Sent off to deliberate, the jurors had little difficulty reaching a verdict. After less than ninety minutes, they returned to the courtroom. Their judgment was stark: no liability whatsoever on the company’s part—a complete victory for the defense.
“Mr. Glock never considered any compromise in this case,” a triumphant Grimm said afterward on the courthouse steps. “The Glock pistols are the safest pistols on the market for police use.”
Gaston Glock’s calm, assertive performance in the witness chair was a crucial factor. “The jury liked him more than our client,” Bob Ritchie conceded to a reporter after the trial. Equally, if not more, important was the fact that the Knoxville policeman had violated his department’s safety standards. Ronald Grimm told me: “You don’t put the finger on the trigger until you’re prepared to destroy something—kill it.”
Yet that wasn’t the rule all handgun owners followed. The FBI, until it fully changed over to pistols in the 1990s, instructed recruits to keep their index finger on the trigger of their handgun anytime they had it drawn. The idea was that the agent should be ready to shoot. Of course, it was safer to rest your finger on a revolver trigger that provided twelve pounds of resistance. In many places, police trainers taught new cops to cover suspects with their finger on the trigger. Some civilian shooting instructors favored the same approach until at least the early 1990s. It was not until 1995 or so, with the semiautomatic pistol having become the predominant American handgun, that finger-off-the-trigger became gospel.
Some civilian shooting experts dissented, at least to an extent, from the majority’s unmitigated admiration for the Glock. “The gun factory ads cry, ‘Glock Perfection,’ ” Massad Ayoob wrote in the September 1990 issue of GUNS magazine. “But perfection is an amorphous term. I for one don’t think it’s been achieved yet.”
One of the best-known private firearm trainers in the United States—he ran a rural New Hampshire academy called the Lethal Force Institute—Ayoob lauded the Glock as a military weapon and target-shooting gun. He worried, however, about whether it was well suited for civilians to carry for self-protection.
Ayoob’s was a voice taken seriously among firearm buffs. The grandson of an Episcopalian immigrant from Damascus, Syria, he did as much as any other single person in the late twentieth century to codify the mind-set of ordinary Americans who felt it wise to go about their business armed. His long list of books includes the seminal In the Gravest Extreme: The Role of the Firearm in Personal Protection . He came to firearms naturally, he told me: “There were guns in the house. There were guns in my father’s jewelry store, of course. Like there’s a telephone for calling people, there is the gun for self-defense.”
Ayoob counts himself as the third generation in his family to stave off mortal danger with a handgun. His grandfather, the owner of a bowling alley, once shot and wounded an armed would-be robber. Ayoob’s father, the jeweler, was accosted one night on a Boston street. The mugger fired a shot that zipped past his ear; Ayoob’s father pulled his own handgun and killed his assailant.
Massad Ayoob himself started carrying a gun as a boy of twelve. Later he served for many years as a part-time police officer in several small towns in New Hampshire. He pointed his service weapon at threatening arrestees a few times but never fired. He became a private instructor and a champion shooter, passing along his skills to his two daughters, one of whom, he told me, once had to use her handgun to scare away a pair of men intent on raping her.
In his GUNS magazine piece, Ayoob noted that the Glock “didn’t have as many accidental discharges as I’d feared it would when it came into common police use.” He speculated that cops and civilians were being extra careful. “Any intelligent person who handles a loaded Glock,” he wrote, “handles it gingerly.”
But caution wasn’t enough. “Two design features of the Glock concern me,” he wrote: “the short trigger pull and the lack of a manual safety.” Glock’s official specifications say that from a resting position to firing, the trigger travels half an inch with resistance of five or five and a half pounds. Ayoob measured the trigger travel as more like three-eighths of an inch. “However,” he noted, “with the standard trigger, much of that pull is a light take-up like a military rifle before the firm resistance of the final pressure [is] encountered.” By his calculation, “real resistance is only felt in less than a tenth of an inch of trigger pressure. A tenth of an inch is not a lot.”
Glock introduced a modification in 1990 called “the New York Trigger.” The New York State Police had bought the Glock 17 on the condition that the manufacturer would replace its regular trigger assembly with one that offered firmer resistance from the beginning of the pull. The substitute trigger module and spring result in a steady eight pounds of resistance. Having installed the New York Trigger on his own compact Glock 19, Ayoob wrote: “I feel much more comfortable.” He suggested in the article that Glock make the heavier trigger standard. But the company never did—five to five and a half pounds remained the norm.
Yet even the New York Trigger wasn’t sufficient, in Ayoob’s opinion. He thought the Glock should have an external safety lever, as well. Glock warned users to keep their index finger off the trigger until they intended to fire. “But that answer is too pat, too ignorant of the dynamics that can occur under stress,” Ayoob wrote. “For a manufacturer to say, ‘You don’t need a safety, just keep your finger off the trigger and there’ll be no accidents,’ is as if General Motors were to say, ‘You don’t need seat belts or air bags. Just avoid collisions and you’ll be fine.’ Guns are made to be held with the finger on the trigger. That’s why the Glock shoots so well when you do fire it intentionally, and because everything from childhood cops n’ robbers to television habituates you to hold the gun that way, that’s how it’s going to probably happen under stress.”
If Glock routinely provided a thumb safety and the New York Trigger, Ayoob concluded he would “volunteer to be the Glock Poster Child. Until then, much as I like it as a shooting gun, I’ll still carry it on the street with feelings of reservation.”
CHAPTER 13
Pocket Rockets
In June 1995, Advertising Age magazine named Gaston Glock one of its “Marketing 100.” The Austrian businessman, then sixty-seven, was honored for having taken on “some of the biggest guns in American firearms.” “It was a conscious decision to go after the law enforcement market first,” Glock told the premier advertising industry periodical (in English so fluent it suggested vigorous polishing by an editor). “In marketing terms,” he added, “we assumed that, by pursuing the law enforcement market, we would then receive the benefit of ‘after sales’ in the commercial market.”
“Ten years ago, there wasn’t a single Glock pistol in the US,” Ad Age noted. “Today the company sells more than 20,000 a month at an average cost of $600 apiece,” the retail price for civilians. “The lightweight frame, reliability, and easy maintenance quickly made this semi-automatic handgun a favorite with cops.”
By the time the advertising industry paid homage to Gaston Glock, more than 500,000 Glock pistols were in use in North America, according to a company brochure. The bulk of sales had shifted from law enforcement to the more lucrative commercial market. Four out of five Glocks produced in 1995 were purchased by civilians, who paid much higher prices than police departments. Retaining law enforcement business and winning new public contracts remained essential, however, for the reasons Ad Age suggested: credibility and name recognition. Sam Colt had taught that lesson a century and a half earlier.