In the United States, a company manufacturing a handheld product that launches metal projectiles at high velocity eventually will encounter lawsuits. Whatever one thinks of plaintiffs’ lawyers or the large corporations they sue, the prevalence of legal skirmishing is as much a fact of American life as the pervasiveness of automobiles, fast food, and firearms. Glock was no exception.
The company’s internal legal files offer an unusual window on how Glock, Inc., dealt with the challenges posed by the plaintiffs’ bar. A sampling of company records from 1991 and 1992 listed nineteen accidental injuries involving Glocks. There may have been more; these were the ones the company acknowledged. Eleven of the cases by mid-1992 had led to lawsuits.
Some of the cases concerned pistols that allegedly malfunctioned, harming the owner. Others involved shootings in which the gun operated properly but someone pulled the trigger unintentionally. In these latter instances, the victim blamed the Glock’s design.
Yet another set of six suits were labeled “container” cases, referring to the padded plastic box in which Glocks were sold. The box resembled a miniature black suitcase. It had a handle for transporting the pistol—say, to a firing range—and, inside, it had room for a spare magazine and ammo. A small post in the box was meant to protrude through the trigger guard and keep the gun in place. The post was the problem.
Some users stored their pistol with a round in the chamber, ready to fire. If the box were jostled, so that the post contacted the trigger, the gun could go off, as it did in the case of Marshall Rosen. “Claimant removed his Glock 17 from its holster, removed the loaded magazine and unloaded same,” the file on Rosen states. “He then placed the pistol into the container, and it discharged. Injuries to the left hand (palm). Tendon and severe nerve damage requiring surgery. Permanent disfigurement.” Another Glock owner, Mark Herman, similarly shot himself in the left hand, sustaining “permanent disability.”
When informed of the box accidents, Gaston Glock “wanted to blame the dumb Americans,” according to one former longtime company employee in the United States. “They should know better than to store the gun loaded.” Mr. Glock showed little regard for the American business credo of “the customer is always right.”
Callous as this might seem, the Austrian manufacturer did have a legitimate point. The user manual that came with each pistol stressed emptying the gun before storing it. The owner was told to remove the magazine and check the chamber to make sure there was not a round left there. Following those instructions would preclude exploding gun boxes.
Still, as a practical matter, some people, especially homeowners who thought of their Glock as protection against intruders, were bound to keep it loaded and ready to fire. Others were careless. The file on Mark Herman noted that he “forgot his Glock 17 was loaded and placed it into the storage container.” Such accidents were eminently foreseeable.
A more high-minded company might have announced a recall in the name of consumer safety, issued an apology, and established a claims process to pay victims’ medical bills. That did not happen at Gaston Glock’s company; confessions of fallibility were not his style.
Paul Jannuzzo, Glock’s corporate counsel, knew the carrying case was poorly designed. Many in the company knew—almost everyone, apparently, except the founder. Fighting the cases in court made no sense, because Glock might lose, piquing the interest of the plaintiffs’ bar. Since a recall and apology were out of the question, Jannuzzo moved quietly to put out legal brushfires as they ignited. If injured Glock owners were persistent, they received a settlement—in exchange for which they had to sign binding legal papers promising not to discuss the case or the flawed gun box. Marshall Rosen got $95,000 to drop his suit; Mark Herman, $99,000. Wounded Glock owners who failed to hire a good lawyer received little or nothing for their trouble.
As a result of Glock’s efficiently executed policy of settlement-and-silence, some gun owners who might have been alerted sooner to the peril learned about it the hard way. No one knows how many people shot themselves or others before Glock changed the box design in the early 1990s to one where the handgun rested securely in heavy foam, without a post that could contact the trigger.
Carrying cases were not the only hazard of owning a Glock, of course. Firearms, like lawn mowers or microwave ovens or motorcycles, occasionally malfunction. The reason could be bad parts, a mistake in assembly, or recklessness by the user. The world is full of imperfections and misfortune. When guns break down—and all brands of firearms suffer glitches from time to time—it’s not uncommon for someone to get hurt.
The Glock legal files describe a suit filed by Jeffrey A. Gueno, an Air Force captain who badly injured his right index finger when his Glock 21 .45-caliber “exploded in his hand.” Gueno, an experienced firearm user who was practicing at a range, “alleged that Glock placed on the market a product in defective condition which is unsafe for its intended use.”
When confronted by such cases, Jannuzzo had one overriding initial objective, he told me: “Get the gun.” The company lawyer made sure that Glock recovered the supposedly substandard pistol for examination and, if the case were to be settled, destruction. He did not want faulty Glocks being passed around, and possibly photographed, to the detriment of the manufacturer’s reputation.
The company’s inspection of Captain Gueno’s Glock attributed the accident to the plaintiff’s ammunition, rather than his pistol. “There was no indication of any obstruction having been lodged in the barrel,” the file states. “The damage to the pistol was caused by an ammunition failure–related problem.”
Ammunition can fail in several ways. A batch of rounds may be poorly fabricated, leading some to disintegrate. Shoddy ammunition may jam as it moves from the magazine to the chamber or from the chamber to the barrel. To save money, some gun owners “reload” ammo, using basement hand-crank machines to insert new lead bullets into spent brass cases they collect at the shooting range. Unless it’s done expertly, reloading can lead to problems. Glock explicitly voided its warranty if the customer used reloaded ammunition.
The company’s determination in the Gueno case was that the plaintiff’s factory-made ammunition was of poor quality and lacked full-metal jacketing or plating. This was often the company’s response when confronted with the claim of a malfunctioning pistol. Glock instructed users from the outset to buy top-grade, factory-made, full-jacketed ammunition. Rounds that have exposed lead because they are not fully jacketed, whether those rounds are reloaded or factory-made, are much more likely to produce malfunctions in Glocks than in certain other handguns, as a result of the kind of rifling in Glock barrels.
Rifling refers to the spiraling grooves in a gun barrel that cause the bullet to spin in flight. The rotation stabilizes the bullet, increasing accuracy. Traditional rifling incorporates twisting lands and grooves. With an exposed-lead bullet, the lands actually engrave the projectile’s relatively soft metal. Gaston Glock designed his barrel with polygonal flat sides: six or eight, depending on the caliber. Polygonal rifling provides a superior bullet-to-barrel seal when jacketed or plated ammunition is used. “This leads to an increase in velocity over conventional cut rifle barrels of the same length,” according to The Complete Glock Reference Guide , a volume published independently of the manufacturer. However, the Guide continues, “the lack of lands in the polygonal rifled Glock barrel tends to allow a lead bullet to skip down the bore rather than spin, leaving larger lead deposits, while creating buildup and reducing the bore diameter.” In a barrel constricted by lead detritus, excessive pressure can accumulate, leading to an explosion, or what the reference book politely calls “a Glock KB (Ka-Boom).” The easiest way to prevent ka-booms is to use jacketed or plated bullets, as Glock admonishes its users to do.
Jeffrey Gueno may or may not have used substandard ammunition. In any event, he was not the sort of plaintiff Jannuzzo wanted to fight in court: a clean-cut Air Force captain who many jurors would assume knew how to handle a gun. Gueno offered to drop his suit for $24,000, not an extravagant amount. The company legal file suggested that the case “should be settled on economic analysis, i.e., less expensive to settle than defend.” Jannuzzo listed an “anticipated expense” of only $14,000, indicating his expectation that Gueno, whose medical bills were paid by the military, would agree to the lower amount. (The file doesn’t indicate the company’s actual payout.)
As a result, the entire potentially embarrassing episode—labeled a “catastrophic failure” in the Glock records—disappeared from public view. Glock, Inc., obtained the damaged gun and disposed of it. Upon receiving settlement, Gueno swore in writing not to discuss the incident.
In a memo dated December 17, 1992, Jannuzzo urged Gaston Glock to sign off on a joint settlement in which the company would share the costs of a confidential $20,000 payment with the ammunition manufacturer Olin/Winchester. “It is important to note that Olin/Winchester Corporation has approximately 30 damaged Glock pistols at their facility,” the attorney wrote. “Should this case be tried, it is safe to assume that those pistols will be presented as evidence, which would have a destructive and widespread effect for Glock Inc.” The complaint, brought by a US Customs agent named Wernli, whose .45-caliber Glock 21 had exploded, causing a “crush injury to the distal tip of his right index finger,” was resolved out of court. The damaged guns did not surface.
On occasion, Glock employees in Smyrna testing pistols as they arrived from Austria identified mechanical problems before the guns were shipped to users. Senior executives in Austria typically had a short and impatient reaction to any suggestion of a flaw: “Impossible!”
In 1998, Smyrna discovered a batch of .40-caliber Glock 22s that mysteriously jammed even when loaded with appropriate ammo. “These malfunctions were very difficult to clear and could not be cleared with the normal ‘tap, rack’ drill,” according to a February 12, 1998, memo addressed to Gaston Glock. “Law enforcement officers see this type of stoppage as a serious failure and one which has life-threatening implications.”
When executives in Austria brushed off the concern, saying the balky guns merely needed to be “broken in,” Jannuzzo followed up with a sharply worded letter to his employer. The notion of having to break in a new handgun, he wrote, “flies in the face of the Glock pistol’s reputation as being the best-shooting semiautomatic ‘out of the box.’ ”
There is no evidence that Glock 22 jams were a widespread problem. But neither is there any indication that the company warned its customers, police or civilian, that at least some .40-caliber guns might not work properly. When questions about defects have arisen, Glock has consistently maintained that every single pistol is carefully tested and, if used correctly, functions without flaw.
Yet another category of legal complaints about the Glock focused on the negligent or criminal misuse of handguns, sometimes by someone other than the owner. This kind of suit first began cropping up against gun manufacturers in the early 1980s. Under traditional American injury law, the intervention of a third party—the curious child who foolishly shoots a friend, the convenience-store robber who attacks a clerk—was thought to break the chain of liability between the victim and the manufacturer. But since the 1960s, some US judges and law professors had been expanding theories of liability to give injury victims a better chance of finding a defendant with deep pockets. The consumer-protection movement led by Ralph Nader reinforced this trend and helped turn up new evidence that manufacturers often knew more than they liked to admit about hazards associated with their products. Rising crime rates in the 1970s and 1980s added a sense of urgency to the gun-control movement and prompted some activists to turn their attention to the courts, as well as the legislature, as a venue where they might rein in companies that make and sell firearms.
Initially, the targets of these innovative suits were manufacturers and retailers of inexpensive, unreliable “Saturday Night Specials”: revolvers and pistols that could be purchased for as little as $29 and were favorites of stickup artists, drug dealers, and cash-strapped residents of inner-city neighborhoods who feared those criminals. Lawyers representing accident and crime victims argued that Saturday Night Specials had no redeeming social value; they couldn’t plausibly be marketed for target shooting, hunting, or police work. By their very nature, according to this view, cheap handguns were meant only to kill people and therefore were “unreasonably hazardous.”
The plaintiffs’ argument had visceral appeal to gun foes, but also significant weaknesses: As a matter of economics and fairness, it didn’t address the concerns of people living in violence-ridden neighborhoods who might seek to defend themselves with cut-rate handguns. More broadly, suits seeking to hold gun manufacturers responsible for crime and negligence implicitly demanded that juries look away from the role of the person who pulled the trigger. While suits over individual guns that exploded in the hands of their users sometimes resulted in plaintiffs’ verdicts or settlements, most courts were hostile to claims that handgun makers should be liable for the misuse of otherwise lawful articles of commerce. The product, after all, was supposed to fire bullets; that there was risk should have surprised no one. Even in a period of expanding liability theories, there were limits to what judges would tolerate.
Despite the failure of most manufacturer-liability suits stemming from crime and negligence, the litigation continued into the 1990s. Plaintiffs’ lawyers thought that if they achieved just a few breakthroughs, gun companies would be intimidated into a series of lucrative settlements. Some of the suits were sponsored by gun-control organizations willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on the litigation, no matter how unlikely the odds, because the mere existence of legal combat drew attention to their cause. In this environment, gun opponents inevitably took aim at Glock, given the Austrian-based company’s success and profitability. Maybe its unusual design would make it more vulnerable to legal attack, or so the plaintiffs’ attorneys and activists hoped.
Of course, Glock did not make Saturday Night Specials. By the late 1980s, the lowest end of the handgun market was dominated by a group of small interlocking companies based in Southern California. According to police departments, the Austrian pistol had ample social value as a tool to fight crime. It wasn’t cheap, and it clearly was suitable as a target pistol or home-defense weapon. What distinguished the Glock from other handguns was that it was easier to fire and it lacked an external safety lever. These differences troubled some people, and not just gun-control advocates.
In May 1988, a team of FBI shooting instructors involved in the federal agency’s arduous process of replacing its revolvers issued a skeptical internal evaluation of the Glock. “Unintentional discharges of the first shot lead to safety and liability issues in view of the manner handguns are routinely used by FBI agents,” the report noted. This wasn’t the last word on the topic; in fact, other FBI officials came to think highly of the Glock. By the mid-1990s, the agency was arming thousands of agents with the Austrian pistol. But the early FBI evaluation indicated hesitations about the fast-firing firearm.
Herbert Timm, the police chief of the Chicago suburb of Winnetka, lobbied his village board to buy Glocks for his small force, only to embarrass himself with the new pistol. “I was transferring the gun from the holster I was wearing into another holster in the desk drawer, and assumed—which is something that no one should ever do—that it was not loaded,” he told the Chicago Sun-Times . It was loaded. “I pulled the trigger, and it fired into the wall just below the ceiling.” Luckily, no one was hurt. “I’ve been a policeman for twenty-five years,” Timm said, “and never had an accidental discharge of a weapon.”
Negligence with guns has occurred as long as there have been guns. Visit any older police station, and you may notice posters and photographs in odd places: very high and very low on the walls. Remove the strangely placed decorations, and behind them you will find bullet holes.
In some places, the arrival of the Glock almost certainly contributed to a surge in unintentional firing. When the Metropolitan Police Department of Washington, DC, switched to the Austrian pistol in 1989, Gary Hankins, chairman of the Fraternal Order of Police labor committee, announced: “We’ve got the right gun.… This is going to make all of us feel better out there on the streets.” Almost immediately, however, Washington cops began shooting themselves and each other. The Washington Post found that in the decade after the 3,800-person department adopted the Glock, more than 120 accidental discharges occurred, with 19 serious officer injuries. The police mistakenly wounded nine DC citizens and killed one. The skein of accidents resulted in the city government paying out millions of dollars to settle lawsuits.
Looking back, DC officials concluded that the fiasco stemmed from an unhappy coincidence of three factors. The department, responding to generational turnover and rising crime, hired fifteen hundred new officers in just eighteen months. It then failed to train many of the rookies. Recruits often received only three days of firing-range instruction, rather than the goal of ten. “They just rushed through this stuff,” said Lowell Duckett, a retired instructor at the DC Police Academy. The final factor was putting an easy-to-fire Glock in the hands of each and every one of the underprepared new officers. The Austrian pistol is an excellent first firearm because it is so simple and light. But without expert guidance, a novice is probably more likely to make a dangerous mistake with a Glock than with another pistol or revolver.
Police departments from Tampa to Tucson reported accidental shootings soon after changing over to the Glock pistol. In November 1990, Richard Johnson, an officer with the Port Huron Police Department in Michigan, “was in his patrol car when he removed the gun from its holster,” the Glock legal files note. “As he did so, the gun discharged, shooting him in the left foot.” The following year he sued the manufacturer, alleging that the Glock’s unusual “trigger safety” was inherently dangerous.
Glock countered that Officer Johnson had handled his firearm too casually. Like Captain Gueno of the Air Force, Johnson sought only modest damages, described in his suit as “in excess of $10,000.” In his file, Jannuzzo wrote: “Should be settled for less than it would cost to defend” and added an anticipated outlay of $12,000. Glock settled dozens of suits in this manner, with little or no fanfare.
On occasion, plaintiffs and their lawyers held out for bigger payoffs. One such clash occurred in Knoxville, Tennessee, as a result of a disastrous encounter in the early-morning hours of July 9, 1991.
Cheryl Darlene Grant and her husband, Benny, both in their early forties, had driven back to Knoxville after attending a concert. Police said that they noticed the Grants’ late-model Camaro speeding. In the ensuing chase, Benny Grant jumped out of the Camaro, while his wife drove off. Eventually cornered, Cheryl Grant rammed a police cruiser and started to run. Patrolman Danny Wagner chased her on foot. The officer said that Grant turned and reached behind her back, as if to draw a weapon. He pulled out his Glock. When the cop finally caught up to Grant, they tussled, causing him to fire accidentally. A single shot smashed into Grant’s head, killing her. As he tried to holster his handgun, Wagner fired a second errant round into the pavement. Grant had consumed alcohol and cocaine that evening, but she was not armed.
The city of Knoxville and Wagner jointly settled with the Grant family by paying them $130,000. But the Knoxville PD didn’t abandon the Glock as its duty weapon; in fact, it subsequently traded in its nine-millimeter Glock 17s for .40-caliber Glock 22s. (Wagner kept his job on the force.)
Grant’s relatives, represented by prominent local plaintiffs’ attorneys Bob and Wayne Ritchie, a father-and-son duo, sued Glock for $7.2 million. As with Officer Johnson in Port Huron, the woman’s family alleged that the basic design of the Glock 17 was “unreasonably dangerous.” The manufacturer knowingly made a risky product, the relatives claimed, and should have foreseen accidents such as the one in Knoxville.
The lawsuit described the Glock 17’s key selling points as flaws—specifically, that its trigger pull was too light, that the distance the trigger had to travel was too short, and that the gun’s lack of an external safety lever made it a deadly hazard. “Glock Perfection,” the company’s sales slogan, was shoved back in Gaston Glock’s face.
“The very idea that anyone would criticize his invention offended Mr. Glock, let alone that they would sue him,” Jannuzzo explained. “When accidents happened, Mr. Glock assumed it was the user’s fault, and usually it was. Be that as it may, we were getting sued more and more often all around the country.”
Sometimes, Jannuzzo advised that his employer put on a full-dress courtroom defense to send a message to plaintiffs’ lawyers that Glock was not a patsy. Seeking a jury verdict against the company would be time-consuming, expensive, and probably not successful. With millions at stake in the Knoxville case, the company didn’t even offer to settle.
The plaintiffs’ side put Officer Wagner on the witness stand. He testified that he had pulled his Glock as he chased Cheryl Grant because he feared being shot. He regretted the death but suggested that the pistol, not he, was at fault. He told the jury that after the accident, he remained on the beat and now carried what he considered a less dangerous handgun: a nine-millimeter pistol made by Smith & Wesson. (Knoxville allowed its officers to choose from a short list of authorized weapons.) Wagner told the jury that the S&W took a full twelve pounds of pull on the trigger to fire, instead of the five required for the Glock. “I didn’t feel that the [Austrian] weapon was safe,” he testified.
The jury learned that the Knoxville PD could have bought its Glocks with five-pound or eight-pound trigger weights; the company offered both. Knoxville chose the lighter weight, on the theory that it made shooters more accurate and was more manageable by officers with less hand strength. Wagner testified that the Smith & Wesson also had a much longer “trigger travel”: one and a quarter inches, compared to the Glock’s half inch.
The plaintiffs’ team elicited testimony from a retired FBI agent and forensics consultant, who reinforced Wagner’s position on trigger pull and trigger travel. “I think that the [Glock] has a tremendous allure for many police agencies because it is easy to shoot; it is easy to shoot it well,” said the ex–FBI man, Donald Bassett. “Those agencies are not aware of the safety deficiencies of trigger design, or they simply ignore those, or consider them inconsequential in favor of ease.”
Nonsense, countered Ronald Grimm, the company’s locally hired defense lawyer. If you pull the trigger of a Glock, he argued, it will fire. That is what it is supposed to do. Officer Wagner should not have had his index finger on the trigger as he tried to subdue the suspect.
The defense called a Knoxville PD weapons expert to the stand. He testified that Officer Wagner had violated the department’s safety rules when he chased Grant with his finger on the trigger of his Glock 17. The Knoxville government essentially sided with the Austrian manufacturer, leaving its police officer to take the fall.
Why would the city blame Wagner but not fire him? Knoxville apparently sought to resolve its liability without acknowledging flaws in its training methods. By keeping Wagner on salary, quickly settling with the victim’s family for $130,000, and admitting no wrongdoing, the city dodged the threat of a multimillion-dollar payout.
As his star witness, Grimm summoned Gaston Glock. Putting the Austrian engineer on the stand was not an obvious call. One reason to do so was that the Knoxville jury would be curious to hear from the man whose invention was at the center of the dispute. When talking about his pistol, Glock came across as self-assured. He spoke slowly, with a certain gravitas. On the other hand, he could also come off as arrogant and supercilious, especially when dealing with Americans.
During a pretrial deposition in November 1993, all of these qualities were evident. “We have such an incredible success,” Glock boasted. “It certainly can be said that based upon our economic success, our system functions without a flaw.” Would jurors see him as condescending or supremely confident? Questioned sharply by plaintiffs’ lawyers in the deposition, he never gave an inch. “With our weapon,” Glock said, “it is possible with a lightning-fast move to instinctively fire the weapon.”
In the courtroom seven months later, Glock, speaking in German with the aid of a translator, reiterated that his gun was “flawless,” stating it always operated exactly as it had been designed to. Asked about the skeptical testimony of the former FBI expert, Bassett, Glock heaped scorn on the witness and the famous agency. “The statement of the FBI is useless,” he said.
Glock informed the jurors that his company told all users in its operating manual to keep their fingers outside the trigger guard until they intended to shoot. “The officer knows from his training that when he has taken his finger off the trigger, the gun is absolutely safe,” Glock testified. “That is our absolute basic rule,” he said. “Keep your finger off the trigger” until prepared to fire.
No longer the self-conscious engineer, too timid to talk to his own bankers, Glock presented a poised public persona. The Knoxville News Sentinel , which provided daily coverage of the weeklong trial, reported that “Glock testified for three hours to defend his design before a jury of five men and three women, who, at times, appeared mesmerized by his explanation of how his gun operates.” Moreover, his German struck the Tennesseans as worldly. He displayed no doubts and deflected unfriendly interrogation with a bemused countenance. “At times,” the paper observed, “some [jurors] laughed with Glock at his stylish and light-hearted nature while others smiled at him as he testified.”
Sent off to deliberate, the jurors had little difficulty reaching a verdict. After less than ninety minutes, they returned to the courtroom. Their judgment was stark: no liability whatsoever on the company’s part—a complete victory for the defense.
“Mr. Glock never considered any compromise in this case,” a triumphant Grimm said afterward on the courthouse steps. “The Glock pistols are the safest pistols on the market for police use.”
Gaston Glock’s calm, assertive performance in the witness chair was a crucial factor. “The jury liked him more than our client,” Bob Ritchie conceded to a reporter after the trial. Equally, if not more, important was the fact that the Knoxville policeman had violated his department’s safety standards. Ronald Grimm told me: “You don’t put the finger on the trigger until you’re prepared to destroy something—kill it.”
Yet that wasn’t the rule all handgun owners followed. The FBI, until it fully changed over to pistols in the 1990s, instructed recruits to keep their index finger on the trigger of their handgun anytime they had it drawn. The idea was that the agent should be ready to shoot. Of course, it was safer to rest your finger on a revolver trigger that provided twelve pounds of resistance. In many places, police trainers taught new cops to cover suspects with their finger on the trigger. Some civilian shooting instructors favored the same approach until at least the early 1990s. It was not until 1995 or so, with the semiautomatic pistol having become the predominant American handgun, that finger-off-the-trigger became gospel.
Some civilian shooting experts dissented, at least to an extent, from the majority’s unmitigated admiration for the Glock. “The gun factory ads cry, ‘Glock Perfection,’ ” Massad Ayoob wrote in the September 1990 issue of GUNS magazine. “But perfection is an amorphous term. I for one don’t think it’s been achieved yet.”
One of the best-known private firearm trainers in the United States—he ran a rural New Hampshire academy called the Lethal Force Institute—Ayoob lauded the Glock as a military weapon and target-shooting gun. He worried, however, about whether it was well suited for civilians to carry for self-protection.
Ayoob’s was a voice taken seriously among firearm buffs. The grandson of an Episcopalian immigrant from Damascus, Syria, he did as much as any other single person in the late twentieth century to codify the mind-set of ordinary Americans who felt it wise to go about their business armed. His long list of books includes the seminal In the Gravest Extreme: The Role of the Firearm in Personal Protection . He came to firearms naturally, he told me: “There were guns in the house. There were guns in my father’s jewelry store, of course. Like there’s a telephone for calling people, there is the gun for self-defense.”
Ayoob counts himself as the third generation in his family to stave off mortal danger with a handgun. His grandfather, the owner of a bowling alley, once shot and wounded an armed would-be robber. Ayoob’s father, the jeweler, was accosted one night on a Boston street. The mugger fired a shot that zipped past his ear; Ayoob’s father pulled his own handgun and killed his assailant.
Massad Ayoob himself started carrying a gun as a boy of twelve. Later he served for many years as a part-time police officer in several small towns in New Hampshire. He pointed his service weapon at threatening arrestees a few times but never fired. He became a private instructor and a champion shooter, passing along his skills to his two daughters, one of whom, he told me, once had to use her handgun to scare away a pair of men intent on raping her.
In his GUNS magazine piece, Ayoob noted that the Glock “didn’t have as many accidental discharges as I’d feared it would when it came into common police use.” He speculated that cops and civilians were being extra careful. “Any intelligent person who handles a loaded Glock,” he wrote, “handles it gingerly.”
But caution wasn’t enough. “Two design features of the Glock concern me,” he wrote: “the short trigger pull and the lack of a manual safety.” Glock’s official specifications say that from a resting position to firing, the trigger travels half an inch with resistance of five or five and a half pounds. Ayoob measured the trigger travel as more like three-eighths of an inch. “However,” he noted, “with the standard trigger, much of that pull is a light take-up like a military rifle before the firm resistance of the final pressure [is] encountered.” By his calculation, “real resistance is only felt in less than a tenth of an inch of trigger pressure. A tenth of an inch is not a lot.”
Glock introduced a modification in 1990 called “the New York Trigger.” The New York State Police had bought the Glock 17 on the condition that the manufacturer would replace its regular trigger assembly with one that offered firmer resistance from the beginning of the pull. The substitute trigger module and spring result in a steady eight pounds of resistance. Having installed the New York Trigger on his own compact Glock 19, Ayoob wrote: “I feel much more comfortable.” He suggested in the article that Glock make the heavier trigger standard. But the company never did—five to five and a half pounds remained the norm.
Yet even the New York Trigger wasn’t sufficient, in Ayoob’s opinion. He thought the Glock should have an external safety lever, as well. Glock warned users to keep their index finger off the trigger until they intended to fire. “But that answer is too pat, too ignorant of the dynamics that can occur under stress,” Ayoob wrote. “For a manufacturer to say, ‘You don’t need a safety, just keep your finger off the trigger and there’ll be no accidents,’ is as if General Motors were to say, ‘You don’t need seat belts or air bags. Just avoid collisions and you’ll be fine.’ Guns are made to be held with the finger on the trigger. That’s why the Glock shoots so well when you do fire it intentionally, and because everything from childhood cops n’ robbers to television habituates you to hold the gun that way, that’s how it’s going to probably happen under stress.”
If Glock routinely provided a thumb safety and the New York Trigger, Ayoob concluded he would “volunteer to be the Glock Poster Child. Until then, much as I like it as a shooting gun, I’ll still carry it on the street with feelings of reservation.”