Officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) line up with their Glocks alongside Alaskan State Troopers (AST) during a shooting competition.

Development of the Glock

To understand the Glock, you need to comprehend the market that it entered in the 1980s, and something about the products against which it competed. The key categories of handgun had been settled during the first decade of the twentieth century, and by the post-war years there had been little seminal advance in the basic technology.

Handguns fell into two types—revolvers and semi-automatic pistols. The revolvers were the old guard, with an ancestry dating back to the days of the Wild West. In military use, revolvers had largely been replaced by pistols, but up until the Glock era the same could not be said for law-enforcement service. In the United States, for example, six-shot .38, .357 Magnum and (less commonly) .44 handguns were dominant among police forces until the 1980s and 1990s. Classic examples were the Colt Detective Special, the Ruger Speed-Six and the Smith& Wesson Model 10.

As with all types of firearms, revolvers had their pluses and minuses. One of the great virtues of the revolver was its reliability. Revolvers would rarely ever jam, and if there was a misfire all the operator typically had to do is simply pull the trigger once again to turn to the next cartridge; with a pistol, the user has to clear the jam manually, and sometimes empty and reload the gun. Unless the revolver’s hammer was cocked, the gun also had the mechanical advantage that no parts (such as a firing pin) are held under spring tension, thereby reducing the possibility of mechanical wear. There were also some bonuses in ergonomics, particularly considering the fact that within a police force one gun would have to be used by a variety of human hand sizes. Because revolvers don’t need to hold a magazine in the stock, they can be used more easily by individuals with small or slender hands.

So far, so good, but revolvers had a major deficit—ammunition capacity. The maximum number of cartridges they could hold was six, and six rounds could be burned through with frightening speed during an actual armed engagement. Speed-loading devices were developed, in which new rounds could be dropped into the empty chambers in one go, once the spent cases had been ejected, but revolvers still required frequent reloading, and in these moments the user was exposed and vulnerable.

The striking virtue of pistols, by contrast, was that they could offer greater ammunition capacity, and that meant greater firepower and less downtime between shooting. Instead of the rotating cylinder of the revolver, they had a detachable magazine inserted (usually) into the pistol grip—reloading was a simply matter of pressing the magazine eject button, then inserting a new magazine into the grip. Th