Less than three decades ago, few had heard of Glock, the man or the gun. Just how a pistol developed by an unknown engineer with little firearms experience became the dominant, if not iconic, law enforcement handgun in the United States is the subject of Paul M. Barrett’s “Glock.”
Thirty years ago, Glock knew that the Austrian army wanted 20,000 new service pistols made in Austria, and no suitable gun existed. So he set out to design one. As former Austrian Lt. Ingo Wieser, who tested the new pistol in 1983 for the military, put it: “Mr. Glock was at the right place at the right time.”
The all-black pistol had unconventional lines, sleek simplicity and extreme reliability — and its adoption shocked the firearms industry.
In designing the gun, Glock started with no preconceived notions — just a clean sheet of paper, a practical idea, good advice, sound engineering and no investment in any particular manufacturing method. When he received the contract, his workspace was the garage where he made his knives.
He had a gift for blending plastic and metal. By mating polymer and machined steel components, he was able to manufacture his pistol at an extremely competitive price. His process gave his fledgling company a profit margin of, at times, an estimated 70 percent, considerably higher than his competitors’.
Although he had the Austrian military contract, Glock had little in the way of a business plan. “Where there really is money to be made is to convert U.S. police departments from revolvers to pistols,” Karl Walter — who soon became an executive with the Glock firm — told the inventor in an early meeting.
Then, on April 11, 1986, a watershed event occurred: the “Miami Massacre,” in which a pair of armed robbers killed two FBI agents and wounded five more. The bloodshed demonstrated to U.S. law enforcement that more police firepower was needed. The Glock offered the high-magazine capacity police craved (17 rounds) as well as an often overlooked advantage: Officers could be easily trained in its use.
The revolvers typically used by American police for decades had a cylinder capacity of six rounds, and officers were trained to fire them double-action, meaning one long, heavy trigger pull would cock the hammer and then release it to travel forward and fire a cartridge. The Glock trigger — just point and pull — operated much like that of the double-action revolvers, a concept law enforcement embraced, but the trigger pull was lighter weight and of shorter length. The pistol was also easy to clean and maintain.
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