DanaC
01-15-2011, 03:39 PM
Excerpt of a rather lengthy article. Has an anti-gun bias over-all, but still an interesting look at the history of the Glock.
For the complete article, see -
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_04/b4212052185280.htm
Cover Story January 13, 2011, 12:45AM EST
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
By Paul M. Barrett
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.)
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Polls show that even most people who support stricter gun control do not believe that such laws reduce crime generally. "At some basic level," Dennis Henigan, vice-president of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, acknowledges in his 2009 book, Lethal Logic, "the public is convinced that 'when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.' This belief cannot help but diminish the intensity of public support for further gun restrictions."
The rise of the Glock and other semiautomatic handguns cannot be linked to variations in overall crime rates. But that doesn't mean it would be pointless to take small steps to reduce mayhem, such as restricting magazine capacity. One lesson of Tucson is that there is a difference between a 33-round clip and an 8- or 10-round clip. The only way to make a limit work, though, would be to ban the manufacture, sale, and possession of all clips larger than the cap. Reviving a porous 1990s-style limit would backfire. Representative Carolyn McCarthy (D-N.Y.), among others, is working on a new restriction. "We are optimistic it will plug the loopholes in the 1994 law," says Kristen Rand, legislative director of the Violence Policy Center, a gun control group that is consulting on the bill. Even if quite modest, however, the provision seems unlikely to receive serious consideration in a Republican-controlled House of Representatives. Glock's victory, and that of its industry, won't be reversed anytime soon.
With Michael Riley. This article draws on Bloomberg Businessweek Assistant Managing Editor Paul M. Barrett's reporting for a forthcoming book on Glock and its influence in America, to be published by Crown in 2012.
For the complete article, see -
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_04/b4212052185280.htm
Cover Story January 13, 2011, 12:45AM EST
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
By Paul M. Barrett
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.)
-----------
Polls show that even most people who support stricter gun control do not believe that such laws reduce crime generally. "At some basic level," Dennis Henigan, vice-president of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, acknowledges in his 2009 book, Lethal Logic, "the public is convinced that 'when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.' This belief cannot help but diminish the intensity of public support for further gun restrictions."
The rise of the Glock and other semiautomatic handguns cannot be linked to variations in overall crime rates. But that doesn't mean it would be pointless to take small steps to reduce mayhem, such as restricting magazine capacity. One lesson of Tucson is that there is a difference between a 33-round clip and an 8- or 10-round clip. The only way to make a limit work, though, would be to ban the manufacture, sale, and possession of all clips larger than the cap. Reviving a porous 1990s-style limit would backfire. Representative Carolyn McCarthy (D-N.Y.), among others, is working on a new restriction. "We are optimistic it will plug the loopholes in the 1994 law," says Kristen Rand, legislative director of the Violence Policy Center, a gun control group that is consulting on the bill. Even if quite modest, however, the provision seems unlikely to receive serious consideration in a Republican-controlled House of Representatives. Glock's victory, and that of its industry, won't be reversed anytime soon.
With Michael Riley. This article draws on Bloomberg Businessweek Assistant Managing Editor Paul M. Barrett's reporting for a forthcoming book on Glock and its influence in America, to be published by Crown in 2012.