Europe Supplies the Weapons, the United States the Dead

We are used to naturally dealing with the dichotomy between a pacific Europe and a bellicose United States. And we´re not very far from reality because not only does the U.S. account for 50 percent of the global spending on arms, but, as we know, the passion of Americans for weapons is so intense that their country has the highest rate of gun ownership per capita in the world: 88.8 per every 100 inhabitants. Do you know what the next country on the list is? Yemen with 54.8., followed by Switzerland (45.7) and Finland (45.3). After that there is no other country that surpasses 40 firearms for every 100 persons, so the result is symmetrical. The U.S. also has 50 percent of the handguns that exists in the world.

Weapons are everywhere. What is the result of the fact that U.S. citizens have, according to the sources, between 260 and 300 million weapons at their disposal? That the number of people killed by firearms in the U.S., some 57,000 people a year, is eight times higher than in European countries. But just as surprising as this data is the generally unknown fact that a large number of handguns that are sold in U.S. are European. According to Estudios de Política Exterior SA, number 806, an indispensable source from which I extract this data, EU member countries sold in 2010 no less than 1 million handguns in the U.S.. Among them are, guess … Austria and Germany, which manufacture pistols (Glock, Sig Sauer, and Walther) that seem to have Americans fascinated.

We complain about the “Spanish brand” and how hard that is to promote, but the “Austrian brand” gives you something to think about. It turns out that, in addition to worshipping Arnold Schwarzenegger (another Austrian), the Americans love Austria’s Glock pistols. Interestingly, Glock handguns have become equally iconic for police, criminals, and the mentally unbalanced, to the point that a good number of the major massacres that have taken place in recent years have been carried out with a Glock: Aurora, 20 dead in 2012; Tucson, six dead in 2012; Virginia, 32 dead in 2007; Honolulu, 7 dead in 1999…

Paul Barrett’s recent book on Gaston Glock and its guns (“Glock: The rise of America’s Gun”) has highlighted something that few knew: 80 percent of the security forces and police forces in the U.S. have adopted the pistol of an Austrian engineer born in 1929, displacing the classic Smith 38 revolver. His secret? A reinforced polymer (plastic) that achieves a very lightweight and easy to use gun; and its infallible mechanics enable you to shoot 17 bullets quickly and safely, compared to the five of the traditional Smith & Wesson revolver. In a country where criminals and traffickers are heavily armed, the speed and agility of the Glock guns have caused them to be indispensable for the police.

The best part? The history of Gaston Glock, one of the 25 richest men in Austria. In 1999, a partner of Glock, Charles Ewert, who had diverted large sums of money from the company, hired French hitman Jacques Pecheur to murder him. The attempt was unsuccessful, Glock survived and Ewert ended up in prison. Curiously, to kill Glock, Pecheur chose not a gun but a club with which he dealt seven blows, but he was able to defend himself by snatching the club and the killer escaped. Why Pecheur chose a club instead of a Glock is unknown. Perhaps it was because the assassination attempt took place in Luxembourg, where it is not so easy to buy Glock pistols? We don’t know.

What we do know is that Glock sends nearly 250,000 guns to the U.S. every year. Guns are manufactured for $75 and are sold for $300-$500, depending on the model, so business is significant. And so, Europe provides the weapon and the U.S. the money and the dead. They say that Europeans are idiots, but in the United States they kill themselves while we investigate how to make faster and lighter guns.