Glock: The Rise of America's Gun

Referring to a Glock became a signal of cultural awareness. Aaron Sorkin, in his brilliant screenplay for The Social Network , the 2010 movie about the invention of Facebook, has one Harvard nerd verbally lash out at a classmate who publicly embarrassed them: “I’m gonna get a Glock 39, and I’m going to kill you.”

Not “I’m gonna get a gun , and I’m going to kill you.”

Say Glock to the mildest Quaker, and she will know you are talking about a tough handgun. Mention the brand to a firearm buff, and his eyes will light up. Glock is the Google of modern civilian handguns: the pioneer brand that defines its product category. Its boxy shape, black finish, and almost defiant lack of grace became the standard. The no-firearms symbol posted by the federal government at US airports incorporates the profile of—what else?—a Glock.

In the late-twentieth-century chapter of the long story of the gun in America, the Glock achieved the status of a literary character. Elmore Leonard, the crime novelist, gave the pistol a prominent role in Freaky Deaky (1988). Chris Mankowski, Leonard’s suspended detective hero, confronts a hoodlum named Juicy Mouth: “Chris walked around to the front of the Cadillac. He raised the Glock in one hand and stood sideways—not the way Mel Gibson did it, two handed—Juicy looking right at him now, aimed at the fat top part of the seat next to the guy and began squeezing off shots.” A few years later, in his epic satire Infinite Jest , David Foster Wallace imagined a deranged junior tennis star habitually carrying a Glock onto the court and threatening to kill himself if he loses: “Everybody watching the match agrees it is one ugly and all- business-looking piece of self-defense hardware.”

How did it happen that in the most firearm-fixated country in the world, “Glock” came to mean “gun.” How did a pistol produced by an obscure engineer in suburban Vienna, a man who spoke barely any English and had no familiarity with the American zeitgeist, become, in the space of a few years, an American icon? The answers reveal more than the history of one company or even the recent evolution of an entire industry. The progress of Herr Glock’s gun illuminates the country’s changing attitudes about law enforcement, self-sufficiency, and safety. It explains the strange, scary allure of the dull clicking sound the slide makes when a nine-millimeter communicates it is ready to fire the first round.

CHAPTER 4 “Plastic Perfection”

Karl Walter, gun-salesman-on-wheels, first learned about the Glock 17 from a report in the German weapons magazine Deutsche Waffen Journal . An Austrian transplanted to the United States, Walter had enjoyed precocious success selling specialized European firearms to American police departments and gun collectors. He closely followed industry developments back in Europe. When an unknown won a large contract to supply pistols to the Austrian Ministry of Defense, he was intrigued. How could this Gaston Glock have bested the old-line brands? Walter sniffed opportunity.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, Walter traveled the United States in a motor home customized as a rolling arsenal. He displayed his wares in locked, felt-lined showcases: Uzis, AK-47s, Steyr AUG bullpup assault rifles, you name it. Walter didn’t sell ordinary firearms. He sold the heavy stuff—to police departments and retailers with special licenses allowing them to trade in fully automatic weapons. He drove a circuit from New England to the Middle Atlantic States, down to Miami, across to Dallas. For a certain breed of gun buyer, “it was a candy store,” he recalled.

Undercover agents with the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms kept a wary eye on Walter. Occasionally, they tested him—would he sell a select-fire Uzi to a buyer who lacked the proper federal permit?

He refused the bait. But that did not save him from getting arrested once, in 1972, by the local police in Troy, New York. The Troy authorities accused the young man with the thick Austrian-German accent of illegally transporting weapons. Walter explained that he was a legitimate salesman just earning a living. The gun-trafficking charges were dropped—Walter, as usual, had all the necessary paperwork—but the police in Troy suggested that he make his way to the state border as swiftly as the speed limit permitted.

Walter first came to the United States in the mid-1960s as a high school exchange student. He enjoyed the sense of possibility in America. Back home in Austria, his father, a stern physician who served as a medical officer in the German Army during World War II, sent him to a parochial high school run by Benedictine monks. Frustrated by biblical Greek, young Karl switched to a public school but remained an indifferent student. He eventually obtained an engineering degree and, when he secured a US work visa, returned to the States in 1969 at the age of twenty- four. He got an entry-level engineering job in the auto industry in Detroit.

Some of his colleagues were target shooters, and Walter became interested in firearms as a hobby. “Guns have a mystique,” he explained. “Young people are drawn to it. It’s excitement. It’s adventure. It’s power.” Before he became a US citizen, he couldn’t legally own his own firearm (he borrowed from friends at the range), but in an odd twist of the law, he could mail $50 to Washington and get a federal firearm license allowing him to buy and sell guns as a business. Soon he was making more money moonlighting as a gun dealer than he was from his day job. He decided to get into firearms full-time.

His roots helped Walter develop a relationship with the Austrian manufacturer Steyr, whose rifles were popular with some American police departments. He established ties to the Belgian firm Fabrique Nationale and other European arms makers. Despite his success with Steyr’s SSG sniper rifle and AUG assault weapon, Walter could not move a lot of the manufacturer’s GB pistol, the same cumbersome model that the Austrian Ministry of Defense rejected as a replacement for the Walther P-38. “Steyr’s handgun was far more complicated [than those of most rivals] and a pain in the ass to service,” Walter told me.

Still, he saw a chance for gain in law enforcement handguns: “You know, I said, where there really is money to be made is to convert US police departments from revolvers to pistols.” The nine-millimeter pistol had been standard in Europe since World War II. “I was astonished,” Walter said, “that this modern country still hung around with revolvers, when the rest of the world had pistols, including the Soviet Union.” To act on this idea, he needed a product better than the Steyr GB-80.

In spring 1984, Walter traveled on business in Germany and Austria with Peter G. Kokalis, a prominent American gun writer. Savvy small-arms marketers forge close ties to gun magazines (and now websites) in a symbiotic relationship that benefits all concerned. Kokalis, then the technical editor of Soldier of Fortune , could help Walter’s clients by writing about their products. That burnished Walter’s reputation as a middleman. Soldier of Fortune , meanwhile, sold advertisements to the gun and ammunition manufacturers.

Browsing at a Vienna gun shop, Walter and Kokalis came across a Glock 17. This was the pistol Walter had a notion of trying to sell in the United States. “Jeez, that’s ugly” was his reflexive reaction. The squared-off plastic Glock lacked the steel frame and polished wooden grips of a classic American revolver. Its black matte finish seemed homely. “But still, I was extremely curious why the Austrian Army bought it,” Walter told me. “There had to be more to it than what meets the eye initially.”

He suggested to Kokalis that they pay a visit to the Glock homestead in Deutsch-Wagram, fifteen kilometers from central Vienna. Walter’s Austrian-inflected German eased the telephone introduction, and a meeting was set.

Gaston Glock received the visitors from America with an awkward shyness. His English was slight. Walter was struck by how unsophisticated and provincial his host seemed. Glock smiled but even in German demonstrated little facility with small talk. Helga, his gracious wife, served coffee.

Walter explained that he represented Steyr in the United States. Perhaps he could do the same for Glock.

Glock responded tentatively. He had not given much thought to America.

Walter, trying to stimulate conversation, asked his host to explain the mechanics of his pistol. Suddenly Glock grew more animated. The gun maker took apart a Glock 17, showing how its parts were housed in stand-alone subgroups: easy to remove and replace, without the skill of a trained armorer. There was no safety or decocking lever to confuse the user. The Glock 17 couldn’t fire if dropped or jarred, Glock said. Its “Safe Action” system required a user to depress a small device built right into the trigger—a “trigger safety.”