Edward Tenner The Gaston Glock Story: Why Americans Love European Guns
Jan 12 2011, 2:11 PM ET
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Writing in the National Rifle Association's American Rifleman in 2009, Industry Insider columnist Cameron Hopkins provides background:
The most significant innovations of the past 30 years, have all come from European gun companies. Even Ruger, the most innovative American gun manufacturer since World War II, has been playing catch up to the likes of Glock, HK, Beretta, Blaser, Sauer, and SIG.
In the early 80s, the U.S. Armed Forces conducted a trial to replace the venerable 1911 pistol. An Italian gun came in first (Beretta) and a Swiss-designed, German-made gun was second (SIG).
In the mid 80s, some 90 percent of U.S. law enforcement officers carried Smith & Wesson revolvers, but a change came about with the introduction of a "point gun, pull trigger" semi-automatic pistol from Austria. Glock never looked back and now controls an estimated 60 percent of the police market today with SIG and Beretta taking sizeable chunks from Smith's pie.
Glock falls into a pattern of the Central European independent engineer-inventor-entrepreneur. I've written about a few of them (Anton Lorenz [reclining chairs] and Kurt Lorber [triangular paper clips) here. But the Glock saga also shows that "only in America" doesn't happen only in America, and our unique traits good and bad are the result not of a bygone frontier but of the contemporary globe.
