(Vienna) The Austrian pistol manufacturer Gaston Glock, whose existence was worthy of a thriller, died at the age of 94 after having revolutionized weaponry with his small plastic calibers.
“In memory of Gaston Glock, 1907 1929 -2712.23. Perfection continues,” Glock GmbH wrote on its website on Wednesday, accompanying the tribute with a portrait of the businessman and a black banner.
Discreet as his invention was famous, 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 spare time, he already made prototypes of pistols… always with his left hand, in order to ward off fate.
In 1982, he won a tender from the Austrian army to design 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, headquartered in Deutsch-Wagram (north-east), is launching on the world market.
“In Glock we Trust”
“We can really compare Gaston Glock to Steve Jobs when he took the first Apple product out of his garage,” Fritz Ofner, director 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 say among themselves “In Glock we Trust” – are now equipped with one. The FBI also cherishes it.
A commercial success driven by Hollywood and stars.
Bruce Willis extols the merits of the “low-cost gun” in Die Hard 2Tommy Lee Jones in U.S. Marshals. We draw it in the James Bond.
On the music side, “at the end of the 1990s, Glock was the most cited brand in the top 50 American”, according to Mr. Ofner, for whom “this new weapon has encountered a new genre”, rap.
Sold in millions of copies, this minimalist “black jewel” ensures the fortune of its Austrian designer and Glock GmbH, which has become a multinational present in aviation, wood, health and energy, employs nearly 2,000 people in Austria, Slovakia and the United States.
Stormy divorce and controversies
But success was also achieved through pain. In 1999, in a parking lot in Luxembourg, Jacques Pêcheur, a former French wrestler, charged the Austrian tycoon with a hammer.
The instigator of the murder, Charles Ewert, is the former right-hand man of Gaston Glock, who became his enemy after a dispute. The victim will come out alive after losing a liter of blood and the two men will be condemned.
Then came the divorce in 2011 from Helga, at the age of 82, and the start of a multi-million euro standoff. The mother of his two sons and his daughter was ousted in favor of a colleague, Kathrin Tschikof, more than half a century his junior.
The last decade is also marked by the rise of the debate on handguns, because the “gun made in Austria” is not appreciated only by law enforcement and the armed forces.
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 when the GIs dislodge him from his hole in Iraq. And the Islamic State Organization exhibits it in propaganda videos.
Gaston Glock loses a defamation lawsuit against the NGO Amnesty International, which had drawn attention to the presence of his pistols in the ranks of rebels in Sudan.
VI P and extreme right
The Glock couple, based on the edge of a lake in the south of Austria, also patrons of hospitals and animal protectors, then invested in the equestrian sector.
A place of competitions and social events, the “Glock horse performance center” sees celebrities parade, from Mariah Carey to Rupert Everett, including John Travolta, Naomi Campbell and Robbie Williams.
Three former ministers, members of the far-right FPÖ party, were also guests of the Glocks. The industrialist, once close to the tribune Jörg Haider, however denied allegations of secret financing boasted by a former leader of the party.