Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun (22 page)

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 staying 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.”

Several years earlier, Ayoob had identified himself as a Glock skeptic, at least when it came to civilians carrying the handgun. Now his tone had changed. “What of the new Baby Glocks?” he wrote for his retailer readership. “Just try to keep them in stock.” Praising various technical specifications, he wrote that the Pocket Rockets “finally make the Austrian brand a true hideout gun that fits ankle and pocket holsters.… I’ve shot them both, and the recoil is amazingly controllable. They’re much nicer to shoot than hot-loaded .38 snubbies, let alone the baby Magnums. How many customers do you have
who already own at least one Glock? Each of them is a candidate for one of the new shrunken models.”

Asked about his evolution into an unabashed Glock enthusiast, Ayoob told me the manufacturer had responded to his earlier criticism by introducing on-request options such as a heavier trigger pull. That the company also began paying him to write promotional material, a gig he shared with other prominent firearm instructors, did not lessen his enthusiasm. But Ayoob emphasized that he did not sell out. “The Glock works for me, as it does for so many others,” he said.

His fervor for smaller Glocks was widely shared. One of the first high-volume purchasers of the Glock 27 .40-caliber subcompact, he noted, was the Georgia State Patrol, which ordered eleven hundred to be used as backup guns to the full-sized Glock 22 service pistols the patrol had issued to its troopers.

The pocket pistol vogue of the mid-1990s accelerated two related trends in the American small-arms industry: the proportional increase of imports and the relative rise of handgun sales versus long gun sales. The import boom helped propel a shift away from hunting rifles and shotguns and toward pistols made for competitive shooting and self-protection.

At mid-century, according to Tom Diaz, a former Democratic counsel to the House Crime Subcommittee and the author of a critical history of the industry, handguns accounted for less than 13 percent of domestic US firearm production. Shotguns (45 percent) and rifles (43 percent) dominated the market. During the 1960s, the industry was transformed. Gun sales in general soared. Handguns overtook long guns, because
of rising domestic production and increased importation of pistols and revolvers. By the 1970s, Diaz wrote, “handguns grew to thirty-six percent of the market, whereas rifles and shotguns fell to thirty-two percent each. The mix has never gone back—handgun share of the market has steadily risen, while rifles and shotguns have fallen.”

Larger social changes were at work. Hunting continued a gradual decline, as farming communities contracted, exurban subdivisions expanded, and the tradition of stalking deer, duck, and quail began to seem old-fashioned to many younger people. “Grandpa or Dad isn’t taking the kid out into the field to teach him how to shoot anymore,” Paul Jannuzzo told the
Financial Times
in 1996. Increasingly, the Glock counsel served as a public spokesman for, and an interpreter of, the broader industry. Glock, of course, did not suffer as a result of the slow demise of hunting as a hobby and means of sustenance. To the contrary, Glock and other overseas manufacturers profited from gun owners’ desire for something new and different.

In the first half of the twentieth century, imports accounted for less than 5 percent of all firearms purchased in the United States. By the mid-1990s, with the advent of globalization and the enterprise of Glock and other foreign brands, that figure had grown to more than 33 percent. In 1996, Brazilian and Italian manufacturers were bested by their Austrian rival. For the first time, Glock claimed the top spot among handgun importers, shipping 213,000 pistols to the United States.

A
corporation does not have a soul. Its character reflects that of the people in charge. Gaston Glock was very much in charge of his company, and he was a man with a complicated soul.

Even those who came to have grievances against Mr. Glock did not dispute his drive and tenacity. Well into middle age, he discovered a reservoir of ambition that fed the design of a truly innovative handgun. He then had the temerity to try to sell his invention in the United States, a country in love with its homegrown firearms. To a remarkable degree, he succeeded, and no one can gainsay that feat.

Was Glock a visionary engineer, covertly sophisticated in his understanding of the American gun market? That is how he and his handlers crafted his image in retrospect. And fair enough: In the 1850s, Sam Colt, too, cultivated a personal mythology to move his handguns.

A more realistic perspective, though, suggests that Glock was a late-blooming tinkerer whose breakthrough came at exactly the right moment. He had the common sense to hire an inspired marketer in Karl Walter, a man willing to do whatever it took to make a deal. At the beginning, Gaston Glock
had no feel at all for the United States, or much of anything outside of Austria. He evolved from a provincial manager of a radiator factory to a world-traveling industrialist. He met celebrities, flew on private jets, and had minions at his beck and call. He showed visitors a photograph of him shaking hands with Pope John Paul II at the Vatican, feeding an apocryphal notion that the two were friends. Brushes with Hollywood distorted Glock’s sense of his personal status in America. In the mid-1990s, a Los Angeles movie prop master introduced him to Sharon Stone. Glock arranged for the elegant actress to receive one of his pistols as a gift. About a week later, Stone sent a bouquet of flowers to Glock—in all likelihood, a routine thank-you gesture. Glock, then in his mid-sixties, was so pleased by this interaction that on a subsequent trip to Los Angeles, he showed up at Stone’s gated home for an unannounced visit, accompanied by one of his West Coast sales representatives. The actress did not make an appearance, and Glock was not invited into her mansion. He eventually got back into his car and left. When word of the embarrassing misadventure filtered back to Smyrna, it became a watercooler favorite among those employees prone to gossip.

The owner’s amusing pretensions did not inhibit his company’s performance. Glock built a veritable cash machine, with margins in the neighborhood of 70 percent—the kind of performance that would warrant a Harvard Business School case study were Glock not so secretive about his decision making. Few outsiders knew how he had accomplished what he had done.

As often happens in business, the profit imperative over time propelled the company and its owner into morally ambiguous territory. Glock’s crafty response to the assault weapons ban
provides one example of the manufacturer’s deftness at outmaneuvering lawmakers and regulators.

The slogan “Glock Perfection” was not puffery to Gaston Glock. He believed it. His organization projected coolness, certainty, even arrogance. In public, the founder was capable of beguiling charm, as he demonstrated when testifying before the jury in Knoxville. At other times, he struck people as distant and condescending. To his German-speaking aides, he expressed disdain for Glock, Inc.’s, American employees, based on nothing more than their nationality. His all-purpose complaint concerned the prevalence of “crazy people” in the world, by which he meant incompetents, fools, and crooks.

He had an unforgiving management style, which, one day, he summarized for Monika Bereczky, the head of human resources for the American subsidiary. Bereczky, a Romanian native of Hungarian descent, spoke German fluently and for a number of years served informally as a personal assistant to Glock and his wife, Helga. “Every morning,” he told her, “you have to slap everyone on the head, just in case they did something wrong.”