The blame game is go and Glock is the target. Slate did a write up of Glock as a company and basically tries to make underhanded jibes that demonstrate how “evil” Glock is. They make several negative statements but never really mention anything good. In addition to that they also omit quite a bit of information that would make the article less ominous:
Second, and more important, Glocks held more ammunition than the standard-issue guns usually did at the time. With gang-driven gun violence rising, police departments decided to give the guns with the extra rounds a try. They caught on and then gained popularity in the consumer markets. (They also developed a particular cache among criminals, then broader cultural recognition, including numerous citations in rap lyrics.) By 1996, Sweeney writes, Glock had sold more than 1 million guns in America.
Yes police wanted more ammunition. What this story doesn’t tell you is the police departments weren’t upgrading from some 10 shot pistol but from six shot revolvers. Not only did Glock’s pistols hold more than six shots they were much faster to reload. But the biggest hurdle for Glock’s adoption was reliability, police were still using revolvers because they didn’t have much trouble in the way of jamming up. Glock was chosen not only because of additional ammunition capacity but also because of the reliability of their pistols.
Slate then continues to bring up other accusations made against Glock which have no bearing on the shooting in Arizona whatsoever. Of course they also have to point out how well armed we Americans are:
Several other states showed a significant sales bump. And national sales increased about 5 percent. All in all, Americans—not military or police, mind you, but private citizens—own more than 270 million firearms, about 85 guns per 100 people. No other country has such high rates of gun ownership, or absolute numbers of guns in the general population.
The insinuation is America has a high rate of gun related crimes because of how high our gun ownership is. Of course anybody who has looked into the matter knows this is bullshit as countries such as Switzerland and Finland have high rates of gun ownership and pretty low rates of violent crimes. Gun ownership rates have no correlation to levels of violent crimes in a country no matter how much anti-gunners want to believe it.
They also try to make Glock sound like a bad company because they make money:
So how profitable are companies like Glock? Again, we don’t know, because it keeps such information private. But the BusinessWeek story says Glock estimated its “profit margin per pistol” at 68 percent. And consider a major Glock competitor: Massachusetts-based Smith & Wesson, established back in the 1850s. The company’s last annual report cites a gross margin of 32 percent.
Isn’t making money the whole point of running a company? That’s like accusing a vehicle of somehow being bad because it gets you from point A to point B. You really can’t make something sound evil/bad/wrong when it’s doing the exact thing it’s supposed to. Of course to many out there making a profit is a bad thing that only evil capitalists would dare imagine doing (ironically many of the people making such accusations are rich from profits from capitalism).
The haters can say all they want, but the Glock’s are flying off the shelves after all this publicity. So the more PSH we hear from the antigunners the more guns that get sold.
oops looks like you already covered this in the previous post, it had scrolled off my RSS reader.
Along with the reliability factor, simplicity is a huge selling point with police. They are often faced with a officers that have little firearms proficiency. Having a trigger safety was HUGE at the time. Semi-autos were widely saw as to complicated/unreliable for police. Another factor was expense. Glock had the total package. Simple to use, utterly reliable, and cheap.