Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun (3 page)

Some accounts claim that Glock developed his gun in just six months, or perhaps even three. Glock himself said the process lasted a year—still a startlingly short period of time for a novice firearm designer to produce a prototype. He filed for an Austrian patent on April 30, 1981. It was his seventeenth invention, so he called his gun the Glock 17. Coincidentally, his creation could store an impressive seventeen rounds in its magazine, with an eighteenth in the chamber, if the user so desired.

After another year of testing and improvement, Glock submitted four samples of the pistol to the Austrian Army on May 19, 1982. “I remember [the date], because I worked two years, day and night, to bring the sample to the Army on time,” he said more than a decade later.

Two overarching concepts would set the Glock 17 apart. First, it was to be made largely out of light, resilient, injection-molded plastic, and second, it was designed without a preexisting factory.

By the 1980s, industrial plastic, often called polymer, was
remarkably strong and resistant to corrosion, a major problem with traditional steel guns. Glock had begun learning about the material when he bought an injection-molding machine to make handles and sheaths for the military knives he produced in his garage. He had the wisdom and good luck to hire former employees of a bankrupt camera manufacturer who brought advanced injection-molding and plastic-design skills. One of these men, Reinhold Hirschheiter, continued for decades as Glock’s right-hand man for production.

By fashioning the frame of his pistol from polymer, Glock foresaw savings on raw material and labor, as well as a weapon that had distinct ergonomic advantages over one cobbled together from blued steel and walnut. Earlier guns made from polymer frames—the American Remington Nylon 66 rifle and the German Heckler & Koch VP70 pistol—had engineering or design shortcomings; they never caught on widely. Steyr produced a successful plastic-stock rifle for soldiers and police, the AUG. But in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Austrian manufacturer was struggling to figure out how to apply the technology to pistols, opening the door for Gaston Glock.

Glock imagined a thoroughly modern pistol factory, dominated by computerized workstations, and he conceived his gun to be made in this as yet nonexistent plant. “The important thing that gave him the big price advantage was he designed the pistol for complete production on CNC [computer-controlled] tools,” said Wolfgang Riedl, a former Steyr executive who later joined the Glock team as marketing director.

The task fell to Lieutenant Ingo Wieser, an aide to Colonel Dechant, to compare Glock’s submission to that of five other
manufacturers. Wieser, a twenty-five-year-old career soldier, had an unusually intimate view of the birthing of the Glock. Without contradicting any of the central elements of the story as told by Gaston Glock, and repeated over the years by his admirers, Wieser adds useful political context and a dose of skepticism to the heroic portrait of Glock.

Today, Wieser operates a security-consulting firm in Vienna and serves as a leading forensic adviser to the country’s court system. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of modern pistol technology. In 1979, before Gaston Glock’s opportunistic eavesdropping in the halls of the Defense Ministry, Wieser had supervised tests on potential replacement pistols. These trials found that Beretta offered the most effective model. But Steyr, the long-established Austrian arms maker, which was controlled by the Socialist-dominated government, objected fiercely that a foreign manufacturer should not receive the contract. In response, the defense minister told the Army that if Steyr did not win the competition, then another Austrian company had to be found. Otherwise, the military could end up accused of insufficient patriotism in its procurement. But there wasn’t a suitable alternative company in Austria that already knew how to make handguns. “Mr. Glock was at the right place at the right time,” Wieser told me.

Gaston Glock, through his production of knives, ammunition belts, and other accessories for the Army, had earned a reputation as a dutiful contractor. He had also forged strong ties to Socialist party officials. Colonel Dechant concluded that with meticulous guidance, Glock could be used as a means to build an Austrian pistol to the military’s specifications and to head off a messy confrontation with Steyr.

Dechant brought Hubner into the project because of his vast knowledge about European pistols. Glock’s role was to
amalgamate ideas from Dechant and Hubner and borrow the millions of shillings needed to fabricate and test prototypes. This was not a small or unimportant function, Wieser told me. But in his view, Glock was more of a general contractor than a genius inventor. “Without Dechant and Hubner,” Wieser said, “Glock would still be making curtain rings.”

Wieser did not try to conceal his envy of Gaston Glock’s subsequent fame and wealth. As the Army’s top handgun tester in the early 1980s, Wieser made many suggestions to improve the Glock prototype, but he received no pecuniary reward. No one celebrates his contribution to a revolutionary weapon. “Mr. Glock conveniently forgot about me,” he said.

His bitterness notwithstanding, Wieser emphasized that he conducted a fair and objective competition that pitted the Glock against weapons from Heckler & Koch, Sig Sauer, Beretta, Austria’s Steyr, and Fabrique Nationale of Belgium. Only the Steyr GB pistol held more rounds in its magazine—eighteen—than the Glock’s seventeen. The Heckler & Koch P9S and the Sig Sauer P-220 each held nine; the Beretta 92F, fifteen.

With its plastic frame, the Glock was by far the lightest model, at 661 grams (23 ounces). The mostly metal H&K weighed 928 grams (33 ounces). The Steyr was the heaviest at 1,100 grams (39 ounces). Glock produced the simplest handgun, with only thirty-four components. That compared to fifty-three for the Sig. The Beretta, with seventy parts, and the H&K, with seventy-seven, had more than twice as many as the Glock.

All of the guns had slides made from steel; only the Glock’s
was machined from a solid rolled-steel bar, with no welding or riveting. The slide is the long rectangular component that sits atop the frame. The firing of a pistol causes the slide to move rearward against a strong spring, ejecting the spent cartridge. When the force of the gun’s recoil is expended, the compressed spring pushes the slide forward to its original position. On its way, the slide scoops up a new cartridge from the top of the magazine and loads the round into the chamber, ready to fire. Because of the unfussy way Gaston Glock fabricated his slide, his pistol required fewer steps to manufacture, and there were fewer opportunities for error.

The Glock 17 was put through a preliminary firing run of ten thousand rounds. The Army set twenty stoppages as grounds for disqualification. The Glock malfunctioned just once. It was fired after exposure to heat, ice, sand, and mud. It was dropped from a height of two meters onto a steel plate without accidental discharge or damage to the frame. The other guns had been put through similar paces.

In the end, a comparison chart prepared by the Army ranked the submitted guns. The Belgian FN was “not regarded as [a] considerable competitor.” The next-worst finisher, the hapless Steyr, was described as having an “extraordinary rate of misfires; heats up.” The H&K, Sig Sauer, and Beretta fared better. The first-place finisher was the Glock 17.

On November 5, 1982, Gaston Glock received formal congratulations from the minister of defense. “Your pistol achieved 88.7 percent of the possible maximum points,” the letter said. Glock’s proposed injection-molding technique enabled his pistols to be supplied at a substantial discount from the next most expensive competitor. In 1983, the Ministry of Defense ordered twenty thousand Glock 17s.

The firearm industry suddenly had an ambitious newcomer.
All Glock needed, Riedl noted, were a factory and a workforce. “He only had a big garage where he produced the knives.”

“How was it that Gaston Glock was able to get it right?” the American firearm authority Patrick Sweeney asked in
The Gun Digest Book of the Glock
(2008). It is a question that handgun aficionados have debated for decades. Sweeney offered as sensible an answer as any, and one consistent with Glock’s. “He got it right,” Sweeney wrote, “because he hadn’t done it before. One of the largest problems in getting a new design accepted by an established manufacturer is not just the ‘not invented here’ syndrome, but also the ‘we don’t have the tooling’ syndrome. Why invent something new when you can simply modify what you have?”

Glock started with a blank sheet of paper. He listened to his military customers. He made adjustments they requested. As a result, he came up with something original—and, as it turned out, he did so at precisely the right moment.

Within just a few years, another market, far larger and richer than the Austrian defense sector, would be keen for “a pistol of the future.” The Miami Shootout of 1986 helped foster this demand. American police officials wanted a new handgun, and Glock was there to offer a powerful alternative to the revolver. Across the United States, the preferences of local cops and county deputies have broad commercial consequences. The American civilian gun-buying population tends to gravitate toward what the professionals carry. For Glock, that translated into a bonanza. The Glock 17 gained profit-making momentum in the fashion of a classic American consumer fad—one
that, rather than fade away, kept expanding year after year. Venerable rivals, chiefly Smith & Wesson, ignored Glock at first and then scoffed at him. Eventually, they began imitating the Austrian invader, flooding the market with knockoffs. The Americans, to this day, haven’t caught up.

I
n the United States, guns are much more than a tool of law enforcement or an article of commerce. They are embedded in the country’s history. By the time the Constitution was framed, a tradition of private firearm ownership was an aspect of daily life and American identity. Citizen-soldiers defeated the mighty British, beginning with the shot “heard round the world,” fired by a Massachusetts farmer. The Second Amendment enshrined the principle of an armed populace. Folklore nurtured the gun tradition. “God may have created all men,” according to a saying of the nineteenth-century West, “but Sam Colt made them equal.”

To many Americans, over many generations, guns have represented freedom, individualism, and self-reliance. “No other country finds so much history, emotion, belief, vice, and virtue in so many guns,” Henry Allen, an essayist, poet, and Pulitzer Prize–winning critic, has observed. Allen served as a Marine in Vietnam and shoots guns recreationally. “Snub-nose .38 revolvers,” he continued, “stand for the world weary persistence of pulp-fiction detectives in the Depression. Single-action Army Colts are the attribute of the cowboy. A Parker double-barreled shotgun is your grandfather picking his way with a knowing elegance through the brush in search of quail. A .22 is
the innocence of childhood—that spattering noise of the rifle range at Boy Scout camp, and afterward the smell of Hoppe’s No. 9 cleaning solvent. The wood-sheathed M1 evinces the common-man determination that won World War II.”