Vice President Kamala Harris first revealed to the public that she owned a gun in 2019, during her first presidential campaign. But it was only this week that the Democratic nominee for president revealed the make of that gun, which an aide has said is securely stored in her Los Angeles residence: Glock.
If Ms. Harris wanted to appeal to a broad swath of American gun owners, she couldn’t have picked a better brand.
“The Austrian-made Glock is actually America’s gun,” said Paul M. Barrett, author of the 2012 book “Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun.” “It revolutionized the American and worldwide handgun industry in the ’80 and ’90s when it was introduced, and became the firearm equivalent to Xerox for copying and Google for searching.”
That the gun has been a favorite of the country’s police forces for more than three decades helps account for its dominance in the popular imagination. During an interview on “60 Minutes” this week, Ms. Harris pointed to her background in law enforcement as a reason for her choice. But that hardly begins to capture the status of the boxy, magazine-fed pistol in American culture.
Originally developed in the early 1980s by the Austrian engineer Gaston Glock for the Austrian military, the gun looked nothing like the other pistols of the time: It was made of plastic, not steel and wood, and it was rectangular, with no curved lines.
It gained traction in the United States through a combination of savvy marketing and favorable national trends.
As national crime rates spiked in the late ’80s and early ’90s, police departments were searching for a more reliable gun that could fire more bullets without being reloaded.
Lighter, easier to clean and with a larger magazine than the handguns previously used by American police departments, Glock caught on.
To promote its products, Glock gave away stunt guns to Hollywood prop masters. The pistols quickly started turning up in television shows and movies like “Law and Order” and “Die Hard 2,” in which the character played by Bruce Willis delivers a monologue about the excellent quality of the gun. Almost none of the facts about the Glock that Mr. Willis recites in the movie were true, but that did not prevent the scene from bolstering the gun’s image.
“Gun enthusiasts went nuts about this — correcting it, drawing a huge amount of attention to the Glock, which was still an exotic product,” Mr. Barrett said.
Concerns that the plastic gun could evade metal and X-ray detection led to congressional hearings in 1986, which brought Glock more publicity still. The furor also aligned the brand closely with the National Rifle Association, which, according to Mr. Barrett, had initially kept the company at arm’s length because it wasn’t American.
(The company did not respond to a request for comment.)
At the same time, gangster rap ascended as a major force in American pop culture. Rap stars including 2Pac, the Notorious B.I.G. and Wu-Tang Clan mentioned the gun — a single word, easy to rhyme — in their music. A search on Genius, the lyrics annotation archive, returns hundreds of results for “Glock.”
All of this visibility turned Glock into a hugely popular brand for private gun owners. According to September data from GunBroker.com, new and used Glock 17 and 19 models are among the most popular pistols.
Along the way, Glock achieved the ultimate status for a brand: genericization. Like Kleenex and Aspirin, “Glock” became a way to refer to an entire product category, not just pistols made by the Austrian company.
As one of the country’s default firearms, Glock has gained a darker kind of cultural fame for its use in mass shootings, including the murders at Virginia Tech in 2007, at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin in 2012, and at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston in 2015, according to a May 2022 report from the Violence Policy Center.
Along with Ms. Harris’s recent discussion of her gun ownership, her campaign has embraced aspects of American culture and expressions of patriotism typically thought to be more closely associated with Republicans. Over the summer, her official campaign store sold — and quickly sold out of — a camouflage hat, and at the Democratic National Convention in August, supporters waved American flags and chanted “U.S.A.!”
Her line on guns has not always landed. Ms. Harris has faced criticism from the conservative news media for owning a pistol despite supporting a handgun ban as district attorney in San Francisco.
But as a Democratic woman who says she supports both owning guns and placing limits on them, the presidential contender has given voters plenty to decode.
And in Glock, she has settled on a symbol.
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