Glock: The Rise of America's Gun

by Paul M Barrett

  CHAPTER 16

  Glock Goes to the White House

  In October 1997, Washington broiled under an intense autumn sun. Whatever the temperature, the gun executives would have been sweating, for Paul Jannuzzo and Richard Feldman had led them into the enemy’s lair. Sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with President Bill Clinton, his attorney general Janet Reno, and other administration notables were senior executives from Smith & Wesson and seven other major American handgun manufacturers. The public affairs network C-SPAN broadcast the ceremony live. At the Northern Virginia headquarters of the NRA, which routinely demonized Clinton as the “most anti-gun president ever,” top association officials stared in disbelief at their television screens.

  Before the formal Rose Garden announcement started, the industry representatives made nervous small talk in the Oval Office. “I want to thank you, Mr. President,” Feldman joked, “for offering to find me a spot in the witness protection program.” Clinton laughed, relishing his guests’ unease.

  The peculiar gathering stemmed from a White House push for federal legislation mandating that firearm manufacturers ship a trigger lock with every handgun. Democrats in Congress had introduced a bill and appeared to have the votes for passage. The NRA was preparing for scorched-earth resistance, even though gun-control proponents seemed to have an attractive argument: that “child safety devices” would deter accidents. Who opposed child safety?

  Feldman, with Jannuzzo’s support, suggested an alternative idea: Why couldn’t gun manufacturers voluntarily provide safety devices? The mechanisms could be as simple as a padlock blocking the trigger or a cable threaded through the gun’s barrel. Gun makers could take credit for helping protect the families of their customers. The cost would be modest—$5 to $10 per handgun—and most of that could be passed along to consumers.

  A young Clinton aide, Rahm Emanuel, negotiated in secret with Feldman over a mutually beneficial pact: Glock and other gun manufacturers would swallow their pride and chance the NRA’s wrath, accepting an invitation to the White House, where they would share credit with Clinton for a commonsense advance in gun safety. In exchange, the proposed legislation mandating locks would be dropped, sidestepping an ugly fight.

  “Mr. President, we are all Americans,” Feldman said when it was his turn to speak in the Rose Garden. With the red record light of the TV cameras illuminated, he continued: “By being here today, we demonstrate that there are issues on which we can all agree and work together.”

  “This administration and the gun industry from time to time have stood on different sides of various issues,” Clinton told an audience dominated by police officers being honored for their heroism. “But today we stand together and stand with the law enforcement community to do what we all know is right for our children.”

  Afterward, Jannuzzo defended the deal in a gun industry trade magazine. It would “avoid a train wreck.… I’d much rather have something on a voluntary basis where we can make the decision as to what fits mechanically our own products, as opposed to somebody whose real goal is to outlaw firearms deciding how they should be locked up.” Glock stood for pragmatism. “If you’re only working one side of the aisle, you’re bound to get screwed sooner or later, because people will take you for granted,” Jannuzzo said. “When the Republicans wake up, they’ll realize that what could have been a very contentious issue has been taken off their plate.”

  A day after the White House photo op, the top official of the NRA, Wayne LaPierre, sent a vitriolic open letter to Jannuzzo and the other executives who’d braved the Rose Garden. The rebuke offered an illustration of how the NRA did not always see eye-to-eye with gun companies like Glock. “Firearms safety—as it’s being pressed by the Administration—is a phony,” LaPierre wrote. “It is simply a stalking horse for gun bans.” Without explaining how providing trigger locks would lead to banning guns, LaPierre added: “You are not selling firearms to Bill Clinton and Janet Reno. And he is not selling firearms safety to the public. He is selling a means to an end. Your end.… You have made a grievous error. It is now left to others—your customers, all peaceable gun owners—to keep it from being a fatal error.”

  Most gun executives maintained stoic public silence in the face of the NRA’s condemnation. But Glock did not. In a letter he faxed back to LaPierre, Jannuzzo reproached the gun-rights activist for his extremism, including past comments in which LaPierre had compared federal agents to fascists. “Finally,” Jannuzzo concluded, “if you ever again feel the need to speak to me in such a condescending manner, have the spine to do it in person, but be prepared to have your head slapped.”

  People in the gun industry did not communicate with Wayne LaPierre like that. With a pat on the back or a sharp word, LaPierre could make or break careers. His friendship translated into instant influence. Jannuzzo’s temper temporarily outweighed his sense of caution.

  The NRA wasn’t the only constituency left out. Excluded from the Rose Garden festivities, gun-control activists fumed. “The big winners today are American gun manufacturers, not America’s children,” said Kristen Rand, the legislative director at Josh Sugarmann’s Violence Policy Center.

  Nonetheless, the trigger-lock truce received resoundingly positive coverage on television news shows and in the press. As it had in the past, Glock had managed to turn unlikely circumstances to its commercial advantage.

  / / /

  The tension between the NRA and Glock actually began several years earlier. The enactment in 1994 of the assault weapons ban, including the magazine-capacity limit that ironically proved such a boon to Glock, became a central Republican campaign issue in the midterm elections that year. Newt Gingrich, the conservative Republican from Georgia, made the rollback of gun control a top priority. With characteristic hyperbole, the NRA paid for advertising campaigns calling the assault weapons ban and the Brady Act “the largest step ever toward the disarmament of American citizens.” (Neither provision even hinted at disarming law-abiding gun owners.) Local NRA affiliates mobilized to oust powerful congressional Democrats, including those who traditionally promoted Second Amendment rights, such as House Speaker Tom Foley of Washington and Judiciary Chairman Jack Brooks of Texas. In November 1994, Foley and Brooks were defeated, and Republicans took over the House of Representatives, elevating Gingrich to Speaker. “The NRA,” said a chagrined Bill Clinton, “is the reason the Republicans control the House.”

  The 1994 election exacerbated paranoia on the fringes of the gun culture. Militia groups, some inspired by the standoffs at Ruby Ridge and Waco, expanded in parts of the Midwest, the Plains states, and the Southwest. Rumors materialized about deployment of unmarked black helicopters and foreign-speaking United Nations troops. Survivalists dug backyard bunkers, storing rifles and ammunition in sealed polyvinyl chloride drainpipes. Computer bulletin boards bristled with alerts about the “Zionist Occupation Government.”

  The NRA fueled the fear. Its chief lobbyist, Tanya Metaksa, met with members of the Michigan Militia during a trip to Lansing. Neal Knox, one of the organization’s more vituperative figures, insinuated in a column in the December 1994 Shotgun News that the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, as well as various mass killings in the United States, reflected a plot to justify private gun confiscation.

  In March 1995, the NRA bought full-page advertisements in the Washington Post and USA Today accusing the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms of terrorizing ordinary gun owners. A large photo showed helmeted black-clad federal agents armed with submachine guns breaking into a home. Clinton policies could lead the BATF “to intensify its reign of storm-trooper tactics,” the ad stated. During the same period, the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre distributed a fund-raising letter claiming that the Clinton administration’s “semiauto ban gives jack-booted government thugs more power to take away our Constitutional rights, break in our doors, seize our guns, destroy our property, and even injure or kill us.” As if the point had not been made with sufficient em
phasis, LaPierre added: “Not too long ago, it was unthinkable for federal agents wearing Nazi bucket helmets and black storm trooper uniforms to attack law-abiding citizens. Not today.”

  The NRA’s rhetoric seemed even more out of bounds after April 19, 1995. On that day Timothy McVeigh, an anti-government militant, used a truck bomb to blow up a federal office building in downtown Oklahoma City. The facility housed regional branches of the FBI and the BATF. McVeigh killed 168 people, including many children in the facility’s day-care center; he injured more than 800. Former President George H. W. Bush used the occasion to resign his life membership in the NRA. Bush said the association’s “broadside against federal agents deeply offends my own sense of decency and honor.”

  Paul Jannuzzo did not turn in his NRA card. But the NRA’s ceaseless cultural warfare struck the Glock executive as counterproductive, especially for a company like his that built its reputation selling guns to police departments. He had a further motivation to steer Glock away from the fanaticism: McVeigh had been arrested in possession of a .45-caliber Glock pistol.

  “I agree with most of what the NRA wants to do,” Jannuzzo later told me. “I disagree with how they try to do it, and I see through their agenda of constantly provoking political fights for fund-raising purposes. The NRA sees paranoia as good, because paranoia makes gun owners get out the checkbook.”

  Jannuzzo argued in private that to appeal to a broader swath of the American public, the industry needed to distinguish itself from Wayne LaPierre and talk of jackbooted federal storm troopers. “I want to sell a Glock to a suburban mom concerned about keeping her kids safe,” Jannuzzo explained. He had little in common with camouflaged militia members preparing to resist an imaginary United Nations invasion. Jannuzzo played tennis on weekends and rode horses with his children. He enjoyed expensive single-malt Scotch, imported chardonnay, and black market Cuban cigars. “I don’t need to be associated with guys playing survivalist games in the woods.”

  Operating under the aegis of Feldman’s trade group, the American Shooting Sports Council, Jannuzzo looked for subtle ways to lower the volume of the gun controversy. Months before the controversial Rose Garden ceremony, he and Feldman had visited Philadelphia mayor Ed Rendell, a prominent gun-control proponent. Rendell, a Democrat, had his staff researching a potential lawsuit that Philadelphia and other cities might file against the gun industry, modeled on the litigation state attorneys general had brought against major tobacco companies. In a meeting in Philadelphia’s ornate City Hall, Rendell insisted that firearm manufacturers had to take more responsibility for urban gun violence. He accused Glock and other companies of “flooding the streets” with weapons, fully aware that a substantial portion of them would end up in the wrong hands.

  Jannuzzo disagreed with the novel legal theory that Rendell espoused: that the gun companies created a “public nuisance,” akin to the pollution emitted by a mismanaged industrial plant. Nuisance suits were rare and difficult to win. The courtroom weapon had never been aimed at an entire industry in anything approaching this fashion. Moreover, the criminal misuse of guns required the intervention of third parties—muggers, murderers, and rapists—whose illegal conduct broke what lawyers call the “chain of causation” between gun manufacturers and victims. Litigation seemed like a long shot.

  Rendell, though an attorney by training, was not concerned with legal niceties. He warned of dozens of suits filed by cities from coast to coast. A barrage of municipally funded legal actions could lead quickly to heavy legal defense expenses. Pretrial discovery could reveal embarrassing corporate documents. Glock and other gun companies historically had fended off product-defect suits filed by injured individuals. But a coordinated assault by government bodies seeking to recover the aggregate cost of police and hospital services related to gun violence presented a far more daunting threat. In light of the tobacco lawsuits, which were on their way to a multibillion-dollar settlement, Jannuzzo concluded that Rendell and the cities had to be taken seriously.

  The Glock lawyer also thought that there were modest regulatory and safety steps, such as the concession on trigger locks, that his employer could offer as a way out of prospective suits. Jannuzzo indicated that he would be willing to discuss helping law enforcement agencies take a closer look at customers seeking to buy multiple handguns. Such buyers sometimes turned out to be illicit gun traffickers. If agreeing to restrictions that did not interfere with sales to honest consumers would forestall pricey lawsuits and bad publicity, Glock was open to talking. Rendell expressed interest, and they agreed to stay in touch.

  The conciliatory tone in Philadelphia did not last. Other liberal big-city mayors saw the political appeal of taking the gun industry to court. Once Rendell floated the idea, it could not be contained. Gun-control activists hoping to cripple firearm production whispered to any politician who would listen that the tobacco-litigation strategy could be applied to guns.

  Backed by a group of wealthy plaintiffs’ lawyers who had helped push tobacco suits, Mayor Marc Morial of New Orleans jumped to the front of the line. His city filed suit in October 1998 against Glock and every other major handgun maker. “Today is a day of atonement,” Morial said at a press conference. “This suit is about holding that very successful industry accountable.” Two weeks later, Chicago mayor Richard Daley fired off the second such suit, demanding $433 million from the industry to compensate his city for public safety and medical expenditures over the prior five years.

  Rendell was incensed that rivals had stolen his thunder, but there was nothing he could do about it. Boston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, and San Francisco all prepared to join the legal offensive. Others soon followed.

  / / /

  Jannuzzo, combative and not averse to publicity, responded to the challenge. In 1998 and 1999, he emerged in the national news media as the industry’s most forceful and articulate front man. At the same time, he continued to talk to Rendell and other mayors behind the scenes, probing, negotiating, and gathering intelligence. Jannuzzo once again displayed his knack for the dismissive sound bite. “They don’t have a leg to stand on, as far as the law is concerned,” he told the New York Times . “Cigarettes were supposed to be enjoyable, relaxing, and they turned out to be lethal. But guns are designed to be lethal. That’s why people buy them.” He waved off the notion that firearms were defective because they lacked adequate safety mechanisms, a theory that New Orleans and some other cities argued in conjunction with the public nuisance allegation. “What we have,” he said, “is a bunch of frustrated big-city executives who have lost control of the crime problem, and they are looking to blame someone else.”

  Playing the family values card, Jannuzzo argued that the best way to prevent juvenile accidents with firearms was to instruct children how to use guns properly. “My wife is having our fifth child in January,” he wrote in a letter to the editor of the New Orleans Times-Picayune . “Three of the other four have been taught firearms safety based on the [NRA’s] Eddie Eagle program.… They would no more pick up a firearm without adult supervision than they would put their hand in a moving chainsaw or step in front of a moving car.”

  On ABC’s World News Tonight , he answered Morial’s contention that the industry should be held liable for failing to invent a “smart” gun, meaning one that integrated a microchip or a fingerprint reader that would make it impossible for anyone except the rightful owner to pull the trigger. Such gadgetry may sound appealing, and it had been researched. But Jannuzzo noted, correctly, that engineers within and outside the industry had not been able to make “personalized” guns work reliably. Tiny electronic circuitry tended to malfunction when placed in proximity to gunfire. “I don’t know what they can mandate that we can put on guns,” Jannuzzo told ABC. “The greatest fallacy with Mayor Morial’s suit is that [electronic smart-gun technology] simply doesn’t exist.”

  In the most memorable public airing of the municipal litigation, Jannuzzo faced off against Morial on NBC’s Today show.
The confrontation in late January 1999 seemed stacked in favor of the politician from New Orleans. He spoke of innocent young victims of gun violence and a profitable industry’s indifference. New Orleans, he said, was taking the bad guys to court in the name of justice.

  Jannuzzo, cast as the corporate heavy, had come prepared. He turned toward Morial and said: “You have to put the suit in an incredible context. The City of New Orleans is the biggest distributor of used guns in the state of Louisiana.”

  Morial looked stricken. He recognized where Jannuzzo was headed. In an attempt to save money, New Orleans had quietly done business with Glock in a way that had put thousands of handguns on the street. Ten months before suing firearm manufacturers for gross negligence, New Orleans had agreed to give Glock 7,200 old service pistols and confiscated weapons in exchange for 1,700 new Austrian .40-caliber handguns. This was one of dozens of such trades Glock had made with police departments around the country.

  “I only approved that deal on the condition that none of the guns were sold in Louisiana,” Morial said. New Orleans, in other words, had done exactly what it accused the industry of doing: sought financial benefit from dumping guns indiscriminately on the street. On top of that, Morial had tried to foist the weapons on other communities, as if that would absolve him of any connection to subsequent misuse of the older guns.

  Jannuzzo succeeded in upending the televised morality play, exposing his foe’s blatant double standard. The details that came to light after the Today episode made New Orleans look even worse. The guns the city traded went to a wholesaler in Indiana to be resold. Included were confiscated TEC-9s and AK-47s prohibited two years earlier by the federal assault weapons ban. Rafael Goyeneche, president of the Metropolitan Crime Commission of New Orleans, a private watchdog group, was livid: “To learn that the city has exported 7,000 guns seized from street criminals to other parts of the country is really mind boggling and the height of hypocrisy.”