Glock: The Rise of America's Gun

by Paul M Barrett

  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 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, Glo
ck 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 cliché 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 palm-sized handguns, even those firearm writers who initially expressed hesitations became full-throated Glock fans. The Austrian company had demonstrated stayi
ng power. Gun writers eager to ensure future assignments figured it was safer to endorse Glock than to question the company, said Cameron Hopkins, the former editor of American Handgunner . “Everyone has to make a living, you know.”

  In the wake of the buying spree sparked by the 1994 assault weapons ban, the industry overall happened to be going through a sales slump in 1995 and 1996. Many consumers had exhausted their discretionary gun budgets. The firearm media moved to prop up the manufacturers, whose advertising they needed to survive. One Guns & Ammo contributor described a Glock demonstration of Pocket Rockets for gunzine writers in 1995: “Soon after, the pistols were passed out, and like a greedy bunch of kids pawing at the candy jar, we all dug in.” The not-so-subtle message was that readers ought to dig into their wallets and head to the handgun counter of their local firearm shops.

  Taking a broader and more analytical view, Massad Ayoob wrote in January 1996 in Shooting Industry: “Two bright rays of sunshine gleam through the dark clouds of the slump in the firearms market. One is the landslide of ‘shall issue’ concealed-carry reform legislation around the country. The other is the emergence of a new generation of compact handguns. The new [concealed-carry] permits open a new market for people from all walks of life who have need of a truly concealable handgun—since for the first time they have the right to carry one. The new-generation guns also tap a much more familiar market: your current pistol packers who are seeking something small with more power than they could pack in such a small package before.”