But the intense public attention devoted to the Glock did have an impact on the gun and its manufacturer. Within months of the original Anderson column in January 1986, questions about the pistol’s unusual design and materials become a major selling point.
Civilian orders continued to pour in, as thousands of gun buyers decided to see what all the commotion was about. Karl Walter also tallied more than one thousand requests for free samples from law enforcement agencies in 1986 alone. Some came from small municipal police departments; others, from large state prisons and international airport-security offices. The US Capitol Police obtained a Glock and passed it along to the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Glynco, Georgia. Soon Walter was holding seminars with representatives from the Customs Service, the Border Patrol, the Marshals Service, the Bureau of Prisons, and the Drug Enforcement Administration. All of them wanted Glock 17s for closer study and tryouts on the range. Nine out of ten of the recipients eventually sent a check, saying they would like to keep the test guns.
At the Pentagon, Noel Koch eventually dropped his campaign against the Glock. He even bought one for his private gun collection. “Actually, it shoots very nicely,” he told me. “With a full clip, it’s nicely balanced and comes back on point easily.” He expressed an amused insouciance about the tumult he had initiated: It was but one more Washington war story.
Shipments arrived from Deutsch-Wagram every weekend at the Atlanta airport. The first batch of eight hundred was delivered in January 1986, before Walter had managed to get an alarm system installed at the Smyrna facility. He slept in the plant that night, accompanied only by his loyal Samoyed, Tasso. Walter hired his wife, Pam, to help him repackage the guns, record their serial numbers, and send them out to wholesalers via United Parcel Service. As the business expanded, he brought on more employees. The Glock’s success illustrated that in the gun industry, all publicity is good publicity, and high-profile enmity from anti-gun forces is the best publicity of all.
Marty Arnstein, an American wholesaler who placed an early order for Glocks, congratulated Wolfgang Riedl on the plastic pistol controversy. “You just got $5 million worth of advertising for free,” Arnstein said.
CHAPTER 6
“Super Gun”
While the FBI was quick to blame inadequate firepower for its losses in the Miami Shootout, the nation’s premier law enforcement agency moved cautiously to replace its Smith & Wesson revolvers. A lumbering bureaucracy in the best of times, the FBI was traumatized by the bloodshed of April 1986 and embarrassed at how the confrontation spun out of control. Its choice of a new handgun would take years.
The Feds’ hesitation, however, did not slow others. A patrolman in Colby, Kansas, read an article about Glock in the spring of 1986 and suggested that the small town order a couple of the exotic-sounding weapons. With a full-time force of only twelve officers, Colby made the very first formal US police acquisition of Glocks. Karl Walter instituted what would become a permanent Glock policy of offering cops a big discount from the wholesale price of $360 per pistol; Colby paid $300 apiece. “Officers found them unconventional, but really liked their performance,” recalled Randall Jones, now the chief of the Colby PD. His department switched over exclusively to Glocks and carries them to this day.
Curtiss Spanos, a firearm trainer with the larger Howard County Police Department in Maryland, began carrying a Glock 17 in mid-1986. In December, he and a fellow officer encountered two armed robbery suspects. “There would be two dead officers if I didn’t have the nine-millimeter gun,” Spanos told the Washington Post . The hero cop explained that during a thirty-minute chase and gunfight, he was able to return fire rapidly with the seventeen-round Glock as the suspects reloaded several times. “I fired a total of 16 rounds,” Spanos said. “I couldn’t have done that with a revolver.”
Several months after municipal cops from Miami responded to distress calls about the brutal FBI shootout, the Miami PD became the first big-city department to inquire about a force-wide purchase from Glock. A six-month pilot program yielded positive reviews. Miami city commissioner J. L. Plummer called the Glock 17 “reliable, accurate, and very fine.” Beretta protested that it had not been given an adequate opportunity to compete for the Miami contract, but the Italian manufacturer’s complaint was brushed aside. The Miami PD ordered eleven hundred of the Austrian pistols.
Dallas, San Francisco, and Toronto quickly followed Miami’s lead. In St. Paul, Minnesota, John Nord, the deputy chief, was alarmed that twice in early 1987, officers involved in shootings emptied six-shot revolvers while criminal suspects kept firing. Those incidents, combined with the Miami PD’s decision to go with Glock, inspired St. Paul and neighboring Minneapolis to switch. “It’s the wave of the future,” said Minneapolis chief Tony Bouza.
In 1987, Miami’s crime scourge was spreading north. “The crack cocaine wars were hitting Jacksonville,” recalled John Rutherford. The police felt threatened. Rutherford headed firearm training for the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, which was responsible for the growing city and surrounding Duval County. His range served all police and correctional officers in northeast Florida. Rutherford’s boss, the sheriff, ordered him to conduct a study of whether to change over to semiautomatic pistols and, if the answer was yes, which one. Thirty-five years old at the time, Rutherford was a rising star in the department, the son of a Navy man, and a graduate of Florida State University. The assignment became a major test.
Rutherford had hunted as a boy and liked guns. He kept a framed copy of the Second Amendment on his office wall and taught his two children to shoot. He carried a handgun at all times, on and off duty—even to church on Sunday, which annoyed his wife. Rutherford’s view was that if some armed nut decided to take out his frustrations on the congregation, he wanted to be prepared.
As of 1987, he had little experience with semiautomatic pistols. He knew only revolvers. So he had the department hire an outside consultant to help sort through the many options on the market. He chose Emanuel Kapelsohn, a well-known firearm trainer who called his advisory business Peregrine Corp., after the Peregrine falcon, a sharp-eyed bird of prey.
Gun manufacturers from all over the world sent the sheriff’s office their latest models, a dozen in all. Rutherford and a brain trust of fellow officers with firearm expertise gathered to examine the candidate guns. “We’re taking these guns out and looking at them,” Rutherford recalled. “ ‘Ooh, Beretta 92F. Isn’t that pretty? Sig Sauer! You know everybody loves Sig.’ Then, I pull out this black box and pop the thing open, and here’s this Glock. I’m like, ‘What the heck is this?’ I’m tapping it on the table. It’s plastic! What the hell? And there’s no hammer on this thing. I literally said, ‘We don’t want any crap like this,’ and I slung it over onto the couch, didn’t even put it back in the mix with the other guns.”
Kapelsohn noticed the lonely Glock. “You need to give it a chance,” he said.
His words carried weight. Kapelsohn, who came from New Jersey, had a national reputation and heavy connections at the NRA. His credentials were unusual in the weapons-training business: He held a BA in English literature from Yale and a law degree from Harvard. He had worked at a New York firm as a civil litigator for corporate clients; on the side, he drew on a lifetime love of guns to become a noted shooting instructor. Eventually he decided to turn his sideline into a full-time job. He earned gun-instructor certification from the FBI and studied with some of the best-known handgun authorities in the country, including the legendary Jeff Cooper, who ran a school in Arizona. The 1988 treatise Police Defensive Handgun Use and Encounter Tactics named Kapelsohn one of the five top trainers in the United States. He also testified as a paid expert for both plaintiffs and defendants in lawsuits over allegedly wrongful shootings.