Disappointingly, though there is a Baby Glock available, it’s not actually a handgun for small children. It’s a nickname for the Glock 26, a 9×19mm subcompact version of what I assume they call the Big Boy Glock. It’s designed for concealed carry and was introduced in 1995 for the civilian market.
I was hoping for something more akin to the Glock 43 Pink 9mm, which the Gun Made site has at the top of its 5 Best Pink Guns for Women list.
This is because the Glock is not just a gun, it’s a cultural icon. Depending on how you use the word culture, that is. In an interview with NPR about his 2012 book, Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun, author Paul Barrett describes how it arrived “in the mid-1980s, just as crime rates were skyrocketing. Cocaine-driven gang rivalries in many big cities were causing all kinds of shooting incidents.
“The police … came to the conclusion that they were outgunned, as they put it, by the bad guys. And here came Gaston Glock, this obscure Austrian industrialist, and he said: ‘Put away your Smith & Wesson revolvers that hold only five or six rounds. I have the gun of the future for you, the Glock 17 — 17 rounds in the magazine, an 18th round in the chamber.’ And not only that, but it also looks kind of futuristic. It almost looks like something out of Star Trek. And it was the rage.”
An inspiring story, indeed. Why are we talking about Glocks? Because that’s the weapon name-checked in the News24 story headlined “‘Don’t forget Glock’: Pretoria Boys pupil who threatened to shoot teacher will stay in class”.
The story, in essence, is about the attempted expulsion of a 16-year-old Pretoria Boys’ High School pupil, who had allegedly threatened to kill a teacher and shoot up the school. Investigators found videos of him handling guns and messages about buying a Glock pistol. Instagram videos showed the pupil and his brothers handling and showing off firearms while smoking marijuana. WhatsApp messages revealed discussions about buying a Glock, which was to be exchanged at a petrol station for cash.
According to News24, the pupil said in the messages: “Don’t forget the Glock. Bring it then imma give you your cash.” He also said: “If you see a school shooting, just know it was me, because I’m gonna blow this school up,” specifying a teacher as his first target.
This wasn’t the first warning sign. In November 2025, News24 writes, the pupil was issued a final written warning and removed from the school’s boarding house after he tested positive for marijuana. Part of the corrective action taken was that he had to produce “a 10-page research project on the dangers of drugs”, which strikes me as hilariously naive. And which echoes the sort of well-meaning grace that we’re about to discuss.
The shooting threat surfaced when “during an investigation into a separate alcohol incident in which videos of the pupil and his friends drinking off-campus circulated, a classmate’s phone was voluntarily handed to school management”.
The school’s disciplinary committee found that “it is difficult to think of circumstances that would demand more strongly that a learner be expelled, except, perhaps, if a learner had already stabbed or shot another learner or a teacher. This committee cannot and will not wait for that to happen before it acts.” They also pointed out that acts such as school shootings are almost always prefigured by warning signs, which are often ignored.
The school’s disciplinary committee decided to expel the pupil, and on the same day sent this recommendation to the head of the Gauteng department of education (GDE), “triggering a statutory 14-day deadline for a decision under the South African Schools Act”.
You might say education departments don’t kill pupils, school shooters do
Incredibly, after a long delay, the GDE decided to overrule the school’s disciplinary committee, and decreed that the boy be allowed to return to the school, with a 12‑month suspended sanction and intervention programme.
Well, I say incredibly. There might have been some sound pedagogical and legal reasons for the decision, for all I know. Probably similar to the reasons that last year allowed a 17-year-old boy in the US to return to school in Nashville after he had, in separate incidents, punched his mother in the face, threatened a classmate with a knife, and displayed a fascination with school shooters.
For this, he was given a two-day suspension, after which he came to school with a pistol, fired 10 shots in 20 seconds in the cafeteria, killing a 16-year-old girl before shooting himself. America doesn’t have many lessons left to teach us, but surely this is one.
I don’t know what sort of gun this shooter used, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a Glock. Glocks are big in pop culture, especially that version of pop culture personified and pushed by the US. They’re foregrounded in video games, movies and rap music, to the point where extensive media coverage has led to “Glock” functioning as a generic term for any semi-automatic handgun.
Glock pistols have been used in mass shootings and high-profile murders all around the world. To illustrate the scale of this, here’s a heavily truncated list, culled from Wikipedia: the 2001 Nepalese royal massacre, the 2002 Erfurt massacre, the 2002 Nanterre massacre, the 2011 Norway attacks, the 2012 Bucharest hair salon shooting, the 2016 Munich shooting, the 2023 Rotterdam shootings, the 2023 Prague shootings and the 2025 Graz school shooting.
In the US specifically, examples include the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting, the 2011 Tucson shooting, the 2012 Aurora shooting, the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, the 2015 Charleston church shooting, the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting, the 2022 New York City subway attack … I could go on.
So many shootings, and so many school shootings in particular, all brought to you by Glock. I know, I know. Guns don’t kill people, people kill people, or whatever the gun nuts like to chant. As comedian Suzy Eddie Izzard quipped: “They say that guns don’t kill people, people kill people. Well, I think the gun helps. If you just stood there and yelled bang, I don’t think you’d kill too many people.”
Given the febrile swirl of violence in which the Pretoria Boys pupil appears to be swimming, one must sympathise with the shock expressed by the school at the GDE’s blithe willingness to ignore the warning signs brought to its attention.
It’s not guaranteed that this can only end one way, but it is inescapable that ignoring these sorts of warning signs has ended in violence and dead children before. You might say education departments don’t kill pupils, school shooters do. But that’s the same spurious formulation as that used about guns. If you’re taking away the opportunity, you’re potentially saving lives.
Many of us, I want to imagine, believe in the possibility of redemption, but it’s hard to make the case that this should outweigh clear threats to innocents.
There was an example of this sort of muddled bureaucratic largesse in the UK this week. A judge convicted two 15-year-old boys of raping two girls in separate incidents, and of filming the rapes and sharing the videos online. Their punishment?
One of the boys was given a three-year youth rehabilitation order with 180 days of intensive supervision for raping both girls and for the images. The other received the same sentence for three rape charges against each victim and four counts of taking indecent images.
One of the girls who was raped told the BBC that “the judge’s decision to spare them jail sentences was like a ‘rock straight in my face’”. The judge said that “he wanted to avoid ‘criminalising’ the ‘very young’ boys”. You’d be forgiven for thinking that they’d already done that themselves.
Again, we don’t want to eliminate the chance of rehabilitation for boys like the one in Pretoria, but it’s hard to imagine that just sending him back to the school, especially given his history of misdemeanours, is the best way to accomplish this.
Normally, I’d be more hesitant about advancing this opinion, as we don’t know what sort of evidence was presented to the GDE. But given that the same department can barely manage school admissions in general, I’m not confident in its ability to separate politics from pragmatism at this stage.
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