Glock The Rise of America's Gun Part 1

Glock, The Rise of America's Gun is a book that overviews all about the way Glock have raised to the top of the American markets. The beginning of the book talks about how Gaston Glock, Glocks founder, went from towel rack maker to international firearm celebrity. The first few chapters of the book set the scene for the reason why Gaston Glock became so popular in the niche market of personal defense handguns.  While Glock was working as a towel rack maker he also made knives in his garage for the Austrian military. One day while he was in the Austrian embassy he overheard two generals in the military talking about how they were going to be doing military testing for a new service pistol. Glock took this as an opportunity to ask them whether he could submit a pistol for military testing. The generals laughed in his face and effectively said yeah of course but we won’t really consider anything you have made since you don’t have your own gun company. Gaston took this as motivation and went home immediately to start designing his own handgun. He knew that he wasn’t very experienced in designing handguns but he had the talent to put all the pieces and elements together. The next thing he did that no other gun maker has ever done before was sit down the five highest ranking officials in the Austrian military and asked them what they wanted in a perfect handgun. He bought the most popular models of handguns in Austria and brought them with him when he had this meeting. The high ranking military officials told him everything they wanted ranging from grip angle, capacity, weight, and reliability. Gaston went back to his work shop and took only a year to perfect his initial design for a polymer pistol which held 17 + 1 rounds and recoiled substantially less than any gun back in the 80’s anywhere in the world. The first issue once Glock’s became popular in America was the way the gun was composed of 50% polymer and the common misconception that the media caused all Americans to over react was that terrorisms would become aware of this fact and use it to take down airplanes. This reaction was before 9/11 when all the security was still in its adolescent period of early prediction of possible threats. During the initial year span of American hysteria about Glock, many gun shops banned the gun from being sold behind their counters. The thing most people didn’t predict with the banning of Glock in gun stores across the country was how popular it became. In the gun industry whenever a specific weapon gets negative publicity it actually works inversely for the amount of demand there is for the gun in American markets. Once the ban of Glock was lifted after a NYPD police chief was caught “testing” out the new option for his police officers to carry. Immediately the American gun industry changed once Glock was allowed to be sold. The original pre-brady ban Glock sold like hot cakes because during the time when they were originally released the Brady Assault Weapons Ban was in the adolescent stages of becoming law. Anytime that a future president is coming into office or any legislation that is going to limit gun rights there is always a frenzy to buy all the weapons that will be banned or limited.