Maryland has already banned the sale of the most popular long guns in the country, but now Democrats are targeting some of the most popular handguns as well.
On Wednesday, the House of Delegates gave its stamp of approval to legislation that would prohibit the sale of semi-automatic, striker-fired pistols that have a “cruciform trigger bar,” which would cover Glock pistols and Glock clones. California already has a virtually identical law in place, and Democrats in Illinois and New York are also pushing similar bans this session.
Glock has faced litigation over the design of its handguns, which critics claim allow for the easy installation of illegal devices that convert the semi-automatic pistols into full-auto machine guns.
Switches are already illegal under Maryland and federal law, but supporters of the legislation say that lawmakers should go further and require gun manufacturers to make their products harder to retrofit. Maryland’s bill would ban future sales of pistols that can be converted into machine guns, but would not require current Glock owners to get rid of their guns or modify them.
“If you currently own one, you can keep it,” said Del. Nicole Williams, a Prince George’s County Democrat and a sponsor of the bill, during debate on the House floor. “No one is taking your gun away from you. After this, if Glock modifies its design, you can go purchase that newly designed gun.”
Gee, where have we heard that before? How about in Rhode Island last year, when Democrats banned so-called assault weapons but allowed existing owners to keep them. Just one year later, though, Democrats are pushing for a ban on possession of these firearms.
Or how about in California, which banned "large capacity' magazines in the late 1980s but allowed existing owners to keep them... until voters approved a revised mag ban that removed the grandfather clause in 2016.
Why should we believe Williams or any other supporter of the gun ban bill when they say Glock owners can keep their guns? If these pistols are supposedly too dangerous to be sold, why wouldn't Williams also believe that they're too dangerous to possess?
And while Williams contends that Glocks can be sold in the state if the company modifies its design, Glock has already taken that step. Last year it announced an end to production for the vast majority of its catalog, and rolled out its new "V" series, which still has a cruciform trigger bar but also has a piece of steel on the back of the gun that prevents a switch from being installed.
Under the bill approved by Maryland lawmakers, a gun can still be considered a "machine gun convertible pistol" even if it has a "piece of material" designed to block the installation of a switch, so long as that material can be "readily removed with a household tool."
That language seems designed to keep Glocks off the shelves of Maryland gun stores, despite the company's redesign. Maryland Shall Issue head Mark Pennak, though, told the Baltimore Banner he “fully intends” to sue over the ban if Gov. Wes Moore signs SB 334 into law.
The spate of bills and litigation targeting Glock is partly a response to the rise in illegal switches, but it's also an intentional strategy by the gun control lobby and their allies to test the ability to ban some handguns, even if a total ban remains off the table. If Glocks can be banned in these blue states because criminals are illegally converting them to machine guns, a similar argument could be used in these blue states to try to ban virtually all semi-automatic firearms that accept detachable magazines. If criminals are using illegal "large capacity" magazines in Maryland and California despite their forbidden status, then the next step to combat that is to ban those guns that require detachable magazines in order to function as designed.
The anti-gunners may have rebranded themselves as "gun safety" advocates, but the end goal remains the same: banning as many guns as possible, and rendering the Second Amendment a dead letter. Maryland's bill is a step in that direction, and other Democrat-controlled states are going to be marching in lockstep with Maryland and California in the months ahead.
Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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