As you pass through airport security, graphics depict items prohibited in your carry-on luggage. While the representations of a knife and an aerosol spray can are fairly generic, the pictograph of a handgun is unequivocally the silhouette of a Glock pistol.
In 1982, an obscure Austrian engineer named Gaston Glock, who worked in a radiator plant and had a side business with his wife making curtain rods, knives and belt buckles, invented a type of pistol that changed the worlds of law enforcement and firearms and powerfully influenced politics and popular culture. Glock is now 82, and his surname has become synonymous in some circles with “handgun.”
Less than three decades ago, few had heard of Glock, the man or the gun. Just how a pistol developed by an unknown engineer with little firearms experience became the dominant, if not iconic, law enforcement handgun in the United States is the subject of Paul M. Barrett’s “Glock.”
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