Glock: America's Gun.

How Austria's Glock became
the weapon of choice for U.S.
cops, Second Amendment
enthusiasts, and mass killers
like the alleged Tucson
gunman Jared Loughner
For all the anguish and outcry in the days after a
community college dropout named Jared
Loughner allegedly sprayed a Tucson crowd with
33 bullets from a semiautomatic pistol, one
response was notably absent: any sense that
America's latest shooting spree, which killed six
people and wounded 14, including Representative
Gabrielle Giffords, would bring new restrictions
on the right to own or carry large-capacity, rapid-
fire weapons.
The gun control debate has vanished from
American politics, but it wasn't always so
invisible. Twenty years ago, when another
apparently deranged man fired a semiautomatic
pistol into a crowd, killing 23 people in Killeen,
Tex., politicians rushed the microphones to
denounce the weapon itself as "a death machine,"
as Representative John Conyers Jr., a Michigan
Democrat, put it on the floor of the House. A so-
called assault weapons ban became law three
years later. That law has now expired. Since
Loughner's attack, liberal pundits, gun control
advocates, and congressional backbenchers have
been talking about instituting new controls. The
voices that count, however, including President
Barack Obama and the congressional leaders in
both parties, have had nothing to say on the
subject.
Their silence is just one measure of how
thoroughly Gaston Glock —a former curtain-rod
maker from Austria whose company
manufactured the pistols used in Tucson and
Killeen —has managed to dominate not just the
American handgun market, but America's gun
consciousness. Before Glock arrived on the scene
in the mid-1980s, the U.S. was a revolver culture,
a place where most handguns fired five or six
shots at a measured pace, then needed to be
reloaded one bullet at a time. With its large
ammunition capacity, quick reloading, light
trigger pull, and utter reliability, the Glock was
hugely innovative —and an instant hit with police
and civilians alike. Headquartered in Deutsch-
Wagram, Austria, the company says it now
commands 65 percent of the American law
enforcement market, including the FBI and Drug
Enforcement Administration. It also controls a
healthy share of the overall $1 billion U.S.
handgun market, according to analysis of
production and excise tax data. (Precise figures
aren't available because Glock and several large
rivals, including Beretta and Sig Sauer, are
privately held.)
With all those customers and that visibility, it's no
surprise that the Glock has also been the gun of
choice for some prolific psychopaths. Byran
Uyesugi used a Glock 17 to kill seven people at a
Xerox ( XRX) office in Honolulu in 1999. Seung-Hui
Cho, who murdered 32 at Virginia Tech in 2007
before killing himself, used the same Glock 19
model that Loughner is accused of firing in
Tucson. Steven Kazmierczak packed a Glock 17
when he shot 21 people, killing five, at Northern
Illinois University in 2008.
The smooth-firing Glock did not cause these
massacres any more than it holds up
convenience stores. But when outfitted with an
extra-large magazine, it can raise the body count.
The shooters in Arizona, Illinois, Virginia, Hawaii,
and Texas could not have inflicted so many
casualties so quickly had they been armed with
old-fashioned revolvers. In its 2010 catalog, the
manufacturer boasts that while the Glock 19 is
"comparable in size and weight to the small .38
revolvers it has replaced," the pistol "is
significantly more powerful with greater
firepower and is much easier to shoot fast and
true."
The Tucson gunman demonstrated those
qualities all too vividly. Loughner is said to have
emptied his 33-round clip in a minute or two, a
feat requiring no special skill. (Glock does not sell
magazines of that size to civilians, but some of its
guns can accommodate them. The model 19
comes with a standard 15-round clip.) Loughner
was wrestled to the ground by onlookers only
when he paused to insert a fresh magazine. If he
had been forced to reload sooner, the odds are
good there would be fewer victims. Glock
executives did not respond to multiple requests
for comment.


Source: Http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_04/b4212052185280.htm