About eighty people were crowded into Luby’s café in Killeen, Texas, eating lunch on October 16, 1991, when George Hennard, a thirty-five-year-old former merchant marine, crashed his pickup truck through the plate-glass front of the restaurant. Some customers, thinking the vehicle was out of control, moved to help the injured. Then Hennard began shooting.
“He was firing at anyone he could shoot,” said Luby’s patron Sam Wink. He “had tons of ammo on him.” Another witness described him shooting “as fast as he could pull the trigger.” When he emptied one seventeen-round magazine in his Glock 17, he inserted a fresh one. Some witnesses said Hennard spoke to his victims as he approached them. “Was it worth it?” he asked before pulling the trigger of the Glock.
Hennard’s fellow residents in Belton, Texas, would describe him as a strange man. On occasion, he came out of his house screaming. He had sent neighbor Jane Bugg a rambling letter about “treacherous female vipers … who tried to destroy me and my family.” Bugg gave the letter to police, but they did not investigate.
On the day of the attack, Texas state law enforcement officials happened to be leading a class for local police officers in Killeen. The coincidence probably saved a number of lives. Cops arrived less than ten minutes after Hennard started shooting. They found the café floor covered with glass, blood, and spent ammunition. The police opened fire and wounded Hennard, who retreated into a hallway leading to the restaurant’s restrooms. Trapped, he shot himself fatally in the head. But by then, he had killed twenty-two people and injured many more. At the time, it was the worst mass shooting in United States history.
An investigation revealed that Hennard had purchased the Glock legally. It was swiftly traced by its serial number to the company plant in Smyrna, which told the police that the gun had been sold to a distributor in Sparks, Nevada. The distributor transferred it, legally, to Mike’s Gun House, a federal firearms license holder in Henderson, Nevada. Mike’s sold the Glock to Hennard, who at the time was staying in Henderson with his mother. Hennard provided the salesclerk with all of the information requested on the registration form required in Clark County, Nevada, a jurisdiction that had relatively stringent rules governing gun purchases. The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department ran a criminal background check on Hennard, but it turned up only a 1981 misdemeanor arrest for marijuana possession in El Paso. A felony conviction would have disqualified him from owning the weapon; the misdemeanor dope arrest did not.
On the day Hennard made history in Killeen, the US House of Representatives was debating proposals to tighten national rules about gun ownership. House members gathered in the Capitol to consider a major anti-crime bill, a version of which the Senate had passed in July. Republicans and Democrats were waging a raucous political contest to claim the title of toughest crime-busters.
House Republicans added provisions to the bill that would broaden the kinds of cases eligible for the death penalty and give prosecutors more leeway to use illegally obtained evidence. The most heated debate focused on provisions in the anti-crime bill that banned guns classified as “assault weapons” and put restrictions on high-capacity magazines. As drafted, the legislation limited magazines to no more than seven rounds, fewer than half the number in the magazine of a Glock 17.
Several hours into the debate, news broke about the Killeen killings. Lawmakers seized on the horrific reports to score rhetorical points. George W. Gekas, a Pennsylvania Republican, said the Luby’s massacre showed that more crimes deserved capital punishment. Most Democrats drew a different lesson: that semiautomatic weapons and large magazines should be curbed. “Twenty-two people died,” said Charles Schumer of New York, then a House member. “Maybe they didn’t have to.” The Glock 17 wasn’t one of the weapons on the list of thirteen guns to be banned, but the seventeen-round magazines Hennard used would be outlawed if the proposed legislation passed.
The clash over high-capacity weapons intensified the next day. Harold Volkmer of Missouri, a conservative Democrat in the camp of the National Rifle Association, put forward amendments that would do away with the bans on assault weapons and large-capacity magazines. James Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsin Republican, derided the notion that a seven-round limit would have made a difference in Killeen. “The killer was in the cafeteria for over ten minutes,” he said. “He had plenty of time to change clips, and apparently he did.”
Ed Feighan, an Ohio Democrat and one of his party’s more vociferous anti-gun proponents, rose to oppose the Volkmer amendments. “I would have thought that yesterday in Killeen, Texas, this body had run out of time for posturing on this crime bill, or pandering to one of the most powerful special-interest groups in the country,” Feighan said. Weapons commonly used for hunting would not be affected by the legislation, he argued. Rather, the firearms at issue were the AK-47 and its military-style brethren. “And we are talking about seventeen-round magazine clips on guns like the Glock nine-millimeter that was used yesterday afternoon to kill twenty-two innocent Americans.” John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat, also lashed out at the Austrian pistol: “Innocent people lost their lives to a gunman whose import Glock 17 was a death machine which fed bullet after murderous bullet in the firing chamber.”
Amid all the speechifying, few lawmakers wavered in their views. One who did, setting gun-control hearts racing, was Representative Chet Edwards. The Killeen massacre took place in his home district. A Democrat of moderate-to-conservative views, Edwards said the killings had caused him to rethink his long-standing opposition to tough gun control. “For me the old arguments ring hollow,” Edwards said. “It’s a human story now, a human tragedy, and I just simply have to vote to put some limit on assault weapons that could be used by drug kingpins and crazed killers to murder innocent victims.” He added that if the magazine limit were already law, “the killer could not have had seventeen bullets in each clip, and we could have perhaps saved lives.”
“It was not the pistol that caused those deaths,” countered Volkmer. He deplored the bloodshed but said the proposed curbs would not have prevented it. “If it was not a pistol,” he said, “it could easily have been a rifle; if not a rifle, a shotgun; if not a shotgun, a can of gasoline.”
President George H. W. Bush expressed himself similarly in a television interview broadcast during the debate. Two years earlier, in a move that enraged the NRA, Bush had used an executive order to stop the importation of certain semiautomatic assault weapons. He had done so at the urging of his anti-drug czar, William Bennett. The administration suffered politically, and Bush now tried to mend fences with pro-gun forces. “Obviously, when you see somebody go berserk and get a weapon and go in and murder people, of course it troubles me,” the president said. “But what I don’t happen to have the answer to is can you legislate that behavior away.… I don’t believe there is one federal law that is going to rule against aberrant behavior of that nature.”
At the end of the debate, the House voted 247–177 against limiting assault weapons and magazine capacity.
In Smyrna, Karl Walter held a news conference the day after the shooting, expressing sorrow for the victims and their families. But he waved off suggestions that the Glock’s design exacerbated the carnage in Killeen. You can’t blame an inanimate object for the actions of a madman, he said. In fact, what happened at Luby’s illustrated why there should be fewer restrictions on handgun use. If more Americans had legal access to Glocks, he argued, the murders in Texas could have been kept to a minimum. “If there had been one armed person there,” he said, “it would have stopped.”
Walter was not prone to self-doubt. The Glock was a phenomenal commercial success. He took offense that anyone would criticize it. Beginning with production for the United States of 25,000 pistols in 1985 and 1986, Glock had more than tripled that figure in 1989. In 1990, Glock shipped 120,000 handguns to the States. Several thousand law enforcement agencies across the country had purchased Glock 17s, putting a serious dent in Smith & Wesson’s near monopoly on the police handgun market.
And as a result of the company’s low costs, Gaston Glock was enjoying extraordinary profits. In the space of a few years, he had become a multimillionaire, and his lifestyle shifted accordingly. The once-frugal engineer acquired a yacht and a BMW Series 7 sedan. His company bought gleaming executive jets—one for the United States, one for Austria. Glock, who held a pilot’s license, flew the aircraft himself, with a professional copilot. He enjoyed the airplane pilot’s relative isolation, explaining: “There are fewer crazy people in the air.”
In Velden, Glock built a more spacious vacation villa and spent lavishly at two-star Michelin restaurants, glitzy nightclubs, and high-end casinos. He did not try to join high society in Vienna, however. He did not become a patron of the arts or hobnob with diplomats or international bankers. If he dined out in Austria’s worldly capital, he did not create a sensation among other patrons. The newspapers did not report on his comings and goings.
Glock also retained his middle-class affection for bargains. When in Atlanta, he took extended trips to Home Depot for discount plastic bathroom fixtures, which he shipped back to Velden. He outfitted the bedrooms of his five-story villa with inexpensive mattresses bought in bulk at a Georgia shopping mall. While Glock traveled first class to and from Europe, he diligently kept the giveaway airline toiletries and hoarded perfumed soap from the fancy hotels he patronized.
Glock was the sort of boss who monitored closely the company’s expenses, including what he paid his top executives. He was very aware that Karl Walter was profiting handsomely. In addition to a salary, Walter’s contract with Glock provided that he would receive a small percentage of the company’s US revenue. To his surprise, and Gaston Glock’s, that commission had ballooned to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year—not bad for an immigrant gun salesman who once trundled from town to town selling rifles from an RV. With the likelihood that Walter’s total compensation would soon hit seven figures, jealous grumbling began to be heard among less-well-remunerated Glock aides back in Austria. “Some who had Mr. Glock’s ear,” Wolfgang Riedl recalled, “asked whether Karl was getting too big for his pants.”
Despite the setback in the House of Representatives, gun-control advocates and the media kept the spotlight focused on Glock. “The Glock 17,” the New York Times reported, “is popular with drug dealers and at one time was banned by the New York City Police Department, which feared that terrorists could sneak it through airport metal detectors.” But the Times offered no evidence that drug dealers preferred Glocks. The paper did note that the NYPD “recently bought 1,000 of the pistols,” which were also being used “by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Customs agents, the Secret Service, and more than 4,000 other federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies, including the New York State Police.”
Contrary to the Times ’ assertion about the Glock’s popularity with criminals, federal traces of guns recovered from crime scenes showed that compared to its rivals, the Glock was not a weapon of choice on the street. In June 1992, the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms reported the top eighteen models of the nearly fifty-seven thousand handguns seized by law enforcement and traced during 1990 and 1991. The Glock 17 ranked last, meaning it was recovered the least often at crime scenes. The most common crime gun, according to the ATF, was the .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver, almost certainly because it had been on the market for generations, and millions of the guns circulated on the legitimate used market and on the black market. Filling out the top five, in descending order, were: a cheap and unreliable .25-caliber pistol made by Raven Arms; an inexpensive Davis Industries .380 (like the Raven, a type of handgun often referred to as a Saturday Night Special); the nine-millimeter Smith & Wesson Model 3904 semiautomatic, with an eight-round capacity; and the heavy-duty Colt .45, another model that had been sold for many decades. For all of its notoriety, the Glock was less popular with criminals than the older S&W and Colt or the junky Raven and Davis.
These statistics did little to blunt the fulminating of editorialists who condemned the Glock’s lethal force. “It is one in a class of weapons known as ‘assassin’s guns,’ ” the Houston Chronicle stated. The paper quoted Bernard Horn, state legislative director for the Washington-based nonprofit Handgun Control Inc., as saying that the Austrian pistol, equipped with its large magazine, was one reason police were “outgunned.” Civilians, Horn said, “have no business with magazines this size.”
Despite what Handgun Control and newspaper editorial boards might have assumed, continuing attacks on the Glock only seemed to enhance its image in the eyes of potential buyers. Whenever gun-control advocates announce that citizens should not have access to a certain handgun, firearm enthusiasts are prone to take a closer look. “This kind of media reporting does not hurt sales,” Karl Walter asserted.
The Killeen killings actually inspired some people to consider buying a gun for the first time. Two months after the massacre, the Dallas Morning News published a feature on the post-Killeen gun boomlet in middle-class north Texas. The Bullet Trap, a gun shop in suburban Plano, told the paper it had seen an increase in registration for its gun-safety courses and a related uptick in handgun sales. Pete Waldroop, a twenty-three-year-old computer engineer, said he had never considered owning a gun. Then “I saw the Killeen thing and thought I ought to know more.” He paid $59 to take a beginner’s class at the Bullet Trap, where he tried out several models in the store’s indoor range. A few days later, after some more practice, Waldroop returned to the Bullet Trap and paid $459.95 for a Glock 17. He kept the pistol in a briefcase beside his bed.
Suzanna Gratia Hupp, too, became a pro-gun activist as a result of Killeen. A chiropractor, she was eating lunch at Luby’s with her parents when Hennard crashed through the restaurant’s glass front. After Hennard started shooting, Suzanna and her seventy-one-year-old father flipped their table to provide cover. She reached into her purse for the .38 Smith & Wesson Chief’s Special she usually carried. After groping around for a few seconds, she realized that on that day, of all days, she had left the revolver in her car. Suzanna’s father, a World War II vet who didn’t own a firearm, charged at Hennard. The gunman shot him fatally in the chest. And when Suzanna’s mother tried to comfort her dying husband, Hennard killed her, too. Suzanna survived, and in the wake of the tragedy, she became an advocate for relaxing laws on when and where civilians may carry concealed handguns.
In testimony before legislatures in Texas and other states, she spoke of her painful regret at leaving her revolver in her parked automobile at Luby’s. “My state has gun-control laws,” she told lawmakers in Missouri in March 1992. “It did not keep Hennard from coming in and killing everybody.” Elected to the Texas House of Representatives, Hupp became a nationally known gun-rights activist who appeared on television programs such as the CBS Evening News and ABC’s World News Tonight . The NRA gave her a life membership and its Women’s Freedom Award. Texas changed its gun-permit statute in 1995 to make it easier for residents to carry concealed handguns.