The Austrian pistol manufacturer Gaston Glock, whose existence was worthy of a thriller, died at the age of 94 after revolutionizing weapon technology with his small plastic calibers.
“In memory of Gaston Glock, July 19, 1929 – December 27, 23. “Perfection continues,” Glock GmbH wrote on its website on Wednesday, accompanying the tribute with a portrait of the businessman and a black headband.
As discreet as his invention was, the father of the semi-automatic “Glock” studied mechanical engineering in Vienna before founding a knife factory with his first wife Helga in 1963.
In his free time he was already making prototypes of pistols, always using his left hand to avoid fate.
In 1982 he won a tender from the Austrian Army to develop a firearm made largely of non-metallic materials.
It is cheaper, lighter, easier to disassemble, fires more bullets than its competitors and the company Glock GmbH, based in Deutsch-Wagram (northeast), is bringing it to the world market.
“We can really compare Gaston Glock to Steve Jobs when he took the first Apple product out of his garage,” Fritz Ofner, head of one of the very rare investigations into the billionaire (“Weapon of Choice”), told AFP in 2018. ” ).
In the United States, around 80% of police officers – who tell each other “In Glock we trust” – are now equipped with them. The FBI also appreciates it.
AFP
Pop Culture
A commercial success driven by Hollywood and pop culture stars.
Bruce Willis extols the virtues of the “low-cost weapon” in “Die Hard 2,” Tommy Lee Jones in “US Marshals.” We draw it in the James Bond films.
On the music side, “Glock was the most cited brand in the American Top 50 in the late 1990s,” says Mr. Ofner, for whom “this new weapon met a new genre,” rap.
Sold in millions of copies, this minimalist “black jewel” secures the fortune of its Austrian designer, and Glock GmbH, which has grown into a multinational company in the fields of aviation, wood, health and energy, employs almost 2,000 people. in Austria, Slovakia and the United States.
AFP
Dark story
But success was also achieved through pain. In 1999, Jacques Pêcheur, a former French wrestler, attacked the Austrian tycoon with a hammer in a parking lot in Luxembourg.
The instigator of the murder, Charles Ewert, is the former right-hand man of Gaston Glock, who became his enemy after an argument. The victim comes out alive after losing a liter of blood, and the two men are convicted.
Then in 2011 there was a divorce from Helga at the age of 82 and the beginning of a dispute over several million euros. The mother of his two sons and daughter was ousted in favor of a colleague, Kathrin Tschikof, who was more than half a century younger than him.
The last decade has also been marked by the increasing debate about handguns, because the “weapon made in Austria” is valued not only by law enforcement authorities and the armed forces.
The Norwegian neo-Nazi Anders Behring Breivik used it to kill 69 participants at a Labor youth summer camp on the island of Utoya in 2011.
A Glock accompanies Saddam Hussein as the GIs drive him out of his hideout in Iraq. And the Islamic State organization flaunts it in propaganda videos.
Gaston Glock loses a libel lawsuit against the NGO Amnesty International, which drew attention to the presence of his pistols in the rebel ranks in Sudan.
The Glock couple, who live on the edge of a lake in southern Austria and are also patrons of hospitals and animal rights activists, then invested in the equestrian sports sector.
The Glock Horse Performance Center, a venue for competitions and social events, features parades of celebrities from Mariah Carey to Rupert Everett, including John Travolta, Naomi Campbell and Robbie Williams.
Three former ministers, members of the right-wing extremist FPÖ party, were also guests at Glocks. However, the industrialist, who was once close to the People's Tribune Jörg Haider, rejected the allegations of secret financing made by a former party leader.