Gaston Glock: Austrian engineer of iconic handgun dies aged 94
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Gaston Glock, the reclusive Austrian developer of the handgun that bears his name, died on Wednesday. He was 94.
The Glock company announced his death, the Austria Press Agency reported.
The tycoon and developer of the world’s best-selling handguns won loyal followings among police and military across the world with his and his family’s fortune estimated to be at $1.1bn (£858m) in 2021, according to Forbes.
Glock founded the company in 1963 in Deutsch-Wagram, near Vienna. However, his rise began in the 1980s when the Austrian military was looking for a new, innovative weapon and has since expanded around the world, including a US subsidiary founded in 1985.
Up until then, the Glock company had made military knives and consumer goods including curtain rods. But he assembled a team of firearms experts and came up with the Glock 17, a lightweight semi-automatic gun largely made of plastic.
The revolutionary design - with a frame made of a high-strength, nylon-based polymer and only the slide made of metal - beat several other companies’ blueprints. The weapon was significantly lighter, cheaper and more reliable than the models available when it was created and was quickly picked up by police and some countries’ military forces, as well as privately, making it a global hit.
"Get yourself a Glock and lose that nickel-plated sissy pistol," Tommy Lee Jones said in the 1998 movie US Marshals. US rappers also worked them into their rhymes, among them Snoop Dogg’s "Protocol" and Wu-Tang Clan’s "Da Glock".
US soldiers found toppled Iraqi president Saddam Hussein hiding with a Glock in a hole in the ground in 2003. They later presented that weapon to then US president George W Bush, according to the New York Times.
Glock said on its website that its founder "not only revolutionised the world of small arms in the 1980s, but also succeeded in establishing the Glock brand as the global leader in the handgun industry".
However, gun-control advocates criticised Glock for popularising powerful guns that they said were easy to conceal and could hold more ammunition than other guns.
A former US Marine combat veteran armed with what police described as a .45 calibre Glock with a high-capacity magazine killed 12 people in a bar in Thousand Oaks, California, in November 2018.
White supremacist Dylann Roof used a Glock pistol to kill nine African-American people during a Bible study session at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, in June 2015.
Additional reporting by agencies
