Glock: The Rise of America's Gun

by Paul M Barrett

  Initially, the targets of these innovative suits were manufacturers and retailers of inexpensive, unreliable “Saturday Night Specials”: revolvers and pistols that could be purchased for as little as $29 and were favorites of stickup artists, drug dealers, and cash-strapped residents of inner-city neighborhoods who feared those criminals. Lawyers representing accident and crime victims argued that Saturday Night Specials had no redeeming social value; they couldn’t plausibly be marketed for target shooting, hunting, or police work. By their very nature, according to this view, cheap handguns were meant only to kill people and therefore were “unreasonably hazardous.”

  The plaintiffs’ argument had visceral appeal to gun foes, but also significant weaknesses: As a matter of economics and fairness, it didn’t address the concerns of people living in violence-ridden neighborhoods who might seek to defend themselves with cut-rate handguns. More broadly, suits seeking to hold gun manufacturers responsible for crime and negligence implicitly demanded that juries look away from the role of the person who pulled the trigger. While suits over individual guns that exploded in the hands of their users sometimes resulted in plaintiffs’ verdicts or settlements, most courts were hostile to claims that handgun makers should be liable for the misuse of otherwise lawful articles of commerce. The product, after all, was supposed to fire bullets; that there was risk should have surprised no one. Even in a period of expanding liability theories, there were limits to what judges would tolerate.

  Despite the failure of most manufacturer-liability suits stemming from crime and negligence, the litigation continued into the 1990s. Plaintiffs’ lawyers thought that if they achieved just a few breakthroughs, gun companies would be intimidated into a series of lucrative settlements. Some of the suits were sponsored by gun-control organizations willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on the litigation, no matter how unlikely the odds, because the mere existence of legal combat drew attention to their cause. In this environment, gun opponents inevitably took aim at Glock, given the Austrian-based company’s success and profitability. Maybe its unusual design would make it more vulnerable to legal attack, or so the plaintiffs’ attorneys and activists hoped.

  Of course, Glock did not make Saturday Night Specials. By the late 1980s, the lowest end of the handgun market was dominated by a group of small interlocking companies based in Southern California. According to police departments, the Austrian pistol had ample social value as a tool to fight crime. It wasn’t cheap, and it clearly was suitable as a target pistol or home-defense weapon. What distinguished the Glock from other handguns was that it was easier to fire and it lacked an external safety lever. These differences troubled some people, and not just gun-control advocates.

  In May 1988, a team of FBI shooting instructors involved in the federal agency’s arduous process of replacing its revolvers issued a skeptical internal evaluation of the Glock. “Unintentional discharges of the first shot lead to safety and liability issues in view of the manner handguns are routinely used by FBI agents,” the report noted. This wasn’t the last word on the topic; in fact, other FBI officials came to think highly of the Glock. By the mid-1990s, the agency was arming thousands of agents with the Austrian pistol. But the early FBI evaluation indicated hesitations about the fast-firing firearm.

  Herbert Timm, the police chief of the Chicago suburb of Winnetka, lobbied his village board to buy Glocks for his small force, only to embarrass himself with the new pistol. “I was transferring the gun from the holster I was wearing into another holster in the desk drawer, and assumed—which is something that no one should ever do—that it was not loaded,” he told the Chicago Sun-Times . It was loaded. “I pulled the trigger, and it fired into the wall just below the ceiling.” Luckily, no one was hurt. “I’ve been a policeman for twenty-five years,” Timm said, “and never had an accidental discharge of a weapon.”

  Negligence with guns has occurred as long as there have been guns. Visit any older police station, and you may notice posters and photographs in odd places: very high and very low on the walls. Remove the strangely placed decorations, and behind them you will find bullet holes.

  In some places, the arrival of the Glock almost certainly contributed to a surge in unintentional firing. When the Metropolitan Police Department of Washington, DC, switched to the Austrian pistol in 1989, Gary Hankins, chairman of the Fraternal Order of Police labor committee, announced: “We’ve got the right gun.… This is going to make all of us feel better out there on the streets.” Almost immediately, however, Washington cops began shooting themselves and each other. The Washington Post found that in the decade after the 3,800-person department adopted the Glock, more than 120 accidental discharges occurred, with 19 serious officer injuries. The police mistakenly wounded nine DC citizens and killed one. The skein of accidents resulted in the city government paying out millions of dollars to settle lawsuits.

  Looking back, DC officials concluded that the fiasco stemmed from an unhappy coincidence of three factors. The department, responding to generational turnover and rising crime, hired fifteen hundred new officers in just eighteen months. It then failed to train many of the rookies. Recruits often received only three days of firing-range instruction, rather than the goal of ten. “They just rushed through this stuff,” said Lowell Duckett, a retired instructor at the DC Police Academy. The final factor was putting an easy-to-fire Glock in the hands of each and every one of the underprepared new officers. The Austrian pistol is an excellent first firearm because it is so simple and light. But without expert guidance, a novice is probably more likely to make a dangerous mistake with a Glock than with another pistol or revolver.

  Police departments from Tampa to Tucson reported accidental shootings soon after changing over to the Glock pistol. In November 1990, Richard Johnson, an officer with the Port Huron Police Department in Michigan, “was in his patrol car when he removed the gun from its holster,” the Glock legal files note. “As he did so, the gun discharged, shooting him in the left foot.” The following year he sued the manufacturer, alleging that the Glock’s unusual “trigger safety” was inherently dangerous.

  Glock countered that Officer Johnson had handled his firearm too casually. Like Captain Gueno of the Air Force, Johnson sought only modest damages, described in his suit as “in excess of $10,000.” In his file, Jannuzzo wrote: “Should be settled for less than it would cost to defend” and added an anticipated outlay of $12,000. Glock settled dozens of suits in this manner, with little or no fanfare.

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  On occasion, plaintiffs and their lawyers held out for bigger payoffs. One such clash occurred in Knoxville, Tennessee, as a result of a disastrous encounter in the early-morning hours of July 9, 1991.

  Cheryl Darlene Grant and her husband, Benny, both in their early forties, had driven back to Knoxville after attending a concert. Police said that they noticed the Grants’ late-model Camaro speeding. In the ensuing chase, Benny Grant jumped out of the Camaro, while his wife drove off. Eventually cornered, Cheryl Grant rammed a police cruiser and started to run. Patrolman Danny Wagner chased her on foot. The officer said that Grant turned and reached behind her back, as if to draw a weapon. He pulled out his Glock. When the cop finally caught up to Grant, they tussled, causing him to fire accidentally. A single shot smashed into Grant’s head, killing her. As he tried to holster his handgun, Wagner fired a second errant round into the pavement. Grant had consumed alcohol and cocaine that evening, but she was not armed.

  The city of Knoxville and Wagner jointly settled with the Grant family by paying them $130,000. But the Knoxville PD didn’t abandon the Glock as its duty weapon; in fact, it subsequently traded in its nine-millimeter Glock 17s for .40-caliber Glock 22s. (Wagner kept his job on the force.)

  Grant’s relatives, represented by prominent local plaintiffs’ attorneys Bob and Wayne Ritchie, a father-and-son duo, sued Glock for $7.2 million. As with Officer Johnson in Port Huron, the woman’s family alleged that the basic design of the Glock 17 wa
s “unreasonably dangerous.” The manufacturer knowingly made a risky product, the relatives claimed, and should have foreseen accidents such as the one in Knoxville.

  The lawsuit described the Glock 17’s key selling points as flaws—specifically, that its trigger pull was too light, that the distance the trigger had to travel was too short, and that the gun’s lack of an external safety lever made it a deadly hazard. “Glock Perfection,” the company’s sales slogan, was shoved back in Gaston Glock’s face.

  “The very idea that anyone would criticize his invention offended Mr. Glock, let alone that they would sue him,” Jannuzzo explained. “When accidents happened, Mr. Glock assumed it was the user’s fault, and usually it was. Be that as it may, we were getting sued more and more often all around the country.”

  Sometimes, Jannuzzo advised that his employer put on a full-dress courtroom defense to send a message to plaintiffs’ lawyers that Glock was not a patsy. Seeking a jury verdict against the company would be time-consuming, expensive, and probably not successful. With millions at stake in the Knoxville case, the company didn’t even offer to settle.

  The plaintiffs’ side put Officer Wagner on the witness stand. He testified that he had pulled his Glock as he chased Cheryl Grant because he feared being shot. He regretted the death but suggested that the pistol, not he, was at fault. He told the jury that after the accident, he remained on the beat and now carried what he considered a less dangerous handgun: a nine-millimeter pistol made by Smith & Wesson. (Knoxville allowed its officers to choose from a short list of authorized weapons.) Wagner told the jury that the S&W took a full twelve pounds of pull on the trigger to fire, instead of the five required for the Glock. “I didn’t feel that the [Austrian] weapon was safe,” he testified.

  The jury learned that the Knoxville PD could have bought its Glocks with five-pound or eight-pound trigger weights; the company offered both. Knoxville chose the lighter weight, on the theory that it made shooters more accurate and was more manageable by officers with less hand strength. Wagner testified that the Smith & Wesson also had a much longer “trigger travel”: one and a quarter inches, compared to the Glock’s half inch.

  The plaintiffs’ team elicited testimony from a retired FBI agent and forensics consultant, who reinforced Wagner’s position on trigger pull and trigger travel. “I think that the [Glock] has a tremendous allure for many police agencies because it is easy to shoot; it is easy to shoot it well,” said the ex–FBI man, Donald Bassett. “Those agencies are not aware of the safety deficiencies of trigger design, or they simply ignore those, or consider them inconsequential in favor of ease.”

  Nonsense, countered Ronald Grimm, the company’s locally hired defense lawyer. If you pull the trigger of a Glock, he argued, it will fire. That is what it is supposed to do. Officer Wagner should not have had his index finger on the trigger as he tried to subdue the suspect.

  The defense called a Knoxville PD weapons expert to the stand. He testified that Officer Wagner had violated the department’s safety rules when he chased Grant with his finger on the trigger of his Glock 17. The Knoxville government essentially sided with the Austrian manufacturer, leaving its police officer to take the fall.

  Why would the city blame Wagner but not fire him? Knoxville apparently sought to resolve its liability without acknowledging flaws in its training methods. By keeping Wagner on salary, quickly settling with the victim’s family for $130,000, and admitting no wrongdoing, the city dodged the threat of a multimillion-dollar payout.

  As his star witness, Grimm summoned Gaston Glock. Putting the Austrian engineer on the stand was not an obvious call. One reason to do so was that the Knoxville jury would be curious to hear from the man whose invention was at the center of the dispute. When talking about his pistol, Glock came across as self-assured. He spoke slowly, with a certain gravitas. On the other hand, he could also come off as arrogant and supercilious, especially when dealing with Americans.

  During a pretrial deposition in November 1993, all of these qualities were evident. “We have such an incredible success,” Glock boasted. “It certainly can be said that based upon our economic success, our system functions without a flaw.” Would jurors see him as condescending or supremely confident? Questioned sharply by plaintiffs’ lawyers in the deposition, he never gave an inch. “With our weapon,” Glock said, “it is possible with a lightning-fast move to instinctively fire the weapon.”

  In the courtroom seven months later, Glock, speaking in German with the aid of a translator, reiterated that his gun was “flawless,” stating it always operated exactly as it had been designed to. Asked about the skeptical testimony of the former FBI expert, Bassett, Glock heaped scorn on the witness and the famous agency. “The statement of the FBI is useless,” he said.

  Glock informed the jurors that his company told all users in its operating manual to keep their fingers outside the trigger guard until they intended to shoot. “The officer knows from his training that when he has taken his finger off the trigger, the gun is absolutely safe,” Glock testified. “That is our absolute basic rule,” he said. “Keep your finger off the trigger” until prepared to fire.

  No longer the self-conscious engineer, too timid to talk to his own bankers, Glock presented a poised public persona. The Knoxville News Sentinel , which provided daily coverage of the weeklong trial, reported that “Glock testified for three hours to defend his design before a jury of five men and three women, who, at times, appeared mesmerized by his explanation of how his gun operates.” Moreover, his German struck the Tennesseans as worldly. He displayed no doubts and deflected unfriendly interrogation with a bemused countenance. “At times,” the paper observed, “some [jurors] laughed with Glock at his stylish and light-hearted nature while others smiled at him as he testified.”

  Sent off to deliberate, the jurors had little difficulty reaching a verdict. After less than ninety minutes, they returned to the courtroom. Their judgment was stark: no liability whatsoever on the company’s part—a complete victory for the defense.

  “Mr. Glock never considered any compromise in this case,” a triumphant Grimm said afterward on the courthouse steps. “The Glock pistols are the safest pistols on the market for police use.”

  Gaston Glock’s calm, assertive performance in the witness chair was a crucial factor. “The jury liked him more than our client,” Bob Ritchie conceded to a reporter after the trial. Equally, if not more, important was the fact that the Knoxville policeman had violated his department’s safety standards. Ronald Grimm told me: “You don’t put the finger on the trigger until you’re prepared to destroy something—kill it.”

  Yet that wasn’t the rule all handgun owners followed. The FBI, until it fully changed over to pistols in the 1990s, instructed recruits to keep their index finger on the trigger of their handgun anytime they had it drawn. The idea was that the agent should be ready to shoot. Of course, it was safer to rest your finger on a revolver trigger that provided twelve pounds of resistance. In many places, police trainers taught new cops to cover suspects with their finger on the trigger. Some civilian shooting instructors favored the same approach until at least the early 1990s. It was not until 1995 or so, with the semiautomatic pistol having become the predominant American handgun, that finger-off-the-trigger became gospel.

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  Some civilian shooting experts dissented, at least to an extent, from the majority’s unmitigated admiration for the Glock. “The gun factory ads cry, ‘Glock Perfection,’ ” Massad Ayoob wrote in the September 1990 issue of GUNS magazine. “But perfection is an amorphous term. I for one don’t think it’s been achieved yet.”

  One of the best-known private firearm trainers in the United States—he ran a rural New Hampshire academy called the Lethal Force Institute—Ayoob lauded the Glock as a military weapon and target-shooting gun. He worried, however, about whether it was well suited for civilians to carry for self-protection.

  Ayoob’s was a voice taken seriously among firearm bu
ffs. The grandson of an Episcopalian immigrant from Damascus, Syria, he did as much as any other single person in the late twentieth century to codify the mind-set of ordinary Americans who felt it wise to go about their business armed. His long list of books includes the seminal In the Gravest Extreme: The Role of the Firearm in Personal Protection . He came to firearms naturally, he told me: “There were guns in the house. There were guns in my father’s jewelry store, of 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.”