Glock: The Rise of America's Gun

by Paul M Barrett

  On the topic of political contributions, Guevara asserted: “GLOCK has never authorized (and would never authorize) any act that would violate United States campaign finance laws. Manown and Jannuzzo stole over $500,000 of GLOCK money for themselves and then labeled it as political contributions to hide their crimes. In any event, we conducted our own due diligence, which revealed that Manown’s … statement that GLOCK money was spread to employees to make political contributions is entirely false (except as to Manown and Jannuzzo).… With respect to the allegation that GLOCK contributed $60,000 to the 2000 presidential political campaign, the evidence shows that Manown stole this money from GLOCK and transferred it to Cayman Island accounts controlled by Manown and Jannuzzo.”

  Guevara concluded by questioning the origins and trustworthiness of the facts in my article. “GLOCK believes that you have been provided false information by some unreliable sources, including convicted felons,” he wrote.

  Putting it charitably, the company and its counsel appeared to miss the point. On the central events that made life within Glock so colorful, there was little dispute: Someone tried to kill Gaston Glock. His top financial lieutenant, Ewert, was convicted of having hired the hit man. Glock endorsed this theory of the crime, and it was Glock who accused Ewert of trying to take control of his company. In the United States, Glock’s senior executive, Jannuzzo, and a longtime lawyer, Manown, were implicated in stealing from the company—again, with much of the evidence coming from Glock itself. Other evidence came from Manown, who provided prosecutors with a detailed confession.

  The important thing is not precisely how much money Jannuzzo and Manown devoted to illegal political donations versus how much they allegedly hid in the Cayman Islands or simply stuffed into their wallets. What is remarkable is that the company operated at all amid such bedlam and that its vital American subsidiary continued to produce healthy profits under such dubious stewardship. That the polymer pistols still managed to flow from the factory and sell throughout the United States and the world—despite the executive chaos—was one of the greatest tributes to the intrinsic quality of Gaston Glock’s creation.

  CHAPTER 19

  The Impact of the Austrian Pistol: Good for America?

  The city of Charlotte, North Carolina, is friendly territory for gun owners. When the NRA comes to town, a Second Amendment celebration breaks out. Add Sarah Palin to the mix, and you get a glimpse of Tea Party heaven. “The most famous moose-hunting mom in America,” the master of ceremonies called Palin at the May 2010 annual meeting of the NRA in Charlotte. The keynote speaker, surrounded by enormous video images of her gleaming smile and chestnut hair, brought an audience of ten thousand at the Time Warner Cable Arena to its feet. “It is so great to be here with you bitter clingers ,” Palin declared, making a sly dig at President Obama. During a 2008 campaign fund-raising event, he had foolishly disparaged “bitter” conservatives who “cling” to guns and religion. The NRA would never let him forget it.

  Wearing a flattering black dress and a large jade crucifix, Palin reminded even dispassionate listeners how effectively she can deliver a prepared speech. “No need to load up the teleprompter,” she said, reading from a teleprompter. “I’ve got everything I need written on the palm of my hand.” The “lame-stream media,” she continued, “are trying to portray us Tea Party Americans as being violent or racist or rednecks.” She waited a beat before adding: “Well, I don’t really have a problem with the redneck part of it!”

  When not faced with pesky media questions, Palin makes the Red State case pithily. “Gun ownership is at an all-time high; violent crime is near a thirty-year low,” she noted. “The anti-gun groups, they don’t deal in common sense.” The crowd in Charlotte signaled agreement with one standing ovation after another.

  / / /

  A few blocks away from where the nighttime political rallies were held, tens of thousands of NRA members patrolled a vast exposition floor populated by marketers of rifles, revolvers, pistols, shotguns, muskets, flintlocks, and ammunition of every conceivable caliber; bowie knives, binoculars, bullet-casing art, body armor, blood-clotting gauze, and freeze-dried bison burgers; crossbows, slingshots, paintball launchers, paper targets (human-shaped and abstract); pup tents, deer blinds, duck lures, bear whistles, varmint guns, and vacuum-packed ostrich jerky; Civil War regalia, Nazi medals, survivalist literature, earplugs, hearing aids, trigger locks, and liability insurance.

  Out of the scores of promotional booths, only one—the black-and-silver walk-in display for Glock—had a line fifty strong waiting to take pictures with its spokesperson. The days of gun shop owners ogling buxom Sharon Dillon were long gone. Glock years earlier had begun hiring R. Lee Ermey, a Marine drill instructor turned actor, to draw attention at public events. Best known for his bravura performance as a sadistic sergeant in the movie Full Metal Jacket (1987), Ermey more recently has hosted Lock ’N Load , a cable-television show devoted to weapons. Now in his sixties, he presents an idealized picture of a brush-cut retired marine: leathery, trim, and ramrod straight. Hour after hour, “Gunny,” as everyone calls him, shook hands with men, gave chaste kisses to their wives, and patted children on the head. The annual NRA conclave draws more couples and families than the uninitiated might guess.

  Several young soldiers mentioned that they had just returned from service overseas.

  “Hoorah!” Gunny responded.

  “Glock rocks!” exclaimed one skinny fellow in hunting camouflage.

  “Damn right, son,” Gunny answered.

  The Glock sales staff, wearing pressed chinos and black-and-silver company shirts, looked on with obvious satisfaction.

  / / /

  I walked the expo floor with Cameron Hopkins, the former editor of American Handgunner and a paid blogger for the NRA website. A compact man whose hobby is hunting antelope and buffalo in Africa, Hopkins has marketed guns and ammo professionally for nearly four decades. “You could say that Glock changed the entire market,” he commented. “Every major manufacturer in handguns you see here has its version of the Glock—XD, Smith & Wesson, Taurus, the smaller ones—all of them. It’s a Glock world when it comes to handguns in America.”

  Over the years, the look-alikes had come up in quality, Hopkins said. Other companies now offered variations in ergonomics and trigger mechanics that made their guns slightly different from the Austrian pistol. And some manufacturers, such as Smith & Wesson, sold a wider array of handguns, including updated versions of the traditional revolver. But when it came to modern high-capacity pistols, they were all still following Glock’s lead.

  We circled back to the throngs at the Glock booth. “What’s amazing is that they keep the excitement level high,” Hopkins observed. “People flock to it. There’s some kind of allure, even though Glock is selling a gun that isn’t much different from the gun it sold ten years ago or twenty years ago.”

  I asked why.

  “I think being on television and in the movies so much helps explain that,” Hopkins said. Image counts—from Sharon Dillon to R. Lee “Gunny” Ermey, from Tupac Shakur to Bruce Willis to Arnold Schwarzenegger.

  / / /

  Several months earlier, I had visited the main European small-arms trade show in Nuremberg, Germany. There, the Glock installation had a Vienna café ambience, with small circular tables and silver plates of delicate butter cookies. Young women dressed in black blouses and slacks served espresso, cappuccino, and mineral water. The European show had a more upper-crust feel than the NRA event in Charlotte. Some attendees wore forest-green hunting jackets woven from hemp and were accompanied by well-behaved spaniels.

  I stopped by the display of Steyr, the manufacturer Glock eclipsed during the competition in the early 1980s to supply the Austrian Army with new pistols. Steyr continues to make high-quality law enforcement rifles, and, over the years, it has designed respectable pistols, as well. But its handguns never caught on in the United States.

  A Steyr rep named Gundaccar Wurmbrand-
Stuppach demonstrated the features of his company’s latest nine-millimeter. “This has many advantages over the Glock,” he said, snapping back the slide. “Our pistol rests more naturally in the hand—you see?”

  I hefted the unloaded Steyr, which was considerably heavier than a Glock. It felt no more “natural” in my grasp. I asked whether Steyr was selling many pistols in the States.

  No, not that many, Wurmbrand-Stuppach acknowledged. He seemed deflated by the question and dropped his sales pitch. “Glock got there first a long time ago,” he said. “Now it is hopeless, it seems. The Glock is the U.S.A. pistol.”

  / / /

  Is it a good thing that the Glock is the “U.S.A. pistol”? How has the company used its leadership position as the market changed over from the revolver to the semiautomatic?

  Glock’s predominance has not been good for Steyr, obviously, or for Smith & Wesson, Colt, or any other handgun manufacturer that covets Glock’s revenue stream. The flip side of competitors’ frustration is that for Americans inclined to buy a pistol, Glock has offered a dependable, reasonably priced product. This goes for police departments, the FBI, security-minded homeowners, and weekend target-shooters. Viewed strictly through a commercial lens, Glock is a winner in the globalized economy: a foreign raider that caught American manufacturers snoozing.

  Gun-control advocates condemn this success. “Glock changed the industry—and not in a good way,” Josh Sugarmann told me. Beginning in the late 1980s, the pioneering Glock 17 nine-millimeter helped spread enthusiasm in the United States for semiautomatic pistols. The move from revolvers to pistols brought with it the prevalence of large-capacity magazines: seventeen rounds instead of six, in the case of the exchange of a Smith & Wesson .38 for a Glock 17. Then, in the 1990s, Glock persuaded many Americans to switch to larger calibers with more “stopping power.” The .40-caliber Glock, equivalent to a ten-millimeter, became the standard sidearm for many beat cops and also a popular item in Main Street gun shops. During the same period, the Austrian manufacturer led the way in introducing more compact models in calibers ranging from the nine-millimeter to the .45. The marketing of these Pocket Rockets was aided by the NRA’s push for more permissive concealed-carry laws and, inadvertently, by the passage of the 1994 assault weapons ban, which included the ten-round limit on magazines.

  “The gun industry has deliberately enhanced its profits by increasing the lethality—the killing power—of its products,” according to Tom Diaz, Sugarmann’s longtime colleague at the Violence Policy Center in Washington. Elaborating in his book Every Handgun Is Aimed at You: The Case for Banning Handguns (2001), Sugarmann asserts: “Three specific design features enhance killing power: the ‘three deadly C’s’ of concealability, capacity, and caliber.” Glock has been a pioneer in all three categories.

  / / /

  In assessing whether the gun controllers’ indictment holds water, it is necessary to address a few aspects of gun ownership and use in American society that go beyond the story of Glock. Still, what follows is not a comprehensive survey of the gun-control debate, a sprawling conflict polluted by polemics and cherry-picked statistics. As a practical matter, it is a debate that, at least since the 2000 presidential election, when NRA activism helped defeat Al Gore even in his home state of Tennessee, the Democrats have abandoned. Gun rights have expanded steadily for more than a decade, and nothing will alter that tendency in the foreseeable future. It is not necessary to mourn or cheer these developments to evaluate Glock’s role in the United States. Instead, this analysis assumes that guns are good and bad—like gasoline-powered cars that take people to work while degrading the environment and being involved in fatal accidents; like tasty steaks loaded with cholesterol and calories; like an Internet that purveys vital information, idiotic conspiracy theories, and vile child pornography. Barring repeal of the Second Amendment and a profound shift in the collective psyche of a large portion of our population—neither likely—guns are here to stay.

  / / /

  One hard truth of civilized life, George Orwell noted, is that we rely on strong, bold people with weapons to protect us from those who might kill us for our possessions or politics or religious beliefs or real estate. Accepting this reality, we give the police and the military weapons to do the job of protection. The Glock, though not without imperfections, gets the job done.

  “It is the gun you want to have if you get in trouble,” Eamon Clifford, a former Washington, DC, cop told me. Clifford was in two shootouts in the early 1990s; in both cases, his conduct was deemed justified. Now a trade union organizer, he acknowledged that the Glock’s light trigger pull can lead to accidents: “You can fire a Glock pretty easy if you’re not real careful.” Then he added: “Being careful is what you should be with guns, you know what I mean?”

  In the law enforcement context, the issues of caliber and ease of concealment that so concern gun-control advocates seem, on close inspection, mostly theoretical. Uniformed cops wear their guns openly on a utility belt. If detectives and federal agents who work in plain clothes prefer a smaller firearm that is easier to hide beneath a jacket, that choice seems reasonable. In any event, an old-fashioned snub-nose .38 Smith & Wesson was also relatively easy to conceal. Criminals who wish to hide handguns can do so regardless of brand. The wisdom of permissive concealed-carry laws is also a separate issue.

  Debates about appropriate bullet caliber (diameter) descend quickly into nuance that can create confusion as much as add clarity. With an equivalent design and propellant charge, a larger-caliber bullet will do more tissue damage than a smaller round. As a result, the stopping power of a single larger round should be greater. Assuming the cops are shooting at the right people—bad guys threatening violence—the goal is for police rounds to knock down targets with the minimum number of shots. That protects the safety of both officers and bystanders. Replacing the .38 revolver with the nine-millimeter pistol had no significant effect in this regard; bullet diameter did not change meaningfully.

  Glock’s marketing of the .40-caliber in the 1990s presumably increased stopping power for departments that traded up. The gun exchanges may not have been absolutely necessary. They certainly generated a large supply of used police guns that were resold to civilians. New Orleans and many other cities were ultimately embarrassed by their eager participation in Glock’s crafty trade-in program. But the .40-caliber pistol seems like a sensible tool in the hands of a carefully trained police officer.

  Firearm calibers do not have inherent moral qualities. It’s worth recalling that in contrast to some police agencies, the US military traded down in the 1980s, exchanging its .45-caliber Colt 1911 pistols for nine-millimeter Berettas. The Pentagon decided that on the battlefield, it was smarter to carry more rounds, even if they were smaller. The generals also hoped that less experienced shooters would be more accurate with a lighter, lower-recoil handgun. It is difficult to say whether these choices made a significant difference. In any case, they do not seem irrational. A couple of well-placed bullets of any standard caliber will do grievous harm.

  A more troubling question about the Glock is whether its large capacity and ease of use can exacerbate the occasional incident in which cops fire what seems like an excessive number of rounds. The barrage of forty-one bullets sprayed at Amadou Diallo by four NYPD officers in February 1999 underscored this danger. Approached after midnight in the vestibule of his apartment building in the Bronx, Diallo reached for his wallet. The officers, who thought he resembled a crime suspect, fatally compounded their error by confusing his wallet for a gun. The unarmed twenty-two-year-old immigrant from Guinea was hit nineteen times and killed. All four of the officers carried nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistols. One was a Glock, two were Sig Sauer models, and one was a Smith & Wesson. Those are the three brands authorized by the NYPD. Despite the statistical underrepresentation of Glock in this tiny sample, it is fair to say that New York, like most other American cities, was converted to large-capacity pistols by the Austrian manufac
turer.

  Media coverage of the Diallo killing, as well as community reaction, understandably focused on the disturbing death of an innocent young black man at the hands of white officers. Beyond this persistent and disquieting subtext of urban law enforcement, there was the question of whether use of the Glock and other semiautomatic pistols encouraged “contagious shooting”—the perceived tendency of jittery policemen to pull the trigger reflexively because fellow officers are doing so. It seems likely that the Diallo affair would have involved fewer rounds fired if the more aggressive shooters had had to reload six-shot revolvers. Fewer rounds could have led to fewer hits. Still, officers who panic with semiautomatics probably would panic with revolvers, too. “It’s much more about training, accountability, and protocol than it is about the weapon,” Paul Chevigny, a law professor at New York University, observed in an interview after the 1999 incident. “I don’t want to sound cold-hearted; Mr. Diallo might be alive if they hadn’t had automatic weapons, but I don’t think it makes that much difference.” The four officers in the Diallo shooting were prosecuted criminally and acquitted of all charges.

  Doubts about police use of semiautomatics resurface every several years. In New York, the November 2006 police killing of Sean Bell, a twenty-three-year-old black man, sparked controversy because officers fired fifty shots into the victim’s parked car. Police incorrectly thought Bell and several friends had a gun. In a confused confrontation, Bell tried to ram an undercover NYPD van, police said. Once the late-night shooting was over, it appeared that police had not been in mortal danger from Bell’s party. Three officers were charged criminally and acquitted.