Chicago’s Glock Lawsuit: A Step Toward Holding Gun Manufacturers Responsible

This July, the City of Chicago sued the Austrian gun company Glock and its American manufacturing arm, Glock Inc, for endangering Chicagoans by selling their easily modifiable pistols through irresponsible retailers and marketing their guns as safe. Two Chicago gun stores, Eagle Sports Range and Midwest Sporting Goods, are also named as defendants for reckless business practices and dangerous marketing of Glock pistols. Chicago seeks to prevent all defendants from selling Glock pistols to the Chicago market and marketing them as safe. 

Twenty-four years ago, Jorge Leon, a young Venezuelan man, patented a device that would allow Glock semi-automatic pistols to become fully automatic. Leon called this device a “fire selector system for selecting between the automatic and semi-automatic operation of a gun,” it is now known colloquially as a Glock switch.   

Roughly the size of a quarter, the switch attaches to the back of a Glock pistol and depresses the trigger bar, allowing the gun to shoot continuously. A typical semi-automatic pistol, such as a Glock 17, can reasonably fire five rounds a second; a fully automatic one can fire twenty. 

Glock switches are small, simple, and cheap to manufacture. With the help of the detailed technical drawings included in the patent filing, they have proven easy to illegally produce using a 3D printer. A Glock switch can be bought for around twenty dollars, and they have become increasingly popular.  From  2017 to 2021, the number of fully automatic gun conversion devices recovered by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) rose 570% compared to the previous five year period.  

Fully automatic guns are highly regulated in the United States. Possessing a machine gun is illegal in Chicago, and, since 1968, U.S. code has legally considered any device used to make a gun fully-automatic a machine gun itself. People have long been self-modifying their semi-automatic guns to be fully automatic. But prior to the Glock switch, the methods were complicated and unreliable, requiring technical skills far beyond what an average person possesses. Modifying a Glock to fit a switch, though, requires a razor blade and about ten seconds. 

Gun violence in Chicago isn’t new. But, the growing popularity of weapons which can theoretically fire 1200 rounds a minute—and be incredibly hard to control with the resulting recoil of rapidly firing so many rounds—exacerbates the issue. Chicago has seen firsthand the proliferation of Glock switches. Currently, the most commonly recovered crime gun in Chicago is the Glock 9mm pistol; around a quarter of these are modified with a switch. 

The company Glock has known about Glock switches for decades. In the late 1980’s, before patenting the Glock switch, Leon even talked about the device with Glock’s late CEO, Gaston Glock. Reportedly, Glock suggested Leon “leave [the device] as a curiosity.” But, while Glock was content to leave the easily modifiable design of his pistols a curiosity, Leon did not keep the device to himself; by filing a US patent for the Glock switch, he made the technology widely known. 

Glock maintains that its guns are very safe, advertising the “safe action system” its guns are equipped with. The two gun stores implicated in the lawsuit likewise advertise their Glocks as safe, but they simultaneously advertise the ease with which Glock pistols can be illegally modified to become machine guns. In 2020, Eagle Sports Range posted an Instagram video advertising the (illegal) modified Glock 17 customers could come in and shoot. “It doesn’t get much better than this,” the caption reads.

Despite clear public safety concerns about the marketing and use of Glocks, regulating these guns and their suppliers is a struggle. The ongoing lawsuit between the City of Chicago and Glock, Eagle Sports Range and Midwest Sporting Goods is an expanded version of a lawsuit Chicago filed in March, which implicated only Glock. That suit was thrown out after Glock cited a US Federal Law protecting gun manufacturers from civil lawsuits over the criminal actions of third parties.

Chicago’s mayor, Brandon Johnson, champions the city’s active Glock lawsuit as historic and the first of its kind. In March, Johnson said winning the lawsuit would “hold Glock accountable for putting profits over public safety.” But, going after Glock is difficult. Glock does not manufacture or sell Glock switches; it sells legal guns. The company has no legal responsibility to protect public safety; its responsibility is to its shareholders. 

Though Chicago touts its lawsuit against Glock as the first of its kind, this is certainly not the first time a city has sued a gun manufacturer. In the early 2000s, Cincinnati, Miami, New Orleans and many other cities attempted to sue manufacturers for negligence and creating public nuisance. In 2000, Chicago itself sued 42 gun manufacturers, dealers, and distributors. Chicago’s suit—and many others’—were dismissed. In the wake of these lawsuits, gun manufacturers lobbied for legal protection from the criminal acts of their customers. The result was the very federal law Glock used to have Chicago’s March lawsuit dropped.  

Throughout the United States, gun regulations struggle to keep up with the rapid pace of firearm evolution. For years, unregulated “ghost guns”—unserialized guns sold as kits or component pieces—have been growing in popularity. From 2017 to 2021 there was a 1083% increase in the number of privately made firearms (which ghost guns are classified under) recovered by law enforcement agencies. Unserialized, these guns were not regulated until 2023, when ATF revised the previous definition of firearm to include any weapon which “may readily be converted to expel a projectile by the action of an explosive.” Even then, the new definition was legally challenged on the grounds that it exceeded the ATF’s statutory authority. 

The tide is changing, though. The case against ATF, Garland v. VanDerStok, was heard by the Supreme Court in early October, and the ATF’s new definition will likely be upheld. An ATF win would be a step towards protecting gun regulation in the United States. A win for Chicago in its Glock lawsuit would be a step towards protecting public safety in Chicago. 

If Chicago wins their lawsuit, there could be a profit incentive for Glock to change the design of its semi-automatic pistols in order to make them less modifiable. A win would also set a precedent that gun manufacturers can be held legally responsible for the harms their products cause. If more lawsuits follow this one, Glock would stand to eventually lose much larger portions of the American market. When public safety can’t trump profit, the law seeks to make being a threat to public safety unprofitable. 

If Glock wins the lawsuit, Chicago will have to once again rethink how to address the threat of gun violence. Gun manufacturers such as Glock will be vindicated from any role in gun crimes. Regardless of the legal outcome, the gun industry will continue to find ways to skirt regulation, as will its customers. Governments will have to continually find ways to keep their citizens safe; Chicago’s Glock lawsuit is just one piece. 

The image featured in this article is licensed for reuse under the Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license. No changes were made to the original image, which was taken by Jason Lawrence and can be found here.