Chicago sues Glock over design that allows easy conversion to machine guns

Alex Brandon/AP

Less than a year after Chicago sued car makers over rampant auto thefts, the city filed another high-profile consumer lawsuit Tuesday targeting Glock, saying the popular firearms maker ignored warnings that its handguns can be easily converted into machine guns.

Tiny devices called auto sears or “switches” can be affixed to handguns such as Glocks, allowing them to fire repeatedly with a single trigger pull.

The devices can cost less than $25 each and be bought online, marketed for other purposes like attachments for airsoft guns. They can even be manufactured at home on 3D printers.

Mass shootings across the country, including a 2022 melee outside a McDonald’s on the Gold Coast and other attacks in Chicago, have involved Glocks equipped with switches.

The lawsuit, filed in Cook County Circuit Court, relies on a change in state law last year that allowed consumer fraud lawsuits against gun makers.

“The city of Chicago is encountering a deadly new frontier in the gun violence plaguing our communities because of the increase of fully automatic Glocks on our streets,” Mayor Brandon Johnson said in a statement.

In a Sun-Times investigation in 2022, lawmakers and gun control advocates warned about the proliferation of switches and said gun makers like Glock bore some of the responsibility to design their guns to be more resistant to conversion.

But Richard Pearson, executive director of the Illinois State Rifle Association, a gun rights organization, said Tuesday’s lawsuit against Glock was a way for the city to “duck responsibility.”

“They should be going after the criminals, not Glock. They should be charging them and putting them in jail,” Pearson said. “If a guy crashes going 160 mph down Lake Shore Drive because he modified his car, are you going to sue Ford or GM for that?”

Pearson said the lawsuit against Glock is designed to “cost the company a lot of money” to defend itself “even though it will get tossed out.”

Although the Glock lawsuit is the first of its kind in Illinois, the firearms maker has faced other legal action in recent years. Last month, for example, Mexico sued Glock and other U.S. gun makers for selling weapons that have allegedly facilitated drug cartel violence.

Under federal law, individual switches themselves — even those not attached to a gun — are considered machine guns. The penalty for breaking that law is a prison term of as long as 10 years.

Criminals who put switches on their handguns often use extended magazines, too, to make them extra lethal.

“While it is illegal to sell machine guns to non-law enforcement personnel, except under very limited circumstances, Glock sells, manufactures, imports, and markets pistols that easily accept auto sears to civilians, thereby facilitating the proliferation of illegal machine guns,” states the city’s lawsuit, which notes Chicago cops have seized more than 1,100 Glocks equipped with a switch over the last two years.

The lawsuit seeks monetary damages and an order barring Glock from selling pistols that are easily converted into automatic weapons.

In the past, the city hasn’t fared well in lawsuits against the gun industry.

In 1998, Mayor Richard M. Daley’s administration filed a $433 million lawsuit against firearms manufacturers and lost six years later. The city sent undercover officers into suburban gun stores to show they were selling guns to criminals through “straw purchasers.” The lawsuit said gun makers and distributors knew about it but failed to act.

Last year, the city lost a lawsuit against a Gary gun store that was accused of funneling firearms to criminals in Chicago.

As for the city’s lawsuit against two big car makers, Kia and Hyundai, the case is pending. The lawsuit, filed Aug. 24 in Cook County Circuit Court, alleges the designs of the automakers’ vehicles are flawed because they’re easy to steal, helping fuel a car theft crisis in Chicago.