Glock

In 1980, when the Austrian army opened a competition for a new service pistol, Gaston Glock had never designed a firearm. His company, founded in Deutsch-Wagram in 1963, made curtain rods, door hinges, and injection-molded consumer parts, with a sideline supplying the Austrian military with field knives, grenade casings, and machine-gun belt links. Glock had no reputation in gunmaking to draw on. What he had was a workshop built around polymer engineering and a willingness to hire people who knew what he didn't: he brought in engineers who had worked on Heckler & Koch's early polymer-framed pistols, the VP70 and P9, and set them to solving the army's brief from first principles rather than from pistol convention.

The result, submitted for testing in 1982 as the P80 and later sold as the Glock 17, wasn't built around one clever feature so much as a manufacturing philosophy. Most service pistols of the period were machined from steel, which made them heavy and slow to produce in volume. Glock's design used a polymer frame, cut the parts count to a fraction of contemporaries, and replaced a conventional manual safety with the Safe Action system: three passive, internal safeties (trigger, firing pin, and drop) that disengage only when the trigger itself is pulled, with no external lever to forget. The pistol passed the Austrian army's technical trials and entered service as the country's standard sidearm.

Adoption elsewhere followed quickly. Norway became the first NATO member to field the Glock 17 in 1984. Glock, Inc. opened its US subsidiary in Smyrna, Georgia, in 1986, and the following year, the Miami Police Department became the first American law enforcement agency to switch to the pistol, a decision other departments spent the next decade copying. By 1997, the FBI had adopted the .40-caliber Glock 22, cementing the brand's position across federal, state, and municipal law enforcement; by the 2010s, industry estimates put Glock's share of the US law enforcement and civilian handgun market at roughly two-thirds. The compact Glock 19 (1988) and subcompact Glock 26 (1995) scaled down the same platform without changing its internal logic, a pattern the company has repeated with almost every model since.

The company's history has not been free of turbulence. In 1999, a longtime financial adviser to Gaston Glock, Charles Ewert, arranged an attack on Glock in a Luxembourg parking garage after Glock began questioning years of embezzlement; Glock fought off his attacker, and both men were later convicted. The episode prompted a tightening of the company's financial controls. A more consequential transition followed Gaston Glock's death in December 2023, after which control of the privately held company passed to his widow, Kathrin Glock, with Carlos Guevara serving as CEO of the US subsidiary, Glock, Inc.

Glock enters its current chapter under different pressure: a wave of state and municipal lawsuits, along with new state legislation such as California's AB 1127, targeting how easily some Glock pistols can be illegally modified with aftermarket "switch" devices. In late 2025, the company discontinued most of its existing catalog in favor of a redesigned "V series" and, in December 2025, announced its sixth pistol generation, with the Glock 17, 19, and 45 reaching dealers on January 20, 2026, the fortieth anniversary of Glock sales in the United States. For a collector, the throughline across four decades and six generations is unusually legible: a single platform, incrementally revised, with early Gen1 and Gen2 production, Austrian versus US-marked frames, and now-discontinued pre-V-series models forming the clearest points of collector interest.