The stronger argument against semiautomatic assault weapons is that they usually accommodate large magazines. Recall that Purdy had attached a seventy-five-round drum to his knockoff AK-47. More commonly, semiautomatic rifles and some pistols accept magazines holding fifteen, twenty, or thirty rounds. Although there are gun competitions geared to high-capacity firearms, no hunter or target shooter needs thirty rounds in a magazine to pursue his or her sport. And it’s not obvious why a civilian handgun owner requires seventeen rounds in the magazine of a Glock pistol. Ten bullets, with the opportunity to reload swiftly, provide adequate firepower for most self-defense emergencies.
Gun skeptics who want to push measures that actually might slow a crazed killer should focus on ammunition capacity, not the superficial appearance of firearms. Even then, they will face a tough fight. Once Glock persuaded police departments that they needed big magazines, civilian buyers found the feature attractive too. The NRA’s muscular version of the Second Amendment—keep your hands off my guns!—tends to meld with the more generalized American instinct that anything worth doing is worth overdoing.
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In the wake of the Stockton massacre, California enacted a state law prohibiting the AK-47 and fifty-five other types of rifles labeled assault weapons. Several other states later passed similar restrictions. The NRA and its allies in Congress were able to resist assault weapons legislation at the federal level until the summer of 1994, when President Clinton signed the national ban into law.
Some in the gun industry were distraught. “We’re finished,” Ron Whitaker, the chief executive of Colt, told other ASSC board members. The AR-15, a civilian semiautomatic-only version of the military M-16, was one of Colt’s most lucrative products.
But the fine print of the federal legislation left plenty of room to maneuver, Feldman pointed out. The law banned nineteen weapons by brand and model, as well as any other semiautomatic rifle that could accept a detachable magazine and had at least two military-style features, such as a flash suppressor, protruding pistol grip, or bayonet mount. The law also prohibited magazines holding more than ten rounds of ammo, regardless of the kind of firearm. It was that last provision that affected growing sales of the Glock.
As tough as the law sounded, the ban was laughably easy to evade in practice. By renaming their guns and modifying them cosmetically—removing the superfluous bayonet mount, for example—a manufacturer could transform a banned assault weapon into a perfectly legal “sporting” rifle. The ban had another, even bigger loophole: It grandfathered all weapons lawfully in existence at the time of enactment in September 1994. That meant that any gun or magazine manufactured by the day the law took effect could be legally sold, and resold, later on.
Nearly a year before passage, Feldman had given ASSC manufacturers a very clear directive: “Make as many guns and high-capacity magazines as you possibly can,” he told them. “Put your plants on three shifts, seven days a week. You won’t get stuck with unused product.” The political controversy and the perception of a finite supply would pump up demand and prices.
At Glock, Paul Jannuzzo fully backed his friend’s advice, as did Karl Walter. Gaston Glock ordered production in Austria into high gear. Before the deadline, the company stockpiled inventory. “We’re getting five thousand guns and eight thousand to nine thousand magazines a week from Austria,” a Glock representative in the US, Dick Wiggins, told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune in May 1994. Consumers were buying everything Glock could produce. “We’re tens of thousands of orders behind,” Wiggins said. “Our pistols are scarcer than hen’s teeth.”
The actual enactment of the ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines spurred yet another round of shopping frenzy. “People who own guns that use magazines holding more than ten rounds—including the Glock 9mm popular with police—are buying extra magazines as fast as they can,” USA Today reported. “ ‘We were cleaned out of magazines in the space of a few hours,’ says Mike Saporito of RSR Wholesale Guns of Winter Park, Fla., which supplies thousands of retail shops. ‘Sales have gone through the roof.’ ”
Tales from gun counters from California to Maryland confirmed the trend. “People bought everything they could get their hands on in every store in town: ammo, handguns, semiautomatics,” said Nancy Nell, owner of a gun shop in West Valley City, Utah. Chris Encinas, a twenty-five-year-old resident of Van Nuys, California, bought a Glock 22 with a fifteen-round magazine that May, hoping to beat the shortages and rising prices he expected would follow the passage of legislation. “I’m trying to rush it,” he told the Los Angeles Times . “If we didn’t have the ban, I wouldn’t have to, but it’s better that I buy it today.” He paid $510 for his .40-caliber Glock. By 1995, the same weapon, grandfathered under the law, would retail for 50 percent more.
Even as the company scrambled to ship pistols, Glock built up an enormous surplus of grandfathered “pre-ban” magazines, which gradually filtered out to the public, as the retail price of a Glock seventeen-round magazine rose—from less than $20, to $30, to $50 and higher, after the ten-round limitation became law. Jannuzzo and other Glock executives each personally bought large crates of high-cap magazines at insider prices and gradually sold them as prices soared.
“If the purpose of the assault weapons ban was to reduce the number of these guns [and large magazines] on the street,” Feldman noted, “the bill had exactly the opposite effect.” He recalled driving in the early fall of 1994 to the Glock facility in suburban Smyrna for a meeting with Jannuzzo. Passing a large sporting goods store called Adventure Outdoors, Feldman saw two long lines snaking down the block. He stopped to investigate. One was a customer line: people waiting to buy grandfathered guns and Glock magazines. The other line was for volunteers signing up to work for Bob Barr, an outspoken pro–Second Amendment Republican challenger running for Congress. Barr had put a campaign table near the gun store.
At their tête-à-tête, Jannuzzo took out cigars and declared: “Our business has never been better. Mr. Glock is going to be very pleased.”
CHAPTER 12
“Ka-Boom”
In the United States, a company manufacturing a handheld product that launches metal projectiles at high velocity eventually will encounter lawsuits. Whatever one thinks of plaintiffs’ lawyers or the large corporations they sue, the prevalence of legal skirmishing is as much a fact of American life as the pervasiveness of automobiles, fast food, and firearms. Glock was no exception.
The company’s internal legal files offer an unusual window on how Glock, Inc., dealt with the challenges posed by the plaintiffs’ bar. A sampling of company records from 1991 and 1992 listed nineteen accidental injuries involving Glocks. There may have been more; these were the ones the company acknowledged. Eleven of the cases by mid-1992 had led to lawsuits.
Some of the cases concerned pistols that allegedly malfunctioned, harming the owner. Others involved shootings in which the gun operated properly but someone pulled the trigger unintentionally. In these latter instances, the victim blamed the Glock’s design.
Yet another set of six suits were labeled “container” cases, referring to the padded plastic box in which Glocks were sold. The box resembled a miniature black suitcase. It had a handle for transporting the pistol—say, to a firing range—and, inside, it had room for a spare magazine and ammo. A small post in the box was meant to protrude through the trigger guard and keep the gun in place. The post was the problem.
Some users stored their pistol with a round in the chamber, ready to fire. If the box were jostled, so that the post contacted the trigger, the gun could go off, as it did in the case of Marshall Rosen. “Claimant removed his Glock 17 from its holster, removed the loaded magazine and unloaded same,” the file on Rosen states. “He then placed the pistol into the container, and it discharged. Injuries to the left hand (palm). Tendon and severe nerve damage requiring surgery. Permanent disfigurement.” Another Glock owner, Mark Herman, similarly shot himself in the left hand, sustaining
“permanent disability.”
When informed of the box accidents, Gaston Glock “wanted to blame the dumb Americans,” according to one former longtime company employee in the United States. “They should know better than to store the gun loaded.” Mr. Glock showed little regard for the American business credo of “the customer is always right.”
Callous as this might seem, the Austrian manufacturer did have a legitimate point. The user manual that came with each pistol stressed emptying the gun before storing it. The owner was told to remove the magazine and check the chamber to make sure there was not a round left there. Following those instructions would preclude exploding gun boxes.
Still, as a practical matter, some people, especially homeowners who thought of their Glock as protection against intruders, were bound to keep it loaded and ready to fire. Others were careless. The file on Mark Herman noted that he “forgot his Glock 17 was loaded and placed it into the storage container.” Such accidents were eminently foreseeable.
A more high-minded company might have announced a recall in the name of consumer safety, issued an apology, and established a claims process to pay victims’ medical bills. That did not happen at Gaston Glock’s company; confessions of fallibility were not his style.
Paul Jannuzzo, Glock’s corporate counsel, knew the carrying case was poorly designed. Many in the company knew—almost everyone, apparently, except the founder. Fighting the cases in court made no sense, because Glock might lose, piquing the interest of the plaintiffs’ bar. Since a recall and apology were out of the question, Jannuzzo moved quietly to put out legal brushfires as they ignited. If injured Glock owners were persistent, they received a settlement—in exchange for which they had to sign binding legal papers promising not to discuss the case or the flawed gun box. Marshall Rosen got $95,000 to drop his suit; Mark Herman, $99,000. Wounded Glock owners who failed to hire a good lawyer received little or nothing for their trouble.
As a result of Glock’s efficiently executed policy of settlement-and-silence, some gun owners who might have been alerted sooner to the peril learned about it the hard way. No one knows how many people shot themselves or others before Glock changed the box design in the early 1990s to one where the handgun rested securely in heavy foam, without a post that could contact the trigger.
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Carrying cases were not the only hazard of owning a Glock, of course. Firearms, like lawn mowers or microwave ovens or motorcycles, occasionally malfunction. The reason could be bad parts, a mistake in assembly, or recklessness by the user. The world is full of imperfections and misfortune. When guns break down—and all brands of firearms suffer glitches from time to time—it’s not uncommon for someone to get hurt.
The Glock legal files describe a suit filed by Jeffrey A. Gueno, an Air Force captain who badly injured his right index finger when his Glock 21 .45-caliber “exploded in his hand.” Gueno, an experienced firearm user who was practicing at a range, “alleged that Glock placed on the market a product in defective condition which is unsafe for its intended use.”
When confronted by such cases, Jannuzzo had one overriding initial objective, he told me: “Get the gun.” The company lawyer made sure that Glock recovered the supposedly substandard pistol for examination and, if the case were to be settled, destruction. He did not want faulty Glocks being passed around, and possibly photographed, to the detriment of the manufacturer’s reputation.
The company’s inspection of Captain Gueno’s Glock attributed the accident to the plaintiff’s ammunition, rather than his pistol. “There was no indication of any obstruction having been lodged in the barrel,” the file states. “The damage to the pistol was caused by an ammunition failure–related problem.”
Ammunition can fail in several ways. A batch of rounds may be poorly fabricated, leading some to disintegrate. Shoddy ammunition may jam as it moves from the magazine to the chamber or from the chamber to the barrel. To save money, some gun owners “reload” ammo, using basement hand-crank machines to insert new lead bullets into spent brass cases they collect at the shooting range. Unless it’s done expertly, reloading can lead to problems. Glock explicitly voided its warranty if the customer used reloaded ammunition.
The company’s determination in the Gueno case was that the plaintiff’s factory-made ammunition was of poor quality and lacked full-metal jacketing or plating. This was often the company’s response when confronted with the claim of a malfunctioning pistol. Glock instructed users from the outset to buy top-grade, factory-made, full-jacketed ammunition. Rounds that have exposed lead because they are not fully jacketed, whether those rounds are reloaded or factory-made, are much more likely to produce malfunctions in Glocks than in certain other handguns, as a result of the kind of rifling in Glock barrels.
Rifling refers to the spiraling grooves in a gun barrel that cause the bullet to spin in flight. The rotation stabilizes the bullet, increasing accuracy. Traditional rifling incorporates twisting lands and grooves. With an exposed-lead bullet, the lands actually engrave the projectile’s relatively soft metal. Gaston Glock designed his barrel with polygonal flat sides: six or eight, depending on the caliber. Polygonal rifling provides a superior bullet-to-barrel seal when jacketed or plated ammunition is used. “This leads to an increase in velocity over conventional cut rifle barrels of the same length,” according to The Complete Glock Reference Guide , a volume published independently of the manufacturer. However, the Guide continues, “the lack of lands in the polygonal rifled Glock barrel tends to allow a lead bullet to skip down the bore rather than spin, leaving larger lead deposits, while creating buildup and reducing the bore diameter.” In a barrel constricted by lead detritus, excessive pressure can accumulate, leading to an explosion, or what the reference book politely calls “a Glock KB (Ka-Boom).” The easiest way to prevent ka-booms is to use jacketed or plated bullets, as Glock admonishes its users to do.
Jeffrey Gueno may or may not have used substandard ammunition. In any event, he was not the sort of plaintiff Jannuzzo wanted to fight in court: a clean-cut Air Force captain who many jurors would assume knew how to handle a gun. Gueno offered to drop his suit for $24,000, not an extravagant amount. The company legal file suggested that the case “should be settled on economic analysis, i.e., less expensive to settle than defend.” Jannuzzo listed an “anticipated expense” of only $14,000, indicating his expectation that Gueno, whose medical bills were paid by the military, would agree to the lower amount. (The file doesn’t indicate the company’s actual payout.)
As a result, the entire potentially embarrassing episode—labeled a “catastrophic failure” in the Glock records—disappeared from public view. Glock, Inc., obtained the damaged gun and disposed of it. Upon receiving settlement, Gueno swore in writing not to discuss the incident.
In a memo dated December 17, 1992, Jannuzzo urged Gaston Glock to sign off on a joint settlement in which the company would share the costs of a confidential $20,000 payment with the ammunition manufacturer Olin/Winchester. “It is important to note that Olin/Winchester Corporation has approximately 30 damaged Glock pistols at their facility,” the attorney wrote. “Should this case be tried, it is safe to assume that those pistols will be presented as evidence, which would have a destructive and widespread effect for Glock Inc.” The complaint, brought by a US Customs agent named Wernli, whose .45-caliber Glock 21 had exploded, causing a “crush injury to the distal tip of his right index finger,” was resolved out of court. The damaged guns did not surface.
On occasion, Glock employees in Smyrna testing pistols as they arrived from Austria identified mechanical problems before the guns were shipped to users. Senior executives in Austria typically had a short and impatient reaction to any suggestion of a flaw: “Impossible!”
In 1998, Smyrna discovered a batch of .40-caliber Glock 22s that mysteriously jammed even when loaded with appropriate ammo. “These malfunctions were very difficult to clear and could not be cleared with the normal ‘tap, rack’ drill,” accordin
g to a February 12, 1998, memo addressed to Gaston Glock. “Law enforcement officers see this type of stoppage as a serious failure and one which has life-threatening implications.”
When executives in Austria brushed off the concern, saying the balky guns merely needed to be “broken in,” Jannuzzo followed up with a sharply worded letter to his employer. The notion of having to break in a new handgun, he wrote, “flies in the face of the Glock pistol’s reputation as being the best-shooting semiautomatic ‘out of the box.’ ”
There is no evidence that Glock 22 jams were a widespread problem. But neither is there any indication that the company warned its customers, police or civilian, that at least some .40-caliber guns might not work properly. When questions about defects have arisen, Glock has consistently maintained that every single pistol is carefully tested and, if used correctly, functions without flaw.
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Yet another category of legal complaints about the Glock focused on the negligent or criminal misuse of handguns, sometimes by someone other than the owner. This kind of suit first began cropping up against gun manufacturers in the early 1980s. Under traditional American injury law, the intervention of a third party—the curious child who foolishly shoots a friend, the convenience-store robber who attacks a clerk—was thought to break the chain of liability between the victim and the manufacturer. But since the 1960s, some US judges and law professors had been expanding theories of liability to give injury victims a better chance of finding a defendant with deep pockets. The consumer-protection movement led by Ralph Nader reinforced this trend and helped turn up new evidence that manufacturers often knew more than they liked to admit about hazards associated with their products. Rising crime rates in the 1970s and 1980s added a sense of urgency to the gun-control movement and prompted some activists to turn their attention to the courts, as well as the legislature, as a venue where they might rein in companies that make and sell firearms.
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