Kapelsohn’s suggestion that the Austrian pistol be taken seriously proved prescient. Within a few days, “we were fighting over who was going to get the Glock,” Rutherford said. “It’s just like shooting a revolver, and that’s what everybody liked about it. You pull it out, you pull the trigger, and you put it away. That was the beauty of it.”
Revolvers typically don’t have external safeties. As Kapelsohn explained to Rutherford, training a cop—or a civilian—to switch to a standard semiautomatic pistol requires intensive drills on deactivating the safety lever before firing. Many officers forget whether the safety is on or off. Some standard pistols, including the Beretta, remain cocked after being fired, with the hammer poised to fall again. To be safe, the user has to “decock” the gun manually before replacing it in a holster. Between operating the safety and decocking, there is a lot of opportunity to make mistakes.
The Glock 17, Kapelsohn said, presented none of these challenges. There is no external safety lever or decocking mechanism. As Rutherford recalled the lesson: “The safety in a Glock was the exact same as the safety in a revolver: trigger travel, trigger weight. You have to overcome both for the gun to go off, and that’s where the safety is at.”
Rutherford and his colleagues in Jacksonville had a nostalgic affection for the standard-issue Smith & Wesson .38. Some of them liked the look of the large .45-caliber S&W Model 645 pistol, the American company’s nominee in the Jacksonville shoot-off. “But the problem was, several of us had gone out on target [with the S&W 645] with the safety on,” Rutherford said. “That’s chilling. We just had a two-week class on using these guns, knowing about decocking and the safety and all that.… Here we are going out on target with the safety on.”
The Glock had another advantage: a light, steady trigger pull. The Smith & Wesson .38-caliber guns in use in Jacksonville had a heavy pull of twelve to fourteen pounds—standard for revolvers. Shooters who train regularly can achieve accuracy with a heavy trigger. But only a small minority of cops practice diligently. “There’s this myth out there that all police officers are gun enthusiasts, and they train like crazy and shoot all the time,” said Rutherford. A dirty little secret of law enforcement is that many cops don’t take range time seriously. And even in high-crime cities, the vast majority of officers go years, or even an entire career, without getting into a gunfight. The average officer is a mediocre shot, or worse.
With a Glock, poor marksmen become adequate; moderately skilled shooters begin grouping rounds in small bunches near dead center of their target. The pistol’s gentle five-pound trigger action doesn’t require the sort of muscular squeeze that can cause the user to jerk the gun off target.
The Smith & Wesson Model 645 and other semiautomatic pistols at the time had an inconsistent trigger pull that didn’t solve the accuracy problem. On most semiautos other than the Glock, the first squeeze was comparable to that of a revolver: around twelve pounds. This initial heavy pull both cocked the gun and fired it. The momentum of the recoil and rearward movement of the slide automatically recocked the pistol for the second and subsequent shots. Succeeding shots required a much lighter, shorter trigger pull because the hammer was already in a cocked position. As a result, a less-than-expert shooter was prone to fire low on the first heavy squeeze of the trigger, and then high on the second, much lighter pull. With training and practice, these tendencies can be overcome, but few police officers receive sufficient preparation. The Glock requires training too, of course, but its soft, consistent trigger action and modest recoil make it “the easiest semiautomatic to transition to,” Rutherford said.
When word got out that Rutherford was leaning toward the Glock, some of his superiors warned him that could be risky. “Now, John,” he recalled one senior officer telling him, “you know the sheriff and the undersheriff, they really like that Smith & Wesson 645.” Smith & Wesson was what the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office had always known. It was the American cop’s brand.
But Rutherford was adamant. He had worked for months on his report, he said. “Now you want me to change it to something else that I know is not the best gun?” During a two-hour presentation to the sheriff, he stressed the Glock’s accuracy and safety advantages, as he saw them. He explained that the Austrian pistol was much easier to maintain because it had only thirty-four parts; the Smith & Wesson 645 had more than one hundred. “You can take fifty [Glocks] apart and put fifty guns back together after mixing up all the parts, and they all shoot,” he said. As beloved as the brand had been, Smith & Wesson had allowed its manufacturing quality to slip, Rutherford told his superiors. The story was similar to that of the American auto industry; gun makers in the United States had lost ground to foreign competitors more diligent about engineering and quality control. That is how Toyota sneaked up on General Motors. Out of a shipment of forty new Smith & Wesson revolvers, three or four would malfunction right out of the box. “The damned things wouldn’t even fire,” Rutherford said. This was something the sheriff hadn’t known. In the Firearm Training Division, Rutherford said, “we were a little miffed at Smith & Wesson by that time.”
A decision came quickly: “We’re buying Glocks,” the sheriff said.
An order went to Smyrna for nine hundred pistols to arm the Jacksonville force. Over the next six months, more than one hundred police agencies around the country requested copies of Rutherford’s ninety-page report on Glock. And Rutherford received a promotion to captain.
Not that the pistol conversion went flawlessly. Shortly after Jacksonville began issuing the Glock 17, a deputy mistakenly shot and killed a teenager he was trying to arrest on suspicion of stealing a pickup truck. An investigation revealed that the officer had drawn his gun and had his finger on the trigger, as he attempted to cuff the juvenile suspect. The deputy should have holstered his gun, especially since the Glock required much less force to fire. “This was a horrific accident, but a training issue, not the fault of the gun,” Rutherford said.
He similarly did not blame the Glock for several incidents early on when deputies’ pistols jammed. After consultation with the manufacturer, Rutherford concluded that the ammunition the department was using didn’t feed properly from the Glock’s magazine. After a switch to Winchester rounds recommended by Glock, the jamming ceased. “That gun does not jam with proper ammo,” Rutherford said. Still, serious questions about Glocks discharging accidentally and having finicky appetites in ammunition would recur in other jurisdictions as the handgun’s popularity spread.
Rutherford’s allegiance never wavered. Twenty-two years later, the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, which he now presides over as the popularly elected sheriff, has seventeen hundred officers. It still arms them with Glock pistols.
Emanuel Kapelsohn’s recommendation of the Glock wasn’t happenstance. In mid-1986, Karl Walter began putting some of the country’s most admired shooting instructors on contract to spread the word about the Austrian pistol. This melding of training and marketing, motivated by a keen sense of customer needs, became a Glock hallmark. Kapelsohn was one of the specialists Walter hired.
In some cities, the Glock gun instructors were paid by the local authorities; that’s the way it worked in Jacksonville, where the sheriff’s office hired Kapelsohn. In other situations, usually after a department indicated it would make a purchase, Glock dispatched Kapelsohn or another trainer as part of the procurement deal—a freebie for the new customer. Strictly speaking, Kapelsohn’s role as an expert hired by the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office had a built-in conflict of interest. During the plastic pistol debate before Congress, he testified in Washington with notable eloquence on Glock’s behalf. Nevertheless, he insisted he “did not have an axe to grind” and endorsed Glock on the merits.