The late 1980s worked to Mr. Glock’s advantage. Increasingly powerful drug gangs and other underworld groups left many police forces feeling outgunned and imperiled. Glock marketed its handgun as an answer.
Police departments across the United States were given Glocks to test on shooting ranges. Discounts were offered. Company envoys touted the weapon’s reliability in all kinds of weather. Unlike a six-shot revolver, the standard Glock had clips
holding 17 rounds. (Later models expanded to 33.)
Glock set up a U.S. plant in Smyrna, Ga., and departments began to line up. In 1988, the D.C. police suspended normal bidding procedures and
rushed to purchase 4,300 Glocks for $1.3 million to replace its Smith & Wesson and Colt revolvers.
Currently, more than 65 percent of federal, state and local agencies in the United States have Glock pistols, according to the company. The Glock is also used by police and military in nearly 50 countries.
“And this gun, when it first arrived in the U.S., was disparaged as ugly, as handgun Tupperware,” Paul M. Barrett, the author of “
Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun” (2012),
said on NPR’s “Tell Me More.”
Barrett noted that Glock’s plan to court U.S. police departments was deliberate. “That would give the gun credibility in the much larger, much more lucrative civilian market, where you can charge full price and get your full profit margin,” he said.
Yet the gun also represented the rise in firepower on America’s streets among gangs, drug networks and others. The Glock was mentioned in rap songs for decades by artists such as Wu-Tang Clan,
Snoop Dogg and Lil Wayne, helping give it a gangster mystique that drew concern from police forces even as they adopted the same handgun.
Congressional hearings were called over the Glock’s light-touch trigger and rapid-fire capacity — issues raised by gun-control groups after a
Glock was used in the 2007
massacre at Virginia Tech that claimed 32 lives.
Mr. Glock rarely gave interviews and declined to address outcry from gun-control advocates. All the while, the Glock increasingly found its way into popular culture in films such as “Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines” and “The Matrix Reloaded,” both from 2003. “Get yourself a Glock and lose that nickel-plated sissy pistol,” actor Tommy Lee Jones said in the 1998
movie “U.S. Marshals.”
In 2021, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) released a
video showing her putting a Glock in a holster and then purportedly walking through the streets of Washington with the concealed weapon.
“The Glock … inherited all aspects of the American firearm heritage,” Barrett wrote in his book. “It was seen as an instrument of law and security, but also menace, danger and fear.”
his guns were especially good at expectorating.