The city of Charlotte, North Carolina, is friendly territory for gun owners. When the NRA comes to town, a Second Amendment celebration breaks out. Add Sarah Palin to the mix, and you get a glimpse of Tea Party heaven. “The most famous moose-hunting mom in America,” the master of ceremonies called Palin at the May 2010 annual meeting of the NRA in Charlotte. The keynote speaker, surrounded by enormous video images of her gleaming smile and chestnut hair, brought an audience of ten thousand at the Time Warner Cable Arena to its feet. “It is so great to be here with you bitter clingers ,” Palin declared, making a sly dig at President Obama. During a 2008 campaign fund-raising event, he had foolishly disparaged “bitter” conservatives who “cling” to guns and religion. The NRA would never let him forget it.
Wearing a flattering black dress and a large jade crucifix, Palin reminded even dispassionate listeners how effectively she can deliver a prepared speech. “No need to load up the teleprompter,” she said, reading from a teleprompter. “I’ve got everything I need written on the palm of my hand.” The “lame-stream media,” she continued, “are trying to portray us Tea Party Americans as being violent or racist or rednecks.” She waited a beat before adding: “Well, I don’t really have a problem with the redneck part of it!”
When not faced with pesky media questions, Palin makes the Red State case pithily. “Gun ownership is at an all-time high; violent crime is near a thirty-year low,” she noted. “The anti-gun groups, they don’t deal in common sense.” The crowd in Charlotte signaled agreement with one standing ovation after another.
A few blocks away from where the nighttime political rallies were held, tens of thousands of NRA members patrolled a vast exposition floor populated by marketers of rifles, revolvers, pistols, shotguns, muskets, flintlocks, and ammunition of every conceivable caliber; bowie knives, binoculars, bullet-casing art, body armor, blood-clotting gauze, and freeze-dried bison burgers; crossbows, slingshots, paintball launchers, paper targets (human-shaped and abstract); pup tents, deer blinds, duck lures, bear whistles, varmint guns, and vacuum-packed ostrich jerky; Civil War regalia, Nazi medals, survivalist literature, earplugs, hearing aids, trigger locks, and liability insurance.
Out of the scores of promotional booths, only one—the black-and-silver walk-in display for Glock—had a line fifty strong waiting to take pictures with its spokesperson. The days of gun shop owners ogling buxom Sharon Dillon were long gone. Glock years earlier had begun hiring R. Lee Ermey, a Marine drill instructor turned actor, to draw attention at public events. Best known for his bravura performance as a sadistic sergeant in the movie Full Metal Jacket (1987), Ermey more recently has hosted Lock ’N Load , a cable-television show devoted to weapons. Now in his sixties, he presents an idealized picture of a brush-cut retired marine: leathery, trim, and ramrod straight. Hour after hour, “Gunny,” as everyone calls him, shook hands with men, gave chaste kisses to their wives, and patted children on the head. The annual NRA conclave draws more couples and families than the uninitiated might guess.
Several young soldiers mentioned that they had just returned from service overseas.
“Hoorah!” Gunny responded.
“Glock rocks!” exclaimed one skinny fellow in hunting camouflage.
“Damn right, son,” Gunny answered.
The Glock sales staff, wearing pressed chinos and black-and-silver company shirts, looked on with obvious satisfaction.
I walked the expo floor with Cameron Hopkins, the former editor of American Handgunner and a paid blogger for the NRA website. A compact man whose hobby is hunting antelope and buffalo in Africa, Hopkins has marketed guns and ammo professionally for nearly four decades. “You could say that Glock changed the entire market,” he commented. “Every major manufacturer in handguns you see here has its version of the Glock—XD, Smith & Wesson, Taurus, the smaller ones—all of them. It’s a Glock world when it comes to handguns in America.”
Over the years, the look-alikes had come up in quality, Hopkins said. Other companies now offered variations in ergonomics and trigger mechanics that made their guns slightly different from the Austrian pistol. And some manufacturers, such as Smith & Wesson, sold a wider array of handguns, including updated versions of the traditional revolver. But when it came to modern high-capacity pistols, they were all still following Glock’s lead.
We circled back to the throngs at the Glock booth. “What’s amazing is that they keep the excitement level high,” Hopkins observed. “People flock to it. There’s some kind of allure, even though Glock is selling a gun that isn’t much different from the gun it sold ten years ago or twenty years ago.”
I asked why.
“I think being on television and in the movies so much helps explain that,” Hopkins said. Image counts—from Sharon Dillon to R. Lee “Gunny” Ermey, from Tupac Shakur to Bruce Willis to Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Several months earlier, I had visited the main European small-arms trade show in Nuremberg, Germany. There, the Glock installation had a Vienna café ambience, with small circular tables and silver plates of delicate butter cookies. Young women dressed in black blouses and slacks served espresso, cappuccino, and mineral water. The European show had a more upper-crust feel than the NRA event in Charlotte. Some attendees wore forest-green hunting jackets woven from hemp and were accompanied by well-behaved spaniels.
I stopped by the display of Steyr, the manufacturer Glock eclipsed during the competition in the early 1980s to supply the Austrian Army with new pistols. Steyr continues to make high-quality law enforcement rifles, and, over the years, it has designed respectable pistols, as well. But its handguns never caught on in the United States.
A Steyr rep named Gundaccar Wurmbrand-Stuppach demonstrated the features of his company’s latest nine-millimeter. “This has many advantages over the Glock,” he said, snapping back the slide. “Our pistol rests more naturally in the hand—you see?”
I hefted the unloaded Steyr, which was considerably heavier than a Glock. It felt no more “natural” in my grasp. I asked whether Steyr was selling many pistols in the States.
No, not that many, Wurmbrand-Stuppach acknowledged. He seemed deflated by the question and dropped his sales pitch. “Glock got there first a long time ago,” he said. “Now it is hopeless, it seems. The Glock is the U.S.A. pistol.”
Is it a good thing that the Glock is the “U.S.A. pistol”? How has the company used its leadership position as the market changed over from the revolver to the semiautomatic?
Glock’s predominance has not been good for Steyr, obviously, or for Smith & Wesson, Colt, or any other handgun manufacturer that covets Glock’s revenue stream. The flip side of competitors’ frustration is that for Americans inclined to buy a pistol, Glock has offered a dependable, reasonably priced product. This goes for police departments, the FBI, security-minded homeowners, and weekend target-shooters. Viewed strictly through a commercial lens, Glock is a winner in the globalized economy: a foreign raider that caught American manufacturers snoozing.
Gun-control advocates condemn this success. “Glock changed the industry—and not in a good way,” Josh Sugarmann told me. Beginning in the late 1980s, the pioneering Glock 17 nine-millimeter helped spread enthusiasm in the United States for semiautomatic pistols. The move from revolvers to pistols brought with it the prevalence of large-capacity magazines: seventeen rounds instead of six, in the case of the exchange of a Smith & Wesson .38 for a Glock 17. Then, in the 1990s, Glock persuaded many Americans to switch to larger calibers with more “stopping power.” The .40-caliber Glock, equivalent to a ten-millimeter, became the standard sidearm for many beat cops and also a popular item in Main Street gun shops. During the same period, the Austrian manufacturer led the way in introducing more compact models in calibers ranging from the nine-millimeter to the .45. The marketing of these Pocket Rockets was aided by the NRA’s push for more permissive concealed-carry laws and, inadvertently, by the passage of the 1994 assault weapons ban, which included the ten-round limit on magazines.
“The gun industry has deliberately enhanced its profits by increasing the lethality—the killing power—of its products,” according to Tom Diaz, Sugarmann’s longtime colleague at the Violence Policy Center in Washington. Elaborating in his book Every Handgun Is Aimed at You: The Case for Banning Handguns (2001), Sugarmann asserts: “Three specific design features enhance killing power: the ‘three deadly C’s’ of concealability, capacity, and caliber.” Glock has been a pioneer in all three categories.
In assessing whether the gun controllers’ indictment holds water, it is necessary to address a few aspects of gun ownership and use in American society that go beyond the story of Glock. Still, what follows is not a comprehensive survey of the gun-control debate, a sprawling conflict polluted by polemics and cherry-picked statistics. As a practical matter, it is a debate that, at least since the 2000 presidential election, when NRA activism helped defeat Al Gore even in his home state of Tennessee, the Democrats have abandoned. Gun rights have expanded steadily for more than a decade, and nothing will alter that tendency in the foreseeable future. It is not necessary to mourn or cheer these developments to evaluate Glock’s role in the United States. Instead, this analysis assumes that guns are good and bad—like gasoline-powered cars that take people to work while degrading the environment and being involved in fatal accidents; like tasty steaks loaded with cholesterol and calories; like an Internet that purveys vital information, idiotic conspiracy theories, and vile child pornography. Barring repeal of the Second Amendment and a profound shift in the collective psyche of a large portion of our population—neither likely—guns are here to stay.
One hard truth of civilized life, George Orwell noted, is that we rely on strong, bold people with weapons to protect us from those who might kill us for our possessions or politics or religious beliefs or real estate. Accepting this reality, we give the police and the military weapons to do the job of protection. The Glock, though not without imperfections, gets the job done.
“It is the gun you want to have if you get in trouble,” Eamon Clifford, a former Washington, DC, cop told me. Clifford was in two shootouts in the early 1990s; in both cases, his conduct was deemed justified. Now a trade union organizer, he acknowledged that the Glock’s light trigger pull can lead to accidents: “You can fire a Glock pretty easy if you’re not real careful.” Then he added: “Being careful is what you should be with guns, you know what I mean?”
In the law enforcement context, the issues of caliber and ease of concealment that so concern gun-control advocates seem, on close inspection, mostly theoretical. Uniformed cops wear their guns openly on a utility belt. If detectives and federal agents who work in plain clothes prefer a smaller firearm that is easier to hide beneath a jacket, that choice seems reasonable. In any event, an old-fashioned snub-nose .38 Smith & Wesson was also relatively easy to conceal. Criminals who wish to hide handguns can do so regardless of brand. The wisdom of permissive concealed-carry laws is also a separate issue.
Debates about appropriate bullet caliber (diameter) descend quickly into nuance that can create confusion as much as add clarity. With an equivalent design and propellant charge, a larger-caliber bullet will do more tissue damage than a smaller round. As a result, the stopping power of a single larger round should be greater. Assuming the cops are shooting at the right people—bad guys threatening violence—the goal is for police rounds to knock down targets with the minimum number of shots. That protects the safety of both officers and bystanders. Replacing the .38 revolver with the nine-millimeter pistol had no significant effect in this regard; bullet diameter did not change meaningfully.
Glock’s marketing of the .40-caliber in the 1990s presumably increased stopping power for departments that traded up. The gun exchanges may not have been absolutely necessary. They certainly generated a large supply of used police guns that were resold to civilians. New Orleans and many other cities were ultimately embarrassed by their eager participation in Glock’s crafty trade-in program. But the .40-caliber pistol seems like a sensible tool in the hands of a carefully trained police officer.
Firearm calibers do not have inherent moral qualities. It’s worth recalling that in contrast to some police agencies, the US military traded down in the 1980s, exchanging its .45-caliber Colt 1911 pistols for nine-millimeter Berettas. The Pentagon decided that on the battlefield, it was smarter to carry more rounds, even if they were smaller. The generals also hoped that less experienced shooters would be more accurate with a lighter, lower-recoil handgun. It is difficult to say whether these choices made a significant difference. In any case, they do not seem irrational. A couple of well-placed bullets of any standard caliber will do grievous harm.
A more troubling question about the Glock is whether its large capacity and ease of use can exacerbate the occasional incident in which cops fire what seems like an excessive number of rounds. The barrage of forty-one bullets sprayed at Amadou Diallo by four NYPD officers in February 1999 underscored this danger. Approached after midnight in the vestibule of his apartment building in the Bronx, Diallo reached for his wallet. The officers, who thought he resembled a crime suspect, fatally compounded their error by confusing his wallet for a gun. The unarmed twenty-two-year-old immigrant from Guinea was hit nineteen times and killed. All four of the officers carried nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistols. One was a Glock, two were Sig Sauer models, and one was a Smith & Wesson. Those are the three brands authorized by the NYPD. Despite the statistical underrepresentation of Glock in this tiny sample, it is fair to say that New York, like most other American cities, was converted to large-capacity pistols by the Austrian manufacturer.
Media coverage of the Diallo killing, as well as community reaction, understandably focused on the disturbing death of an innocent young black man at the hands of white officers. Beyond this persistent and disquieting subtext of urban law enforcement, there was the question of whether use of the Glock and other semiautomatic pistols encouraged “contagious shooting”—the perceived tendency of jittery policemen to pull the trigger reflexively because fellow officers are doing so. It seems likely that the Diallo affair would have involved fewer rounds fired if the more aggressive shooters had had to reload six-shot revolvers. Fewer rounds could have led to fewer hits. Still, officers who panic with semiautomatics probably would panic with revolvers, too. “It’s much more about training, accountability, and protocol than it is about the weapon,” Paul Chevigny, a law professor at New York University, observed in an interview after the 1999 incident. “I don’t want to sound cold-hearted; Mr. Diallo might be alive if they hadn’t had automatic weapons, but I don’t think it makes that much difference.” The four officers in the Diallo shooting were prosecuted criminally and acquitted of all charges.
Doubts about police use of semiautomatics resurface every several years. In New York, the November 2006 police killing of Sean Bell, a twenty-three-year-old black man, sparked controversy because officers fired fifty shots into the victim’s parked car. Police incorrectly thought Bell and several friends had a gun. In a confused confrontation, Bell tried to ram an undercover NYPD van, police said. Once the late-night shooting was over, it appeared that police had not been in mortal danger from Bell’s party. Three officers were charged criminally and acquitted.
In rare circumstances, such as the Diallo and Bell shootings, police officers who rightly or wrongly believe they are threatened do seem to incite one another into a flurry of disproportionate shooting. Glocks and other large-capacity semiautomatics facilitate the tendency. On the other hand, there is not any solid social science that documents the frequency of contagious shooting, let alone identifies it as a common occurrence. “As a result, it is not possible to determine the extent of reflexive shootings and whether the phenomenon is increasing or decreasing over time,” the Rand Center on Quality Policing concluded in a study released in 2007.
Statistics on the number of rounds individual police officers fire when they use their guns are equally challenging to interpret. As a general matter, cops do not shoot very often. Even in big cities with dangerous neighborhoods, most officers never pull the trigger other than in training. That said, studies of gun discharge rates show that since pistols have become more popular, there has been a substantial escalation from the historic norm of two to three shots per incident with revolvers.
Complicating matters, though, as use of semiautomatics became more common in the late 1990s and 2000s, violent crime rates were falling. In New York, the annual number of police gunfights and the total number of rounds fired have fallen off strikingly. By these latter measures, police are more restrained today than they were when crime rates were rising three and four decades ago.
The rate of fatal shootings by the police in New York had fallen to 0.48 per 1,000 officers in the calendar year before Diallo was killed. That was the lowest pace since 1985. Moreover, the number of NYPD shootings and the shots fired per incident fell as the crime rate dropped during the 1990s, according to city records. In 1995, there were 344 police shootings, with an average of five rounds fired per incident. In 1998, there were 249 shootings, with an average of 3.4 rounds fired. Over the subsequent decade, the number of rounds per incident fell to as low as 3.1 in 2004 and then rose to 5.2 in 2007, the year after the Bell shooting. There is no consensus explanation for the year-to-year changes in this pattern. If, for purposes of a highly cautious back-of-the-envelope estimate, one said that the per-incident rate increased from about three rounds in the 1980s to about four rounds in the 2000s, that constitutes a 33 percent rise, probably attributable to the switch to semiautomatics. You could call that the Glock phenomenon.
To be clear, it would not be fair to blame Glock alone if the police in New York or elsewhere, when they point their guns, are now prone to pull the trigger one or two times more often than they did thirty years ago. Other gun manufacturers have sold plenty of semiautomatics. Glock, though, was the pioneer. It is also important to reiterate that in the aggregate, fewer police bullets are flying today than before Glock and other companies armed American law enforcement with pistols. In 2009, NYPD officers fired a total of 296 rounds, including unintentional discharges. In 1971, the figure was 2,113. The trend is not unique to New York. In many American cities, “we’ve seen fairly substantial declines across the board in police shootings,” said Professor Michael D. White, a former deputy sheriff in Pennsylvania who teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan. That promising development is almost certainly linked to the diminished intensity of crime and to better police training—both of which are more important factors than the choice of handgun.
The calculus for civilian ownership of the Glock begins with some of the same questions about the gun’s suitability and then branches out to encompass whether the Glock has worsened crime in the United States in a distinctive way.
Handguns of all sorts became bigger sellers compared to rifles and shotguns in the 1980s and 1990s. During those decades, firearm makers and the NRA helped persuade many homeowners that rising rates of burglary, assault, and homicide warranted purchasing a handgun for self-protection. Criminologists and public health scholars have engaged in an intriguing and prolific debate over whether the benefits of “defensive gun use”—the justified brandishing or firing of a weapon to deter crime—outweigh potential dangers associated with keeping a gun in the home. It is not necessary to sort out that heated disagreement to observe that Glock helped spark the handgun surge and wider demand for big magazines that make pistols more potent. In its 2010 catalog, the manufacturer boasted that while the Glock 19 is “comparable in size and weight to the small .38 revolvers it has replaced,” the pistol “is significantly more powerful with greater firepower and is much easier to shoot fast and true.”
Gun-control advocates deplore Glock’s marketing strategy. “The rise of handguns to dominance in the marketplace has corresponded with an increase in their efficiency as killing machines,” Sugarmann writes. “The human toll in death and suffering exacted by this process has been immense.”
This tough rhetoric appeals to many liberal citizens and scholars. But when drained of emotion and set against firearm realities and crime trends, it loses force.
As in the law enforcement context, the gun controllers’ objection to the ease of concealing compact Glocks (and other semiautomatics) and the stopping power of larger-caliber models seems like a distraction. Smith & Wesson and Colt both sold small handguns and large-caliber weapons long before Gaston Glock turned his attention from curtain rods to pistols. Shot for shot, either a .45-caliber Colt 1911 or a .44 Smith & Wesson revolver will do more damage than a Glock nine-millimeter.
Still, a Glock, or another large-capacity semiautomatic, can make a very bad situation even worse. During a mass shooting, such as the Luby’s massacre in 1991, a deft gunman can fire more rounds and reload more quickly with a modern pistol equipped with hefty magazines. When Seung-Hui Cho slaughtered thirty-two classmates and professors at Virginia Tech in April 2007, he used two pistols: a nine-millimeter Glock 19 and a smaller .22-caliber Walther. Considerable media attention focused on the fifteen-round compact Glock and the fact that it enabled Cho to unleash a greater volume of rounds in less time. Whether his choice of the Austrian brand raised the horrific body count remains a matter of speculation. It probably did.
There is no question that Jared Lee Loughner created more carnage in January 2011 because he brought a newly purchased Glock 19 to a political gathering in a shopping mall in suburban Tucson, Arizona. On a sunny Saturday morning, Loughner, a deranged twenty-two-year-old, opened fire at a constituent meet-and-greet hosted in front of a Safeway supermarket by his congresswoman, Gabrielle Giffords. In just minutes, the gunman sprayed thirty-three rounds, killing six people and wounding thirteen others, including Giffords, who suffered severe brain damage from a point-blank shot that passed through her head. Among the dead were a federal judge and a nine-year-old girl who served on her elementary school student council and wanted to shake hands with the vivacious politician. Loughner used a special oversized magazine, making it possible for him to do much more damage in a matter of minutes than he otherwise might have. He did not stop firing until he had to pause to reload and attendees at the event tackled him.
Since the expiration in 2004 of the ten-round ammunition cap, Glock has led the charge back into the large-capacity magazine business. Sportsman’s Warehouse, the Tucson store where Loughner bought his Glock, advertises on its website that “compact and subcompact Glock pistol model magazines can be loaded with a convincing number of rounds—i.e.… up to 33 rounds.”
The scale of the bloodshed in Tucson, like that at Virginia Tech and Luby’s, presents the strongest possible evidence that a restriction on magazine size makes sense. Such a limit would not stop a Loughner or Cho from attacking, but it could reduce the number of victims. Only six states—California, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York—have their own limits on large magazines. A national ten-round cap seems like a logical compromise that lawful gun owners could easily tolerate. The NRA has concluded otherwise—and pushed the issue off the legislative table.
A problem confronting proponents of magazine restrictions, and critics of the Glock-inspired pistol craze since the late 1980s, is that one cannot correlate the number of guns in the United States, or the popularity of semiautomatics, with overall crime rates. If seventeen-round Glock magazines provide criminals with more efficient killing machines, to use Sugarmann’s evocative phrase, the numbers do not prove that ordinary bad guys, as a group, have taken advantage of this edge.
Starting in the early 1960s, crime levels began increasing after a long period of stability. Criminologists generally attribute this trend to a combination of demography (rebellious baby boomers hitting prime crime-committing years), sociology (waves of heroin- and, later, cocaine-related criminality), and racially tinged history (urban riots in the late 1960s, followed by years of decay in inner cities). In the 1960s and 1970s, as crime proliferated, US prison capacity was shrinking and tens of thousands of patients in state mental hospitals were “deinstitutionalized” without adequate arrangements made for their supervision. Some big-city police departments threw up their hands and stopped enforcing minor infractions, aggravating a sense of lawlessness in less-well-off neighborhoods.
Then, after rising from roughly 1963 through 1993, crime began to drop off. In 1993, there were 9.5 murders and non-negligent manslaughters per 100,000 inhabitants, according to the FBI’s annual report, Crime in the United States . By 2009, the most recent full year for which statistics were available as of this writing, that rate had fallen 47 percent, to 5 per 100,000. As a large subset of violent crime, offenses committed with firearms also fell sharply. Cities, in short, became safer. The reasons are a matter of dispute. Possible factors include a sharp rise in the rate of incarceration, improved policing methods, the burning out of crack-gang rivalries, changes in public housing policy that disperse the poor, and superior emergency medicine protocols that save gunshot victims who in an earlier era would have died.
Pro-gun campaigners posit an additional factor: that expanded rights to carry firearms enacted since the 1990s have deterred criminals, who now must consider whether potential victims will shoot back. The NRA can cite studies to back this up. But the best nonpartisan scholarship on the effect of more permissive carry laws concludes that there is sparse evidence that the statutory changes have had much impact one way or the other.
Liberal advocates such as Dennis Henigan of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence (formerly known as Handgun Control, Inc.) attribute some of the easing of crime levels in the 1990s to enactment of point-of-purchase background checks and the assault weapons ban. Once again, the activists can point selectively to numbers to buttress their aspirations. But the better social science does not strengthen the gun-control position. More rigorous studies show that the passage of the background check and assault weapons laws actually had negligible effects on crime, according to Mark A. R. Kleiman, a professor of public policy at UCLA and one of the country’s most incisive and independent-minded criminologists. By the same token, the expiration of the assault weapons ban in 2004 also has had a trifling effect. Polls show consistently that even most people who support stricter gun control do not believe such laws reduce violent crime. “At some basic level,” Henigan writes with palpable regret, “the public is convinced that ‘When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.’ This belief cannot help but diminish the intensity of public support for further gun restrictions.”
A dirty little secret of the criminological profession is that the experts cannot account for why murder and rape have waned to the degree they have. “If I could predict the crime rate, I would become a stock broker,” Barry Krisberg, the president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, admitted in 2009. The diversity and volume of potential variables have defied scholars’ explanatory capacity.
Sarah Palin got at least one important point right at the 2010 NRA convention: The total number of guns in private hands in the United States is at an all-time high, yet violent crime is back down to where it was in the early 1970s, before most of the modern spike. The murder rate is even lower—at the level of the early 1960s. Anti-gun groups, to their discredit, tend to paper over this good, if difficult-to-explain, news. It makes their fund-raising and lobbying more challenging. Indeed, falling crime rates help explain why these advocates have failed to enact any meaningful new federal gun-control legislation since 1994. Even a series of sensational school shootings in 1999 did not lead to additional national restrictions. Voters and politicians lose interest in alarm about guns during periods when overall crime is down.
Arguing that the Glock and other semiautomatic handguns cannot be held neatly responsible for variations in American crime rates is not the same, however, as saying that there is no relationship at all between gun prevalence and violent crime. Compared to other industrialized Western democracies, the United States does not have an especially high level of crime, or even of violent crime. What it has, Kleiman writes in When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment (2009), is “a startlingly high level—about five times the Western European/Canadian/Australian average—of homicide. It also has an astoundingly high level of private gun—especially handgun—ownership.” The difference in gun homicide rates is linked to differences in the greater lethality in the United States of robbery, residential burglary, and aggravated assault. And that greater lethality accounts for much of the difference in overall homicide rates.
Guns, in other words, make American criminals deadlier. If the prevalence of gun-carrying among criminals in the States resembled that of British or Canadian offenders, the American homicide rate would be closer to the preferable British or Canadian rates. One reason so many criminals in the United States are armed, Kleiman notes, is that so many Americans generally are armed. There just are a lot of guns around. The United States has about one firearm per adult, not counting those in the hands of cops and soldiers. What is more, decently made guns last for generations.
Would reducing the sheer number of handguns in private hands by some fraction produce an equivalent reduction in homicide? Not necessarily. Most handguns are owned by law-abiding people who would not dream of sticking up a convenience store or robbing a crack dealer. Social scientists have done studies that allow them to assess the effects of hypothetical policy changes. A law that reduced overall handgun possession by 10 percent could shrink the number of homicides by a maximum of 3 percent, with no measurable effect on other crimes, according to UCLA’s Kleiman. Taking the far more dramatic step of reducing gun prevalence to Western European or Canadian levels, of course, would have a much larger impact on the homicide rate.
Enacting such sweeping policies, though, is a pipe dream given the Second Amendment and the fact that Democrats have dropped the gun-control cause. President Obama made noises about stiffening restrictions during the 2008 campaign but has done absolutely nothing on the issue since taking office, much to the consternation of the gun-control lobby. For the first time, in 2008, the US Supreme Court stated clearly that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to private possession of handguns in the home, as opposed to a right related to the maintenance of a civil militia or other armed force. The court by a 5–4 vote struck down a Washington, DC, law that effectively prohibited private handgun ownership. In 2010, the high court extended its ruling to other municipalities and states, invalidating a similar law in Chicago. In coming years, jurisdictions with stringent limits on legal handgun ownership will likely either relax those curbs voluntarily or face NRA-inspired court orders to do so.
Accepting that there are between 200 million and 300 million guns in private hands in the United States, one can still imagine policy alterations that might put a further modest dent in armed crime. Such adjustments would make it harder for people who should not be trusted with guns to obtain them and make it riskier for those people to carry guns if they do obtain them. One major limit on the efficacy of the background-check law is the loophole that remains for private gun transactions. The Brady instant record check is supposed to screen out categories barred by the Gun Control Act of 1968: children, felons, people under indictment, illegal aliens, and the insane. But the Brady law applies only to regulated gun dealers. An estimated 40 percent of handguns are acquired by private transaction, for which no background check—no paperwork at all—is necessary. That makes no sense. Closing the gaping private-sale loophole and adding more prohibited categories, such as people convicted of more than one violent misdemeanor and those with records of violent crime as juveniles, seem like modest steps that would make it more difficult for the wrong people to get guns. The NRA, of course, opposes these ideas. An initiative that even the NRA might hesitate to dispute would address the failure of many states to transmit to the federal background-check database all existing records of people who have been officially deemed mentally unstable.
Stepping up the use of ballistic fingerprinting—the technique that digitally matches spent shell casings from crime scenes to guns—is another good idea. It would require liberating federal investigators from a variety of existing legislative limits on compiling a national database for tracing weapons to criminals. And this brings us back to the Glock. Modest as current tracing capabilities may be, they have revealed that the discrepancy persists between the Glock’s image as a leading crime gun and reality on the streets. Although glamorized as the gun preferred by gangsters and thugs, it has not become one of the guns most commonly traced to crimes.
Large numbers of crime-gun traces are thought to suggest makes and models that criminals prefer. The NRA objects to this use of gun traces, but it is accepted by many criminologists. One of the unfortunate constraints Congress has imposed on gun tracing since 2003 bars the BATF from releasing data on which guns are traced most frequently. Before the restriction was enacted, the agency from time to time disclosed rankings. In 2002, Time obtained a BATF study of 88,570 guns recovered from crime scenes in forty-six cities in 2000. Number one on the top ten list was the Smith & Wesson .38-caliber revolver. The next four were pistols manufactured by Ruger, Lorcin, and Raven Arms and a Mossberg twelve-gauge shotgun. Glock did not appear on the list at all.
Glock, then, is not a particular villain within the fraternity of firearms. Nor is it a hero—regardless of what Hollywood tells us on both scores. As a weapon, a means of self-defense, and a source of recreation, the Austrian pistol has many positive attributes. It also has aspects now shared by many brands, such as large ammunition capacity, that can be problematic, even fatal.
Gaston Glock is one of the giants in handgun history, deserving of mention alongside Colt, Browning, Smith, and Wesson. Glock executives exploited the frequently ill-conceived attacks of anti-gun activists, turning the imported pistol into an object of Second Amendment enthusiasm. Throughout their history, the company and the gun have enjoyed tremendous good luck and uncanny timing.
As an organization, Glock has not been propelled by high-mindedness, but rather by profits—nothing unusual there; that is the way of capitalism. Given opportunities to help lead its industry toward compromise with its political antagonists in the United States, Glock flirted with moderation— feigned moderation might be a more accurate description—and then consistently acted in its own interest. It is a company created to do one thing: manufacture and sell pistols. And this Gaston Glock has done extraordinarily well.