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.