OBITUARY Gaston Glock, the man behind the gun, dies aged 94 -
Dec
27 - Gaston Glock, the reclusive engineer and tycoon who developed one
of the world's best-selling handguns, died on Wednesday aged 94,
Austrian news agency APA said.
The
Austrian won loyal followings among police and military across the
world with the weapons that bore his name. Forbes estimated his and his
family's fortune at $1.1 billion in 2021.
His rise began in the 1980s when the Austrian military was looking for a new, innovative weapon.
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 and secured his upstart outfit the contract.
Soon
the easily assembled weapon became a global hit. "Get yourself a Glock
and lose that nickel-plated sissy pistol," Tommy Lee Jones said in the
1998 movie "U.S. Marshals".
Many
U.S. police officers used them and U.S. rappers worked them into their
rhymes, among them Snoop Dogg's "Protocol" and Wu-Tang Clan's "Da
Glock".
U.S.
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 U.S. President George W. Bush, according to the New York Times.
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 U.S. Marine combat veteran armed with what police described as a .45 caliber 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.
MALLET ATTACK
Glock
himself rarely responded to criticism from activists, shunned public
debate and, in 2000, refused to join other weapons manufacturers in
signing a voluntary gun control deal with the U.S. government.
He
made few comments of any kind to the press, but the public got glimpses
of a sometimes tempestuous private life through the courts.
At
the age of 70, in July 1999, he survived an attempt on his life when an
investment broker who managed his assets hired a former wrestler to
attack him with a rubber hammer, a court heard.
Glock
had grown suspicious of how the broker was managing his affairs and had
flown to Luxembourg to confront him, lawyers said. He suffered seven
blows to the head but fended off the assault. The broker, Charles Ewert,
and the attacker, Jacques Pecheur, were both jailed.
His
49-year-old marriage with Helga Glock ended in divorce in 2011 and the
pair embarked on a lengthy legal battle over alimony. Soon after, he
married his second wife, Kathrin, more than 50 years his junior.
He
owned a lakefront mansion and a state-of-the-art equestrian sport
centre in the province of Carinthia, where celebrities showed up for
parties.
He is survived by his wife, a daughter and two sons.
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