Where Glocks came from

Daniel Horan reviews Paul M. Barrett's book, "Glock: The Rise of America's Gun," in today's Wall Street Journal, and it provides a short and interesting summary of the history of the Glock handgun.

Seems that in 1980, Gaston Glock was the manager of a car radiator factory with a side business of making knives and bayonets for the Austrian army. He managed to get authorization to bid for a contract to provide the Austrian army with handguns. Quote:

He knew next to nothing about firearms. Less than 20 years later, he was the world's leading manufacturer of handguns, and the business born in his garage had annual revenues of more than $100 million.

The story goes on to tell us that before he built his own gun he first bought some handguns and took them apart to see how he could improve on them. He eventually came up with the Glock 17, and now Glock handguns are everywhere.

But you can see where he went wrong. Having worked on car radiators, knives and bayonets, he knew the advantage of simplicity and probably saw the manual safeties on the guns he disassembled as a bunch of unnecessary parts. After all, an efficient Austrian army man wouldn't need one. "You know zee penalty for failure."

I've gone on and on about how the lack of a manual safety on Glocks has probably resulted in more negligent discharges than we care to count. Click the guns category and scroll down for posts at this blog about Glock accidental/negligent discharges. But Glock owners are a passionate bunch, and I'm shouting at the wind on that topic.

In 1984 a former Austrian named Karl Walter who worked in the U.S. as a traveling gun salesman visited Mr. Glock in Austria with the idea of selling them in the U.S. Another quote:

Mr. Walter arranged for the Glock 17 to be featured in the October 1984 issue Soldier of Fortune magazine, and product placements in films and television shows soon had Glock pistols showing up in the hands of Hollywood's biggest stars. Innovation had spawned fascination. Once Glock pistols were adopted by the FBI, the Secret Service and major American police departments, sales to the public began to eclipse those of even Smith & Wesson, the venerable American gun maker, which nearly went out of business as a result. ...

Glock sold its five millionth handgun in 2007, and its pistols remain the world's most popular.

Yup, they're everywhere.  Anyone reading this blog probably already has a good grasp of the gun safety rules, but let's take another look at Richard Fairburn's Causes and cures for the negligent discharge for old times sake:

1. All guns are always loaded. (Even if they are not, treat them as if they are.)

2. Never let the muzzle cover anything you are not willing to destroy. (For those who insist “this particular gun is unloaded,” see Rule 1.)

3. Keep your finger off the trigger till your sights are on the target. (This is the Golden Rule. Its violation is directly responsible for about 60 percent of inadvertent discharges.)

4. Identify your target, and what is behind it. (Never shoot at anything that you have not positively identified.)

Glocks have a light trigger pull so #3 is doubly important.

Comments

[Joe Hathaway]

A very interesting comment on Glock pistols, omitting that the bid for which Mr. Glock was competing specified that the pistols had to continue to function after total immersion in water, sand, and mud. Cute little buttons and levers designed to prevent firing of the pistol by idiots who did not know what action the trigger initiated had a tendency to allow one's enemies ample time to kill the bearer of a less-than-freshly-cleaned weapon.

I suggest that Mr. Glock did not "go wrong"; he designed a pistol which is ready to fire at once, with no little gadgets to remember to turn on, or off, or sideways, a pistol with ample built-in automatic protection against unintended discharge, and yet a pistol that would go "BANG" every time the trigger was pulled.

[Geo]

Dropping a handgun in a pool of mud is probably a very infrequent occurrence among civilian handgun owners. But that particular circumstance, as rare as it might be, is infinitely more probable than a circumstance in which the gun owner's life depends on the fraction of a second it takes to flip a manual safety.

Complaints about the time it takes to flip a manual safety make me think of the cowboy movie/TV actors of the 50s and 60s who could grab a single action revolver, draw it from a holster, cock the hammer, aim it, and pull the trigger in less time than it would take an observer to start and stop a stop watch.

I blame the obesity epidemic. Modern products have to be made to accommodate slow, fat fingers. And now that I think about it, it's possible modern gun owners do drop their guns in muddy pools more frequently.

[Ice]

God help me, I put aside a whole atfernoon to figure this out.