Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun (7 page)

Into this turmoil stepped the Subcommittee on Crime of the US House of Representatives. Chaired by William Hughes, a Democrat from New Jersey, the panel held hearings that began in May 1986 and continued sporadically over the following year, ostensibly to review the Biaggi bill and other legislation that would make plastic guns illegal.

The subcommittee convened in the wake of a bitter and much broader clash in Congress over gun control that did not involve the Glock. The NRA and its allies got the best of that bigger fight, winning passage of the Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986, which loosened restrictions on gun sales and reined in the authority of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. President Ronald Reagan signed the law in May, the same month as the House hearings on “plastic pistols.” Anti-gun activists saw the Glock controversy as an opportunity to push back in a protracted war they weren’t prepared to surrender.

Hughes, a stalwart of the gun-control movement, had led a successful drive for his side’s main amendment of the Firearm Owners Protection Act, the NRA’s one disappointment with the otherwise gun-friendly law. The Hughes amendment banned the manufacture or sale of new fully automatic machine guns for civilian ownership (possessing and transferring older machine guns remained legal, with special permission). The New Jersey congressman seemed like a natural to lead an investigation of the Glock. To his credit, Hughes did not
exacerbate the “hijacker special” hysteria. Setting a calm tone, he said by way of introduction: “This subcommittee, indeed this Congress, cannot solve the problem of terrorism, but we can and must take steps to protect ourselves against terrorist acts. A new threat that seems to be emerging is firearms made of materials which can escape detection in X-ray machines, or which can be smuggled through metal detectors.”

The star witness to appear before the subcommittee was Gaston Glock himself. Up front, Hughes alluded to “controversy over the Glock 17,” but he dampened that in two ways. First, he sounded quite friendly to the gun’s namesake. “We are very pleased,” Hughes said, “that Mr. Gaston Glock, the inventor of the Glock 17 handgun, has come today from Austria to testify about this famous gun.” More generally, Hughes played down any immediate danger created by Glock pistols by stressing that “the development of non-metal firearms that will be even less traceable, and detectable, will soon be upon us.” This view was reasonable enough, given that during this period, various tinkerers and entrepreneurs were experimenting with all-plastic gun designs. None of them, however, reached the marketplace.

Unlike Hughes, some of the other participants in the House hearing weren’t terribly scrupulous in distinguishing between the theoretical possibility of an all-plastic gun and the reality of the Glock 17. Biaggi, attending the session not as a member of the subcommittee but as a witness, saw an opportunity for political theater. A twenty-year member of Congress, he was still famous for having been a hero during his pre-political days as a New York City cop. Biaggi condemned “the plastic handgun” as “the latest tool of terrorist technology.” He offered no illustrations of terrorists using plastic guns, but he singled out the Glock 17 as “the weapon that aroused my concern”
because “it is mostly plastic. I say that the Glock 17 is far more difficult to detect than any conventional weapon.”

Federal security officials who testified following Biaggi clearly tried to avoid offending anyone, but just as clearly refused to concede that the Glock, or any other firearm then available, posed a significant detection problem. “While the Glock 17 pistol uses a considerable amount of plastic in its construction,” said Edward M. Owen Jr., chief of firearm technology at BATF, “the pistol contains more metal by weight than many other handguns constructed entirely of metal.” Owen and Billie Vincent of the FAA tiptoed around the personnel problem: that air travelers were—and are—protected by low-paid, barely trained human screeners doing boring, repetitive work.

When it was their turn at the witness table, Karl Walter and Gaston Glock put on an awkward performance. Glock spoke haltingly, using Walter as an interpreter. Yet, in an odd way, the two were disarming.

Until Walter led off the Glock presentation, no one at the hearing had raised the Libyan connection alleged by Anderson and Van Atta. A well-coached corporate executive would have left the issue alone. Walter instead plunged in: “The truth is Glock has at no time … offered directly or indirectly, or negotiated about, or concluded any deal, to or with Libya, Libyan agents, or representatives or other entities representing Libya.”

His tortured assertion may have been technically accurate. The Libyans who, according to Walter’s own account to me, had visited the Glock plant in Deutsch-Wagram supposedly did not discuss an actual sale. But they had not traveled to the Vienna suburb for the Wiener schnitzel. Walter’s decision to make this just-barely-true denial of the Anderson charges seems tendentious at best. Strangely, Hughes and other members of the subcommittee showed no interest in pursuing
whether Gaddafi had sent his personal shoppers to the Austrian gun factory.

Walter tackled the question of detection in a more sensible way. He produced an X-ray image of a disassembled Glock 17, inside an attaché case, with other items such as pens and pencils. The reproduction in the hearing transcript reveals that the pieces of the pistol were recognizable, at least if the viewer knew what to look for. Walter stressed that the company had addressed this concern from the outset: “Austrian security authorities confirmed the clear detectability of the pistol in tests at the Vienna International Airport in 1982.”

When Gaston Glock had his turn as a witness, he offered no opening statement and answered questions with Walter’s laborious assistance. Little was accomplished. Hughes inquired into methods for disassembling a Glock, which led its maker to offer pronouncements that sounded alternately like sales pitches and filibusters, none of them particularly coherent. “This is an advantage for every weapon which you can easily [break down] for cleaning purposes,” Glock said, “because even during peacetime, training with weapons is required.”

The businessman never faced any real pressure from Hughes or other members of the panel. Instead, he gave a tedious tutorial on the pistol’s design and its relatively few component parts. “Our important thing is,” he said, “because of these components, less parts can break, and therefore, the weapon will last longer.” Not exactly a blinding insight. The Austrian ran out the clock and avoided serious trouble.

The appearance before the House panel was only one stop in an impressive circuit the Glock executives traveled through
the halls of Washington. Without benefit of expensive lobbyists or legal counsel, Glock’s tiny executive group responded to the Anderson column by paying courtesy calls on the BATF, the FAA, the separate training academies of the Secret Service and the FBI, the US Capitol Police, and the National Rifle Association. Walter, Riedl, and Glock also secured multiple meetings at the Pentagon. They even visited Noel Koch, the self-appointed scourge of the Glock. The encounter in Koch’s office quickly deteriorated when Glock began lecturing the American. “You’re trying to destroy my company,” Glock said.

“I don’t have anything against your company,” Koch responded. “I just want to keep your gun out of my country.”

“We didn’t like each other,” Koch recalled later. “He was a sour, self-righteous SOB. He was not a great representative for his product, I’ll tell you that.”

For his part, Glock demonstrated impressive chutzpah, scolding a senior American security official when the Austrian was selling his handgun to the likes of Assad and hosting Libyan operatives at the plant in Deutsch-Wagram. But Glock’s risky indignation paid off. In another meeting, Defense Department officials said that despite Koch’s instigation of the Anderson column, the American security establishment had no objection to the Glock 17. The Austrians thanked their hosts and asked that they issue a corrective public statement. The Americans refused, but they made a conciliatory counterproposal. They arranged for the Austrians to meet with weapons experts from a variety of elite military units that had the authority to choose their own small arms.

The House Crime Subcommittee would hold three more days of hearings spread over more than a year, keeping Glock in the headlines. Considering all the melodrama that preceded it, passage of legislation in May 1988 to ban the manufacture, import, or sale of undetectable plastic firearms seemed a ho-hum afterthought. As a practical matter, the law had no effect on the Glock 17, which was deemed detectable. Since no other manufacturer has tried to market an all-plastic invisible gun, the statute, at best, stands as a prohibition of a bad idea that never became a reality. Viewed more skeptically, the congressional fuss seems like a waste of legislative time and energy.

But the intense public attention devoted to the Glock did have an impact on the gun and its manufacturer. Within months of the original Anderson column in January 1986, questions about the pistol’s unusual design and materials become a major selling point.

Civilian orders continued to pour in, as thousands of gun buyers decided to see what all the commotion was about. Karl Walter also tallied more than one thousand requests for free samples from law enforcement agencies in 1986 alone. Some came from small municipal police departments; others, from large state prisons and international airport-security offices. The US Capitol Police obtained a Glock and passed it along to the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Glynco, Georgia. Soon Walter was holding seminars with representatives from the Customs Service, the Border Patrol, the Marshals Service, the Bureau of Prisons, and the Drug Enforcement Administration. All of them wanted Glock 17s for closer study and tryouts on the range. Nine out of ten of the recipients eventually sent a check, saying they would like to keep the test guns.

At the Pentagon, Noel Koch eventually dropped his campaign against the Glock. He even bought one for his private gun collection. “Actually, it shoots very nicely,” he told me. “With a full clip, it’s nicely balanced and comes back on point easily.” He expressed an amused insouciance about the tumult he had initiated: It was but one more Washington war story.