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Chicago Files Suit Over Glock Machine Gun Conversion Switch

The city of Chicago’s legal department filed a nuisance lawsuit against gun manufacturer Glock on Tuesday, under Illinois' newly passed Firearms Industry Responsibility Act, Courthouse News Reports. The city hopes to bar the company from locally marketing or selling semiautomatic pistols that can be converted to fire fully automatic, except to law enforcement. Glock semiautomatic pistols that are converted into full-auto weapons, Chicago argues, are effectively machine guns; weapons that U.S. civilians have been largely banned from owning since 1934.  "Unfortunately, the machine gun has returned as a weapon of choice for criminals in Chicago — this time in the form of a Glock pistol, which can be easily modified into a machine gun using a simple, quarter-sized device called an auto sear," Chicago says in its complaint, filed in Cook County. "Glock knows that it takes little effort to convert its pistols into illegal machine guns and that criminals frequently do so."


Installing an auto sear on a Glock semiautomatic pistol allows a user to shoot continuously by keeping the trigger squeezed, instead of having to pull the trigger every time they want to fire a single round. Though most Glock pistol magazines can only hold between six and 17 rounds — with some extended magazines having space for as many as 33 rounds — the city estimated that a Glock with an auto sear could theoretically fire over 1,200 rounds per minute. The city argued such modified Glocks have "caused death and destruction throughout Chicago: they have been recovered in connection with homicides, aggravated assaults, batteries, kidnappings, burglaries, home invasions, carjackings, and attempted robberies." Besides hoping to enjoin Glock from "marketing and selling pistols that can easily be converted to fully automatic to Chicago non-law enforcement consumers via its website and Illinois gun stores that serve the Chicago market," per the complaint, Chicago seeks tens of thousands of dollars from Glock for violations of municipal and state fraud law.

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