” the IG said, “turned DEC into a veritable weapons supermarket, and individual … officers into unlicensed gun dealers.”

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For the gun industry, and especially Glock, the assault weapons ban turned out to be far more notable for its unintended consequences than for its goal of restricting the spread of semiautomatic firearms. Gun-control advocates and their allies in Congress didn’t anticipate that rifle manufacturers would adapt to the ban by making cosmetic changes to their military-style long guns, allowing the companies to continue to sell virtually identical models. Likewise, handgun makers responded to the prohibition on large-capacity magazines by channeling their design and marketing energies into a new generation of smaller handguns whose clips accommodated ten or fewer cartridges.

In 1995, Glock introduced the Glock 26 and Glock 27 in nine-millimeter and .40-caliber, respectively. (The eccentric Glock model-numbering system, beginning with the Glock 17, tells one nothing about each gun’s characteristics.) The barrel and grip of the new models were an inch shorter than standard Glocks’, but the ammunition packed just as much punch. The new products became known as “Pocket Rockets” or “Baby Glocks.” They fit in the palm of a hand and could be conveniently tucked into a pocket or a purse. They were “a perfect choice for women,” Glock said in a press release. “Those concerned about defending themselves can walk down a dark street with confidence knowing they have the power of a service caliber Glock pistol at their side,” the marketing materials added. “The concealability of these pistols will be their main selling point as a self-defense weapon.”

And sell they did. The Baby Glocks were almost instantly on a four-month back order. Demand “is hot as hell,” Jannuzzo told the company’s hometown paper in the States, the Atlanta Journal- Constitution . “We can’t keep up.”

The gun industry collectively reinforced Glock’s pitch that small handguns were the perfect response to crime- ridden streets. The prolific Massad Ayoob advised in Shooting Industry , a periodical aimed at gun retailers: “Customers come to you every day out of fear. Fear is what they read in the newspaper. Fear of what they watch on the 11 o’clock news. Fear of the terrible acts of violence they see on the street. Your job, in no uncertain terms, is to sell them confidence.… An impulse of fear has sent that customer to your shop, so you want a quality product in stock to satisfy the customer’s needs and complete the impulse purchase.”

Smith & Wesson, Beretta, and other rivals followed suit. Thanos Polyzos, cofounder of Para-Ordnance, a handgun manufacturer now based in North Carolina, recalled years later: “We all rushed to make the smaller packages with larger calibers in direct response to the federal law. What was the point of trying to sell a pistol made for twenty rounds when the law allowed only ten? The law had the opposite effect from what the liberals intended, and Glock, as usual, led the way.”

Beyond congressional Democrats and the Clinton White House, Glock had other parties to thank for the liftoff of Pocket Rockets. Spurred by the debate over the assault weapons ban and its enactment in 1994, the NRA stepped up its nationwide campaign supporting state laws that gave civilians the right to carry concealed handguns to shopping malls, Little League games, and anywhere else they chose. Pocket Rockets were the ideal handgun for suburban concealed carry. Melding their message with that of the industry, the NRA argued that lawfully armed citizens were the first line of defense in stopping crime—a Second Amendment spin on the cliche that there’s never a cop around when you need one.

Before 1987, only ten states, including Indiana, New Hampshire, and the Dakotas, had right-to-carry laws. That year, NRA activists in Florida pushed successfully for a statute that obliged authorities to issue a concealed-carry permit to anyone with a clean criminal record who agreed to take a firearm-safety course. The Florida fight for “shall issue” legislation emboldened local gun-rights groups elsewhere to seek similar laws, backed by the NRA. In 1994 and 1995 alone, eleven states enacted right-to-carry statutes, bringing the total to twenty-eight. “The gun industry should send me a basket of fruit,” Tanya Metaksa, the NRA’s chief lobbyist, told the Wall Street Journal . “Our efforts have created a new market.”

The firearm press, effectively the marketing arm of the industry, did its part for the Pocket Rocket as well. Glock had benefited from lavish and mostly positive attention in the pages of the “gunzines.” With the advent of