There's not many of the old weapons greats around these days. Bart Beretta died in the 16th century. O.F. Winchester went in the 1880s. Horace Smith and Daniel Wesson are long in their graves. The iconic names we know in the gun world all hail from decades and centuries past.
Arguably alone in modern decades among the world's great gun fathers was Gaston Glock, who passed away on Wednesday:
Gaston Glock, the inventor of the ubiquitous gun bearing his name, died on Wednesday. He was 94.
The Glock company announced his death on its website, without giving a cause or other details.
The Glock is universal in mainstream culture, from use in over 65% of US federal, state and local agencies, according to the company, to a staple reference in media, movies, books and songs.
The Glock is indeed "universal in mainstream culture;" even the name of the gun itself has become synonymous with handguns (at least among people who know little about guns themselves). And as for the memes, well, that's half Glock's legacy alone!
And yet the gun was introduced only in the 1980s. So, how did it come to be so ubiquitous in the modern world?
That success is doubly more astounding when you learn that Glock himself had no experience manufacturing firearms prior to the success of his eponymous weapon. He was a curtain rods manufacturer at the start!
But his newcomer status arguably played a role in the success in question:
Glock ... started with a blank piece of paper. He came up with a gun design before he even had a gun factory. So a factory was built to produce this particular gun and as a result of that, the factory is almost uniquely efficient, and the gun has been uniquely profitable as a result
Among the gun's advantages, which have made it a favorite of law enforcement the world over, include larger magazine capacities, a lighter frame, and a smaller number of component parts with more 3rd-party accessories. Even though other manufacturers have arguably caught up to Glock, and even surpassed them in some respects (the Sig P365 really caught them with their pants down, for example).
So if you've got a bunch of Glock 17s or a bunch of Glock 19s you can shuffle all the parts around and put them into any gun, which makes them very appealing to police departments that have hundreds or thousands of weapons.
To be sure, there are tradeoffs to that kind of efficiency. The Glock is a uniquely ugly weapon. It will never win any beauty contests. Compared to the manly, distinctly American lines and curves of, say, an M1911...
...the Glock looks more like a Brutalist chip off a Soviet block, just a big old dumb blocky gun.
And every time they release a new pistol, you can expect it to look almost identical to the last model.
But the Glock is loved for its reliability, customization, and a grip angle that fans say better matches the natural angle of the thumb/wrist/forearm. It pioneered internal safeties that are now the norm on the market, allowing owners to get on target without messing with external safeties that delay them in situations where milliseconds count.
(At least one Fudd in the comments will argue with me about that one 😂)
In honor of Glock, I'll leave this video of YouTube gun legend Hickok45 and his 23-minute video firing every 9mm Glock available at the time.
Not bad for a curtain-rod man, all things considered!
R.I.P. Gaston Glock, 1929-2023.
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