How Gaston Glock rocked the firearms world

 

The announcement of Gaston Glock's death last week, at the age of 94, has brought forth a wave of obituaries and reminiscences about "the way things used to be" in the firearms industry.  Very few individuals can be said to have changed the way arms manufacturers designed, built and marketed their products.  Glock stands tall in the most illustrious of that group, including inventors such as John Moses Browning, Samuel Colt and Hiram Maxim.  He does so, not because he improved the technology in the market at the time, but because he drastically streamlined and improved the productivity of the industry.  Since then, no-one's looked back.

Glock got into semi-auto pistol manufacturing in 1980 when by chance, he overheard two Austrian Army officers discussing the bidding process for a new service sidearm.  Initially rebuffed by the military powers that be, because he'd never built a firearm before and they presumed him to be ignorant, he took his case to the Austrian Minister of Defense and gained permission to compete for the Army's handgun program.  He won the contest, and - over the next couple of decades - the worldwide handgun market as well.

"That I knew nothing [about guns] was my advantage," Mr. Glock said in an interview. He bought a number of handguns and disassembled them in his workshop, examining each component for its function while weighing potential improvements. He made prototypes and test-fired them with his left hand; if he was maimed by an explosion, he could still draw blueprints with his right. The product of his efforts was a nine-millimeter semi-automatic pistol that he designated the Glock 17 because it was his 17th invention.

Most notably, the frame of the new Glock pistol was built of industrial plastic, making it lighter and more resistant to corrosion than the conventional all-steel guns in use up to that time. The handgun's various parts were housed in separate subgroups, making them easy to remove and replace. There was no safety or decocking lever to confuse the user. (The safety was built right into the trigger.) All told, the Glock 17 was a revolutionary new version of a weapon that had remained largely unchanged for a century.

There's more at the link.

Glock was in the right place at the right time, with a thoroughly modern engineering approach to his work that defied older stereotypes.  While more "traditional" manufacturers made each of their successive models an improvement over their predecessor, never differing that much from their forebears, Glock was willing to ask every time, "Why should this be done like that?  Is there any good reason to uphold the status quo, or can we get rid of older, more time-consuming, more material-dependent processes and use modern engineering to come at the problem(s) in a completely new way?"  To everyone's surprise, asking that question was the key to the handgun market;  and Glock made very sure to grab hold of that key and retain it as long as he possibly could.  Today, his firm dominates the handgun industry, with many clones of his designs available worldwide.

I liked the Glock from the first time I handled one.  It was lighter than most of its early competitors, and had far fewer parts (34 of them in most full-size Glocks).  That's a major step forward in simplicity.  As one who'd seen combat in the worst terrain in Africa, where complex weapons systems tended to get chewed up and spat out by the surrounding landscape at the drop of a hat, I'd long been a believer in the old proverb, "Keep It Simple, Stupid!" (K.I.S.S.).  In my personal firearms today, I continue to maintain that perspective, which is why I own more Glocks than any other brand of pistol.  They may look and feel clunky compared to a race-tuned competition pistol, and lack all the little details that illustrate that a gun is a prized possession that's been "tweaked" to express its owner's pride of ownership;  but they've never let out a "Click" instead of a "Bang!" when failure was not an option.  That sort of reliability in a personal defense weapon is worth gold, and then some.

Well, Mr. Glock has now gone to his reward.  I wonder if he was met with an honor guard of Glock-toting angels at the Pearly Gates?  If ever a man deserved such an accolade, it's him.

Peter