Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun (2 page)

“Although the revolver served the FBI well for several decades, it became quite evident that major changes were critical to the well-being of our agents and American citizens,” FBI Director William Sessions said in an agency bulletin after Miami. Revolvers held too little ammunition, and they were too difficult to reload in the heat of a gunfight. There were questions about their “stopping power”: In Miami, the FBI fired some
seventy rounds, and Platt and Matix received a total of eighteen bullet wounds. Yet the killers stayed alive long enough to inflict a terrible toll.

In 1987, Jacksonville’s Lieutenant Rutherford received the formal assignment to recommend a new handgun to replace the Smith & Wesson revolvers that his department issued. His counterparts in hundreds of local, state, and federal police agencies were given similar missions. “My job,” Rutherford told me, “was to find a better gun.”

A
fter thirty years in manufacturing, Gaston Glock’s industriousness had yielded a respectable social station and a comfortable life, without elevating him to the higher ranks of Austrian commerce. Still, he dreamed big.

Glock, the son of an Austrian railroad worker, managed an inconspicuous car radiator factory outside Vienna. In the garage next to his house in suburban Deutsch-Wagram, not far from the radiator plant, he operated a side business with his wife, Helga. Using a secondhand metal press made in Russia, they produced a modest volume of brass fittings for doors and windows. The garage metal shop expanded over time to make steel blades the durability and reasonable price of which so impressed Austria’s Ministry of Defense that Glock obtained a contract to supply field knives and bayonets to the Austrian Army. The military work led to contacts at the ministry, where Glock became an occasional visitor, his eyes and ears open for new opportunity.

One day in February 1980, he overheard a hallway conversation between two colonels that jolted his imagination: The Army needed a new sidearm for officers, pilots, and drivers, to replace the antiquated World War II Walther P-38. Steyr, an Austrian arms maker since the mid-1800s, had offered to
sell the military a modern pistol, but the gun fell short of the ministry’s stringent specifications. Top generals were running out of patience.

Glock interrupted. Would it still be possible, he asked the officers, for another company—his company—to bid on the pistol contract?

The colonels laughed. In his garage, Gaston Glock made hinges, curtain rods, and knives. Now he thought he could design a handgun?

Reserved in manner, Glock, fifty, wasn’t known for his sense of humor. He was a slender man of average height, with a receding hairline, sloping shoulders, and long arms. A recreational swimmer, he had a sinewy physique and unprepossessing looks. He spoke only as much as was necessary and dressed conservatively, a sweater beneath his dark suit coat. Glock had graduated from a technical institute and received training in mechanical engineering. He worked his way up in manufacturing from an entry-level position with a company that made hand drills. Designing firearms was something far beyond his experience.

Glock asked the colonels to describe the Army’s requirements for a new handgun, which they did. “Mr. Glock, in his credulousness, said it shouldn’t be difficult to make such an item,” according to an official company account published years later. “To him, the handgun was simply another accoutrement that attached to a soldier’s belt, similar to the knife he already produced.” Or, as Gaston Glock himself put it in an interview: “That I knew nothing was my advantage.”

Out of prudence and decorum, he sought an audience with the minister of defense. “I asked him if I was allowed to make a pistol for the Army,” Glock recounted.

“He said, ‘Yes, why not?’ ” The minister wanted Glock to
understand something, though: “ ‘I’m not responsible for your costs, for your money. It’s your problem.’ ”

“I said, ‘OK.’ ”

Asked years later about his familiarity with weapons in 1980, he admitted it was slight: “I had very little training. I was just a few days in camps of the German Army” during the latter stages of World War II, he said during a deposition in November 1993 in a lawsuit in the United States. Born in 1929 in Vienna, Glock was conscripted by the Wehrmacht as a teenager. “I was very young in those days: 15, 16 years, but we had to undergo some sort of military training,” he said. This instruction took place in “1944 and 1945,” he explained with a notable lack of precision. How long had he served? “Only two, three days. That is all.”

On other occasions, Glock tried even more strenuously to minimize his involvement with the German military, saying his training lasted for a single day, during which he feigned illness and was sent home. His attempt to play down his connection to the Wehrmacht seems unsurprising, if hardly admirable. Many Austrians of his generation, and the one that preceded it, did the same thing. More relevant to Glock’s role as an arms designer was his assertion that his firearms background was exceedingly limited. “I saw rifle, pistol, hand grenade” in the German military, he said. “I was getting acquainted, when you pull a trigger that it makes boom.”

As an adult, he didn’t own guns. Soon after his fateful visit to the Defense Ministry in early 1980, he bought an Italian Beretta 92F, a Sig Sauer 220 from Switzerland, a Czech CZ 75, and a modern version of the German Walther P-38. All of these weapons were chambered for nine-millimeter ammunition, the standard in Europe.

He used the P-38 as his starting point. Developed in the 1920s to replace a World War I–era Luger design, the Walther was adopted by the German Army in 1938 and used by the Wehrmacht throughout World War II. Captured Walther pistols became prized trophies among Allied troops, who took them home in large numbers.

Glock brought the P-38 and other models to his home workshop in Deutsch-Wagram. He disassembled the guns, put them back together, and noted the contrasting methods used to make them. “I started intensive studies in such a manner that I visited the [Austrian] patent office for weeks,” examining generations of handgun innovation, Glock recalled. “I bought and tested all modern pistols available at that time, and I tried to involve into conversation the best experts that I knew.”

Gaston and Helga Glock owned a vacation home in Velden, a resort on a lake in southern Austria. One weekend in May 1980, Gaston invited several firearm specialists to join him there. Among those who attended were Colonel Friederich Dechant, a champion shooter who oversaw weapons procurement for the Austrian Army, and Siegfried Hubner, the author of technical books such as
Silencers for Hand Firearms
. Hubner had done research at the famous German gun manufacturers Mauser and Heckler & Koch.

“OK, gentlemen, now it is time to show me,” Glock told his guests. “What would you want in a pistol of the future?”

The discussion at Velden focused on pistols, rather than revolvers, and it is important to draw the distinction. Dating to the nineteenth-century marketing genius of Samuel Colt and the
mythology that came to surround his Peacemaker revolver—“the gun that won the West”—Americans historically regarded revolvers with great affection. The Germans, the Austrians, and the Swiss inclined toward the nine-millimeter pistol designs of German arms designer Georg Luger. The inner workings of the two types of handguns are quite different. A revolver, or “wheel gun,” has a cylinder that typically holds five or six rounds of ammunition. Pulling the trigger of a double-action revolver turns the cylinder, cocks the hammer, and then causes the gun to fire. In a pistol, also referred to as a semiautomatic, ammunition is stored in a spring-loaded rectangular box, or magazine, which is inserted into the weapon’s grip. Spring pressure pushes rounds up from the magazine into the chamber. Each time a pistol is fired, the spent shell is ejected from the chamber and a new round moves up. Pistols are more complicated mechanically, meaning that some models are susceptible to malfunction. On the other hand, their larger ammunition capacity makes them more potent in a gunfight. Reloading a pistol with a fresh magazine is easier than swiveling a revolver’s cylinder outside of the frame and inserting cartridges into the chambers.

Americans and Europeans traditionally also differ on ammunition. According to American custom, bullets—and the weapons that fire them—are designated by diameter as measured in fractions of an inch (.38-caliber, .45-caliber, and the like). European ammunition and firearms have been labeled according to the metric system. A nine-millimeter round is roughly the same diameter as its .38-caliber counterpart; a ten-millimeter corresponds to a .40-caliber. In modern times, the geographic differences in terminology have largely dissolved.

At the gathering in Velden, Colonel Dechant told Glock that the Army desired a high-capacity pistol that held more
nine-millimeter rounds than the eight that the P-38 could accommodate, and weighed no more than eight hundred grams (twenty-eight ounces). The weapon should have a consistent and light trigger pull for fast, accurate firing. It should be streamlined and easy to holster. Dechant and Hubner recommended a frame width of no more than thirty millimeters (1.2 inches). Crucially, they said, the gun should have no more than forty parts—far fewer than the industry standard.

Glock asked his guests about grip-to-frame angle. He had nailed together two pieces of wood as a rough model. The experts experimented, pointing the model with their eyes open and closed. The consensus was that an ideal handgun should point “instinctively,” so that an injured user could fire even if he couldn’t see the gun’s sights. The experts settled on an angle of twenty-two degrees, which Glock later reduced slightly.

Colonel Dechant admonished Glock that his pistol should be able to withstand extended contact with snow, ice, and mud. It should fire ten thousand rounds with no more than one failure per thousand. The figure 40,000 was recorded that evening, referring to the goal that the ideal pistol should have a long service life, of forty thousand rounds.

There was much discussion about safety. The P-38 and most other pistols had external levers that when engaged prevented the weapon from firing. Some soldiers and police officers carried their pistols “cocked and locked,” meaning that the guns were ready to fire immediately upon disengagement of the safety. The problem with this common feature, Dechant said, was that an alarming number of soldiers and cops forgot whether their safeties were on or off. That led to confusion and accidental discharges.

“Those experts which I had consulted at the beginning of the development are people that had access to all the accident
statistics, domestic and foreign statistics, which had examined how accidents happen and why they happen when a human being is in a stress situation and still able to operate or not operate a pistol,” Glock recalled years later. “The experts said every [safety] lever is a potential source of mishandling or misoperation during the use of the pistol.”

This counterintuitive insight—that safety devices can become hazards—rang true to Glock. He had carried the Walther P-38 in his pants pocket for two weeks. He discovered that he often couldn’t remember whether he had the safety engaged. “If this level of doubt existed, manual safeties were indeed a hindrance to the quick operation of a handgun,” the Glock company history noted.

At the evening’s end, Glock had his guests sign and date one of the sheets of paper that memorialized their thoughts. He treated the occasion as if it would be remembered by history. At the time, Glock did not pay his guests for their ideas. After he retired from the Army as a major general, Dechant went to work for Glock in a salaried position.

Armed with expert insights, Glock began work on a prototype. He hired experienced technicians who labored long hours with him to implement the Army’s demands. In the evenings, after dinner, he tested crude early versions in a basement firing range he built specially for this purpose. He shot alone, using only his left hand. If the gun blew up on him, he would still have his good right hand to do mechanical drawings.

“I learned to stay out of his way,” said Glock’s wife, Helga.

Some days, Glock attended police academy classes or took private shooting lessons. “My intention,” he recalled, “was to learn as much as possible about general use of the pistol, not only combat situations, but also for police use and military use and all the aspects of pistol use.”

Meanwhile, he and Helga continued running the secondhand metal press in the garage. They employed just a couple of laborers. Each morning, before he left for the radiator plant, Gaston set the controls of the ungainly Russian contraption: a coil of brass or steel fed into the stamping machine, depending on whether the Glocks were making door hinges or bayonets that day. When he came home for lunch, Gaston Glock would make any necessary adjustments. An employee loaded bins of product into a van, which Helga then drove to another shop for finishing. Mrs. Glock also had primary responsibility for raising their three children: Brigitte, a strong-willed firstborn; Gaston Jr., her introverted brother; and Robert, the doted-upon baby.