Let me preface my remarks by pointing out that I am not a firearms enthusiast and that my experience with them is limited to the brief use of a 12 gauge shotgun.

Despite the what a literal reading of the title might imply, the semiautomatic (mainly) pistols of this manufactuer are mainly made in Austria, though some are now assembled in the United States in the Atlanta area. I believe what the title is meant to imply is that the Glock, more particularly the 9mm caliber Glock 17, either caused or coincided with a change in America's handgun buying habits. Before about the time the Glock began being sold in the United States, most American police forces generally provided a revolver as the standard weapon. In the late 1980s the Federal Bureau of Investigation was involved in a horrific shotout with a couple of well-armed bank robbers in which several FBI agents died. This event gained wide publicity, and the deaths of the agents was blamed, to an unreasonable degree, on the FBI being outgunned.

Individually, the bullets from a semiautomatic handgun are not necessarily more lethal than those from a revolver; it depends on the caliber, ammunition, and so forth. But semiautomatics do generally have more bullets in their magazines than revolvers have in their chambers, and semiautomatic pistols can also be reloaded more quickly than revolvers can.

Glock came to America at the right time to sell to police departments who felt themselves outgunned. The company had a good product, good prices, and an innovative sales force. An example of the latter is their application of a tried and true sales technique to the police gun market; the trade-in. Yes, Glock would significantly reduce the price of a lot of new pistols in return for a police departments older weapons, which it (Glock) would then resell to a wholesaler who would then sell the weapons on the secondhand market. This strategy also came in handy when in the late 1990s a number of cities attempted to sue gun manufactuers for what were deemed the social costs of their product; a number of the cities that complained about guns on the street had been happy enough to add to the number of guns on the street through this trade in offer. Glock also used more traditional sales strategies, such as taking its largely male customers to Atlanta's finest strip club on the last day of a several day training course.

The weapon(s) itself were innovative when the first Glocks came on the market in the 1980s. Much of the exterior of a Glock pistol is a plastic which is lighter and more resistant to corrosion than steel. Despite some misleading 1980s headlines, there is enough metal in a Glock to set off a properly adjusted and tended airport metal detector.
Glock pistols have relatively few parts, which results in higher reliability. The competition, especially the American competition, was slow to catch up. As Glock changed the offerings in the American handgun market, this is a second sense in which the Glock is America's gun.

Gaston Glock, the developer, is not the person you would expect to have developed an innovative firearm. In the early 1980s, when the first model was developed, his main job was working at automobile radiator factory and he ran a small machine shop on the side. This machine shop made curtain rods(!) and more pertinantly had also been manufactuering knives for the Austrian army. When he learned that the army was looking for a new side arm, he went to work, learned about fire arms, and successfully bid on the project.

He was lucky in that an American seller of European guns, Karl Walter, sought out Glock on a visit to Vienna and became the marketer of the weapon in the United States. Glock also benefited from the unintended side effects of such legislation as the assault rifle ban. The American market became the largest buyer of Glock pistols.

Glock needed a good product and good luck in the last few years, because there has been many alarming events in the executive suite. Karl Walter was fired when his compensation (a percentage of the sales) was deemed too high. Gaston Glock suffered considerable injuries in 1999 when Charles Marie Ewert, the Luxemburg citizen he had hired to shelter his company from American and Austrian taxes, was involved in an attempt to murder him. Two senior lawyers at Glock's American headquarters, Paul Jannuzzo and Peter Manown, were accused of defrauding the company through an insurance scam. And wealth turned the once shy Gaston Glock into an imperious, suspicious person.