Gaston Glock: Austrian engineer of iconic handgun dies aged 94 | EUROtoday

For free actual time breaking information alerts despatched straight to your inbox signal as much as our breaking information emails

Sign as much as our free breaking information emails

Gaston Glock, the reclusive Austrian developer of the handgun that bears his identify, died on Wednesday. He was 94.

The Glock firm introduced his loss of life, the Austria Press Agency reported.

The tycoon and developer of the world’s best-selling handguns received loyal followings amongst police and navy the world over together with his and his household’s fortune estimated to be at $1.1bn (£858m) in 2021, in accordance with Forbes.

Glock based the corporate in 1963 in Deutsch-Wagram, close to Vienna. However, his rise started within the Eighties when the Austrian navy was in search of a brand new, modern weapon and has since expanded around the globe, together with a US subsidiary based in 1985.

Up till then, the Glock firm had made navy knives and shopper items together with curtain rods. But he assembled a workforce of firearms consultants and got here up with the Glock 17, a light-weight semi-automatic gun largely made from plastic.

The revolutionary design – with a body made from a high-strength, nylon-based polymer and solely the slide made from metallic – beat a number of different firms’ blueprints. The weapon was considerably lighter, cheaper and extra dependable than the fashions obtainable when it was created and was shortly picked up by police and a few nations’ navy forces, in addition to privately, making it a world hit.

“Get yourself a Glock and lose that nickel-plated sissy pistol,” Tommy Lee Jones stated within the 1998 film US Marshals. US rappers additionally labored them into their rhymes, amongst them Snoop Dogg’s “Protocol” and Wu-Tang Clan’s “Da Glock”.

US troopers discovered toppled Iraqi president Saddam Hussein hiding with a Glock in a gap within the floor in 2003. They later offered that weapon to then US president George W Bush, in accordance with the New York Times.

Glock stated on its web site that its founder “not only revolutionised the world of small arms in the 1980s, but also succeeded in establishing the Glock brand as the global leader in the handgun industry”.

However, gun-control advocates criticised Glock for popularising highly effective weapons that they stated have been simple to hide and will maintain extra ammunition than different weapons.

A former US Marine fight veteran armed with what police described as a .45 calibre Glock with a high-capacity journal killed 12 folks in a bar in Thousand Oaks, California, in November 2018.

White supremacist Dylann Roof used a Glock pistol to kill 9 African-American folks throughout a Bible research session at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, in June 2015.

Additional reporting by businesses