How the Glock became America's favorite gun

The ugly plastic Austrian pistol has become an American icon, says Paul Barrett, and in New York alone, 20,000 officers carry a Glock

APRIL 11, 1986, was the bloodiest day in FBI history. The bank robbers were ex-soldiers turned psychopaths, a pair of expert marksmen armed with semiautomatic weapons — and they had no intention of surrendering. After a four-minute firefight on the streets of Miami, both gunmen were killed by a heroic agent. The toll for the FBI was terrible: Two agents dead, three permanently crippled, and two more severely injured. "Gun Battle Looked Like the O.K. Corral," The Palm Beach Post declared.

Lt. John H. Rutherford of the Jacksonville, Fla., Sheriff's Office heard about the shoot-out later that day. "The bad guys," he recalled, "were starting to carry high-capacity weapons." In the chaos of the shoot-out, the federal agents struggled to reload their revolvers, jamming cartridges one after another into five- and six-shot Smith & Wessons. One bank robber, armed with a Ruger semiautomatic rifle, merely had to snap a new magazine into his gun to have another 20 rounds instantly. His partner carried a 12-gauge shotgun with extended eight-round capacity. They were armed for a small war. The FBI had revolvers.

"That was a scary, terrible thing to hear about," said Rutherford. "If the FBI is outgunned, something is wrong." This perception was widely shared by cops, politicians, and law-abiding firearms owners: The criminals were now better armed than the forces of order. The next year Rutherford received the assignment to recommend a new handgun to replace the Smith & Wesson revolvers that his department issued. His counterparts in hundreds of local, state, and federal police agencies were given similar missions.

"My job," Rutherford told me, "was to find a better gun."

RUTHERFORD HAD HUNTED as a boy and liked guns. He kept a framed copy of the Second Amendment on his office wall and taught his two children to shoot. He carried a handgun at all times, on and off duty — even to church on Sunday, which annoyed his wife. But as of 1987, he had little experience with semiautomatic pistols. He knew only revolvers. So he had the department hire an outside consultant to help sort through the many options on the market. He chose Emanuel Kapelsohn, a well-known firearms trainer.

Gun manufacturers from all over the world sent the sheriff's office their latest models, a dozen in all. Rutherford and a brain trust of fellow officers with firearms expertise gathered to examine the candidate guns. "I pull out this black box and pop the thing open, and here's this Glock," Rutherford recalled. "I'm like, 'What the heck is this?' I'm tapping it on the table. It's plastic! What the hell? And there's no hammer on this thing. I literally said, 'We don't want any crap like this,' and I slung it over onto the couch."

Kapelsohn noticed the discarded Glock. "You need to give it a chance," he said.

His words carried weight. Kapelsohn, who came from New Jersey, had a national reputation and heavy connections at the National Rifle Association. His credentials were unusual in the weapons-training business: He held a B.A. in English literature from Yale and a law degree from Harvard.

Kapelsohn's suggestion that the Austrian pistol be taken seriously proved prescient. Within a few days, "we were fighting over who was going to get the Glock," Rutherford said. "It's just like shooting a revolver, and that's what everybody liked about it. You pull it out, you pull the trigger, and you put it away. That was the beauty of it."

The Glock had another advantage: a light, steady trigger pull. The Smith & Wesson .38-caliber guns in use in Jacksonville had a heavy pull of 12 to 14 pounds — standard for revolvers. Shooters who train regularly can achieve accuracy with a heavy trigger. But only a small minority of cops practice diligently. The average officer is a mediocre shot, or worse.

With a Glock, poor marksmen become adequate; moderately skilled shooters begin grouping rounds in small bunches near dead center of their target. The pistol's gentle five-pound trigger action doesn't require the sort of muscular squeeze that can cause the user to jerk the gun off target.

When word got out that Rutherford was leaning toward the Glock, some of his superiors warned him that could be risky. "Now, John," he recalled one senior officer telling him, "you know the sheriff and the undersheriff, they really like Smith & Wesson." Smith & Wesson was what the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office had always known. It was the American cop's brand.

But Rutherford was adamant. He had worked for months on his report, he said. "Now you want me to change it to something else that I know is not the best gun?" During a two-hour presentation to the sheriff, he stressed the Glock's accuracy and safety advantages, as he saw them. He explained that the Austrian pistol was much easier to maintain because it had only 34 parts; the Smith & Wesson 645 had more than 100. And as beloved as the brand had been, Smith & Wesson had allowed its manufacturing quality to slip, Rutherford told his superiors. Out of a shipment of 40 new Smith & Wesson revolvers, three or four would malfunction right out of the box.

A decision came quickly: "We're buying Glocks," the sheriff said.

An order went to Glock for 900 pistols to arm the Jacksonville force. Over the next six months, more than 100 police agencies around the country requested copies of Rutherford's 90-page report on Glock.

Twenty-two years later, the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office, which Rutherford now presides over as sheriff, has 1,700 officers. It still arms them with Glock pistols.