Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun (6 page)

An engineer by training, Riedl had a comfortable position at the time as an executive at Steyr, a conglomerate that manufactured not only weapons, but tanks, trucks, and bicycles. Government-controlled, Steyr was stodgy, and the road to promotion into senior management was long. “I was interested to work for a small company, but one with potential,” Riedl explained to me. “From what Mr. Glock showed me, I thought the company had potential.”

Gaston Glock was rightly proud of the gun he had designed, but he was devoid of management or finance skills, and fearful of revealing his weaknesses. Glock complained when workers spoke to one another on the job, claiming that if they had time to talk, they weren’t staying busy enough—an approach sure to breed needless resentment. Glock was so nervous about dealing with Viennese bankers that he instructed Riedl to do all the talking at meetings they attended together. “This created a strange impression of a mute business owner,” Riedl said. “Mr. Glock seemed to outsiders as naïve or aloof, a little odd. In private, within the company, he made all the decisions, but in public, at this time, he was awkward.”

In November 1985, Glock signed the legal papers that established Glock, Inc., as a Georgia corporation. He wired money from Austria to a new company account in Atlanta, and Walter found a small suburban warehouse-and-office complex in Smyrna. Riedl flew to the States to plot a pricing strategy with Walter. They worked in Walter’s basement, with Walter’s wife, Pam, serving ham sandwiches and coffee.

The pair settled on a commercial wholesale price for the Glock 17 of $360 and a recommended retail price of $560. These levels undercut comparable American and European brands, yet assumed generous potential profits. According to Riedl, Glock’s gross margins exceeded an astounding 65
percent—the manufacturer pocketed $240 on each gun sold. By comparison, manufacturer margins on pistols at companies such as Smith & Wesson and Beretta ranged from 5 percent to 20 percent, according to people in the industry. The Glock’s simpler design and the computerized manufacturing methods allowed for larger profits.

Gaston Glock at first urged his marketing men to try a lower price to boost demand even further. Walter strongly disagreed. “If you sell it for cheap, you will have the image of a cheap gun,” he told Glock. “Quality will always bring you more money.” Glock deferred to Walter’s experience in the American market. It was a crucial early decision, one that eventually made Gaston Glock a very rich man.

Riedl drafted an initial sales plan. Under the plan, the company’s gun operation would break even in its first year if it sold 8,500 units. By comparison, S&W and Beretta each sold hundreds of thousands of guns annually. For Glock, the sale of knives, bayonets, and other products, such as machine-gun belts and plastic fragmentation grenades, to the Austrian military provided a revenue cushion for its fledgling firearm business.

That December, Riedl and Walter traveled to Denver for the annual trade show of the National Association of Sporting Goods Wholesalers. Industry rumors had piqued interest in their gun, even though it wasn’t widely available yet in the United States. The Austrians themselves had only a handful of pistols to display. They borrowed exhibition space from one of the wholesalers with whom Walter was friendly.

The response was overwhelming. On the very first day of the event, Riedl and Walter logged orders for 20,400 guns—far more than Riedl’s target for the entire first year. It would take months to manufacture and ship that many pistols to the
United States. “We couldn’t get enough out the door,” said Walter—the sort of predicament any small company would love to have.

To celebrate their triumphant debut in Denver, Riedl and Walter invited sales representatives to join them that night for free drinks at the bar of a Holiday Inn. The men from Glock arrived in navy blue business suits and ties, as they had dressed for the trade show. The Americans, to their dismay, turned up in cowboy hats, denim jeans, and pointy Western boots. “A little embarrassing,” Riedl admitted.

The next morning, he and Walter rushed to a Western outfitter to buy Stetsons and the rest of the frontier costume. Feeling prepared, they invited their new colleagues back to the Holiday Inn bar on the second night of the wholesalers’ show. This time, the Austrians came attired like John Wayne in
Stagecoach
. Once again, however, they were confounded—the Americans had switched to business suits.

It turned out that the previous evening had been a special Western Night at the Holiday Inn—which was why everyone had dressed like a cowpoke. “We had something to learn about the United States,” Riedl said.

A few weeks later, the Glock team received another lesson in business, American style. During a retailers’ trade show in Dallas, an FBI agent with whom Walter was acquainted asked the salesman what he thought about that morning’s column by Jack Anderson in the
Washington Post
about Gaddafi buying Glocks to distribute to terrorists.

Walter assumed the gossip was some kind of strange joke. A couple of days later, when he returned to his still-bare office in
Smyrna, he discovered that the FBI man had not been kidding. “Sure enough,” Walter said, “the shit hit the fan.”

Jack Anderson, in the sunset of a long muckraking career, thrived on scandal. Factual accuracy was not his strength. But when he broke a story, other journalists often followed, fixing the mistakes as they went. His syndicated column ran in the
Post
and scores of other major newspapers. On January 15, 1986, Anderson’s headline declared:
GADDAFI BUYING AUSTRIAN PLASTIC PISTOLS
. Cowritten with his assistant and leg man, Dale Van Atta, the column reported that “Gaddafi is in the process of buying more than 100 plastic handguns that would be difficult for airport security forces to detect.” An unnamed “top” US official told Anderson and Van Atta: “ ‘This is crazy. To let a madman like Gaddafi have access to such a pistol! Once it is in his hands, he’ll give it to terrorists throughout the Middle East.’ ” The official was none other than Noel Koch, the Pentagon’s counterterrorism chief.

“The handgun in question is the Glock 17, a 9mm pistol invented and manufactured by Gaston Glock in the village of Deutsch-Wagram, just outside Vienna,” the column continued. “It is accurate, reliable, and made almost entirely of hardened plastic. Only the barrel, slide, and one spring are metal. Dismantled, it is frighteningly easy to smuggle past airport security.” Cloaking Koch’s identity, the column described his experiment at Washington National: “One Pentagon security expert decided to demonstrate just how easy it would be to sneak a Glock 17 aboard an airliner.”

The Anderson column created havoc in the Glock world. Everyone who had anything to do with the sale of firearms was desperate to know about the Glock 17. Politicians and activists who opposed widespread ownership of guns, as well as those who favored it, formulated instant opinions on why the violent
Libyan pariah might be so fascinated by the plastic pistol. The phones at Glock, Inc., in Smyrna did not stop ringing. “We were inundated,” Walter said. “Not only media, anti-gun people, hostile people, but law enforcement, too.”

“The amazing thing was that nobody had even heard of Glock before the Anderson column,” recalled Richard Feldman, a lawyer then working as a political operative for the National Rifle Association. “ ‘Glock? What’s that? … I’ve got to see one of those.’ ”

The media-political echo chamber amplified the excitement. The
New York Times
published an editorial on February 9 headlined
HIJACKER’S SPECIAL?
that summarized the alarmist Anderson column. Mario Biaggi, the dean of the New York City delegation in the US House of Representatives, announced that he would introduce legislation to restrict non-metal firearms. In a February 26 press release, the liberal Democrat’s office described how he had confirmed the danger the Glock posed by having one of his aides carry a disassembled pistol into the Capitol: “When dismantled, the frame and magazine of the weapon, which are made of plastic, went undetected by the metal detector, and the barrel created a deceiving image on the X-ray screen.”

The next day,
USA Today
devoted its entire editorial page to plastic handguns. The paper’s editors argued that firearms like the Glock ought to be outlawed. A large cartoon showed a gun store advertising the Glock with a poster:
HIJACKER SPECIAL! PLASTIC GUNS: BEAT THE METAL DETECTORS!
In the drawing, an obsequious salesman asks a grinning Gaddafi how many Glocks he wants. The Libyan ruler, rubbing his hands together with evil glee, answers: “5,000, please!”

Two weeks later, Jack Anderson came back with a second syndicated column, recounting the Biaggi staff episode on
Capitol Hill. Josh Sugarmann, communications director of the National Coalition to Ban Handguns, a Washington lobbying group, published an opinion piece in the
Los Angeles Times
that relied heavily on the Anderson columns and was entitled
PROGRESS GIVES US GREAT NEW HANDGUN—HIJACKER SPECIAL
. Sugarmann, who would go on to start his own anti-gun organization, recalled digging up everything he could find about the Glock. The fawning reviews in the American firearm press got his attention. Glock “did a good job of creating an image for itself as being outside the gun industry,” Sugarmann told me. “That was a key selling point for them: ‘You guys have been building your guns in Quonset huts and brick factories. We’re from the future, and we are here to give you a new gun.’ ”

As the furor over the Glock built—congressional hearings were scheduled for May—several pertinent facts were obscured. The National Airport test that inspired the initial Anderson column had actually involved two handguns, not just the Glock. The Pentagon’s Noel Koch arranged to smuggle a fully assembled Heckler & Koch pistol through the security checkpoint, along with the Austrian handgun. He taped the German-made H&K, also a nine-millimeter model, to the bottom of a leather briefcase. Made entirely of metal, the H&K weighed more than the Glock and presumably should have been even easier to pick up, since it wasn’t stripped to its component parts. That neither gun was noticed indicated that the weakness at National Airport was one of ineffective detection machinery, possibly combined with inattentive security personnel. The “plastic pistol” wasn’t any more of a hijacking threat than an ordinary firearm.

Also strangely absent from the debate was that both the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the Federal
Aviation Administration had scrutinized the Glock 17 in late 1985 and determined that it did not pose a special threat. “As a result of these tests, it was determined that when put through an airport X-ray screening system, the outline was readily identifiable as a pistol,” the FAA’s director of civil aviation security, Billie H. Vincent, said in a document dated March 21, 1986. Despite the approval of these two federal agencies, major media outlets repeated and augmented the alarmist Anderson columns. “Easily concealable handguns like the Glock,”
Time
reported on April 14, 1986, “along with hard-to-detect components for putty-like explosives that are also readily available, give air pirates an edge that officials are finding increasingly difficult to counter.”

The National Rifle Association leapt to Glock’s defense, publishing supportive articles in its in-house magazine and on the opinion pages of major newspapers. Feldman, the NRA operative, was dispatched to a meeting of the US Conference of Mayors in San Juan, Puerto Rico, to hand out X-ray-machine images demonstrating that the Glock 17 could be readily identified. Unimpressed, the mayors passed a resolution calling for a ban on the manufacture and importation of plastic handguns.

In New York, Representative Biaggi’s hometown, the police department banned the Glock by name, based on its reputation as a terrorist weapon. Several states, including Maryland, South Carolina, and Hawaii, would follow suit, using a variety of regulations and laws to restrict the Austrian weapon. “It felt like there was real momentum against this one pistol, and the opposing sides in the gun-control debate were gearing up bigtime,” Feldman recalled. “Hijacking was a big concern, and
here was one pistol that supposedly the terrorists loved—or that’s what the media and some politicians said. Was this going to kill the Glock in the crib?”