Ask anyone on our range which pistol they want and a remarkable number say "the Glock" — including plenty who could not identify any other handgun. It has become a generic name for a pistol, which is quite a feat for a company that had never made one before 1980.
An outsider's design
Gaston Glock ran a business in Austria making knives, entrenching tools and curtain rails. He had no background in firearms design whatsoever. When the Austrian army opened a competition for a new service pistol in the early 1980s, he entered anyway — and that inexperience turned out to be the advantage.
With no traditions to defend, Glock built something the established makers would not have. A polymer frame at a time when "plastic gun" was an insult. A striker-fired mechanism with no external hammer and no manual safety lever, relying instead on a trigger-integrated safety and internal blocks. A very low parts count, and a design intended from the outset to be manufactured cheaply and precisely.
It won the Austrian trial and entered service as the P80.
The name
A small piece of trivia that catches people out: the "17" in Glock 17 is not the magazine capacity, even though the magazine happens to hold 17 rounds. It was the seventeenth patent the company had filed. A pleasing coincidence that has confused people ever since.
From joke to standard
Early reception was sceptical, and in the 1980s the pistol became the subject of some memorably inaccurate scare stories about plastic guns and airport metal detectors — which, as free publicity goes, did the company no harm at all.
The reality asserted itself. The pistols were reliable, simple to strip, easy to shoot well and cheap to buy in quantity. Police forces adopted them in enormous numbers, first in the United States and then worldwide, and the striker-fired polymer pistol became the default template that almost every other manufacturer eventually followed.
Why the replica is such a good one to shoot
Glock replicas are usually gas blowback, and that is exactly what makes them the highlight of a range table. Pull the trigger and the slide slams backwards and returns, the gun kicks in your hand, and when the magazine runs dry the slide locks open just as it should.
The simplicity that made the original a success translates directly: there is no safety catch to find, no hammer to worry about, no manual of arms to learn. Point, aim, shoot. For somebody who has never held a pistol, it is about as approachable as it gets — and the blowback is the bit they will still be talking about in the car.