Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun by Paul M. Barrett Read Free Book Online Page B

Congress over gun control that did not involve the Glock. The NRA and its allies got the best of that bigger fight, winning passage of the Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986, which loosened restrictions on gun sales and reined in the authority of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. President Ronald Reagan signed the law in May, the same month as the House hearings on “plastic pistols.” Anti-gun activists saw the Glock controversy as an opportunity to push back in a protracted war they weren’t prepared to surrender.
    Hughes, a stalwart of the gun-control movement, had led a successful drive for his side’s main amendment of the Firearm Owners Protection Act, the NRA’s one disappointment with the otherwise gun-friendly law. The Hughes amendment banned the manufacture or sale of new fully automatic machine guns for civilian ownership (possessing and transferring older machine guns remained legal, with special permission). The New Jersey congressman seemed like a natural to lead an investigation of the Glock. To his credit, Hughes did notexacerbate the “hijacker special” hysteria. Setting a calm tone, he said by way of introduction: “This subcommittee, indeed this Congress, cannot solve the problem of terrorism, but we can and must take steps to protect ourselves against terrorist acts. A new threat that seems to be emerging is firearms made of materials which can escape detection in X-ray machines, or which can be smuggled through metal detectors.”
    The star witness to appear before the subcommittee was Gaston Glock himself. Up front, Hughes alluded to “controversy over the Glock 17,” but he dampened that in two ways. First, he sounded quite friendly to the gun’s namesake. “We are very pleased,” Hughes said, “that Mr. Gaston Glock, the inventor of the Glock 17 handgun, has come today from Austria to testify about this famous gun.” More generally, Hughes played down any immediate danger created by Glock pistols by stressing that “the development of non-metal firearms that will be even less traceable, and detectable, will soon be upon us.” This view was reasonable enough, given that during this period, various tinkerers and entrepreneurs were experimenting with all-plastic gun designs. None of them, however, reached the marketplace.
    Unlike Hughes, some of the other participants in the House hearing weren’t terribly scrupulous in distinguishing between the theoretical possibility of an all-plastic gun and the reality of the Glock 17. Biaggi, attending the session not as a member of the subcommittee but as a witness, saw an opportunity for political theater. A twenty-year member of Congress, he was still famous for having been a hero during his pre-political days as a New York City cop. Biaggi condemned “the plastic handgun” as “the latest tool of terrorist technology.” He offered no illustrations of terrorists using plastic guns, but he singled out the Glock 17 as “the weapon that aroused my concern”because “it is mostly plastic. I say that the Glock 17 is far more difficult to detect than any conventional weapon.”
    Federal security officials who testified following Biaggi clearly tried to avoid offending anyone, but just as clearly refused to concede that the Glock, or any other firearm then available, posed a significant detection problem. “While the Glock 17 pistol uses a considerable amount of plastic in its construction,” said Edward M. Owen Jr., chief of firearm technology at BATF, “the pistol contains more metal by weight than many other handguns constructed entirely of metal.” Owen and Billie Vincent of the FAA tiptoed around the personnel problem: that air travelers were—and are—protected by low-paid, barely trained human screeners doing boring, repetitive work.
    When it was their turn at the witness table, Karl Walter and Gaston Glock put on an awkward performance. Glock spoke haltingly, using Walter as an interpreter. Yet, in an odd way, the two