I don’t see anti-gun bias in this article. Business Week. It focuses on… well… BUSINESS! It does look to me that the author worked on presenting a balanced story of Glock.
Glock is a terrific product. The video of Mas Ayoob shooting both a Glock and a revolver in the beginning of the article portray accurately why this pistol – simple, elegant and virtually indestructible – is a favorite with law enforcement.
It accurately dispels the myth of the “plastic gun,” that gun grabbers so love to use as a scare tactic, fomenting hysteria about terrorists being able to sneak these firearms on planes and kill us all!
Syndicated columnist Jack Anderson raised the Glock profile when he
wrote in January 1986 that Libya, a notorious terrorist threat, was
trying to acquire Austrian-made “plastic” guns that could evade metal
detectors. Glock pistols are actually made mostly of metal and are
easily identified by alert airport screeners. (And even not so alert ones, I would suspect, since it would set off metal detectors.)
And it attempts a balance when reporting about Glock’s business practices. It discusses marketing strategies, and pricing plans, as well as a certain history of intrigue.
I don’t see an anti-gun bias in the article at all.
Mas Ayoob spent some time with the reporter who wrote the piece.
I know Barrett, and I didn’t take it that way. In
fact, he’s one of the few mainstream media people I know who seems to
take a totally neutral approach to this highly polarized debate. In
reading his article and the related sidebars carefully, I can find no
hint of editorial prejudice against gun owners. The online version
opens with a video of me explaining why both police and “civilian”
markets took to the Glock pistol like ducks to water. Both Barrett and
his editors had the opportunity to edit out the comments in which I
treated the private citizen sector with the same respect as the law
enforcement sector. They did not.I took Barrett to a couple of pistol matches so
he could see why ordinary folks liked these popular handguns. In an
exercise in “participatory journalism,” he took some private lessons
with us and competed in the second match, using a borrowed Glock 17. He
proved safe and competent for a man who has never owned a firearm and
had only fired them in the course of research related to his reportage
on the weapons industry. New to the gun, he did not come in last in the
match.In talking with Barrett, I got a sense of an
honest reporter trying to show every side of the story he had been
assigned to write. Some former Glock execs, whom he plainly showed in
his article to be inimical toward the company, had to be quoted; when
I talked with him, he was trying desperately to get counterpoint
comments from current Glock spokespeople.
As gun owners, we’re so accustomed to being vilified by most of the mainstream mediots, that we seem to kneejerk into defensive mode anytime an article is written about guns that is not completely, 100 percent complimentary.
I would encourage folks to read the piece, rather than jump to conclusions that this article was just another attack on gun rights.
I love my Glocks. The company manufactures a terrific product at a price that is worth its value. I’ve never had a problem with a Glock, and I can understand why it’s a popular firearm with both civilians and law enforcement alike.
