A Discussion about the Glock (Part 2)

PAUL BARRETT: Gaston Glock was a manager of a radiator factory outside of Vienna. On the side, he ran a metal shop in his garage that his wife oversaw during the day. But one of the products he made in the metal shop was knife blades for the Austrian military. This gave him contacts in the Ministry of Defense. And when Austria decided to replace their World War II-era sidearms with a new gun, Gaston Glock audaciously put his hand up and said, “I’d like to try to design that gun.” People laughed at him in Austria.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And this was only in the early 1980s, right?

PAUL BARRETT: 1980, right. In 1982, he—after gathering some of the best handgun experts together and asking them for what elements of a gun would be best suited for the military, he came up with this design. And his huge advantage was the disadvantage you just identified: he started with a blank piece of paper. Rather than telling his customer what they wanted, he listened to what they were looking for. And he came up with this very modern, very futuristic-looking, mostly plastic gun, that was inexpensive to produce, so he has—his profit margin was high; very easy to use—there are no complicated safety gizmos, and we could talk about that some more, because that has a downside, as well; has this large magazine capacity; and it’s very durable, which is very appealing to a military or a police department, which is buying the guns en masse.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And it has very few parts, that have separate parts that have to be manufactured.

PAUL BARRETT: Absolutely, absolutely. It had half or a third of the parts of comparable guns. There’s just less to break down. And the parts also come in modules, so you can pull them in and out. You can literally mix and match the parts. This was a very practical product, similar to the Japanese cars that showed up in the United States in the ’70s and ’80s and had so much success against Detroit’s cars. Well, in the same way, the Glock came to the United States and pushed aside Smith & Wesson, the incumbent gun company that, until that time, was dominant.

AMY GOODMAN: So American police use Austrian guns.

PAUL BARRETT: That’s absolutely correct.

 

January 26, 2012