Can a state ban something designed for a legitimate purpose, and indeed constitutionally protected for that purpose, simply because a criminal may illegally modify the item? That is the fundamental question raised by a recent wave of state laws banning the sale of some of the most popular handguns in the United States.
New York, California, Connecticut, and Maryland have enacted laws prohibiting the sale of common Glock pistols, containing what is called a cruciform trigger bar, on the grounds that they might be illegally modified to be converted from semiautomatic firearms (discharging one bullet for each pull of the trigger) into fully automatic firearms (those which continue to discharge multiple bullets while the trigger is squeezed). Like most gun control laws, these new bans miss the target of the problem.
Converting a semi-automatic firearm into a machine gun is already illegal under federal law, and banning legitimate semi-automatic firearms for law-abiding citizens simply because of what a criminal could do with them will only deprive law-abiding citizens of a means of lawful self-defense and will not deter those who are already willing to break the law by committing firearm crimes and illegally obtaining firearms and engaging in already-prohibited modifications.
A 2019 Special Report by the United States Department of Justice, “Source and Use of Firearms Involved in Crimes: Survey of Prison Inmates, 2016,” found that “an estimated 287,400 prisoners had possessed a firearm during their offense. Among these, more than half (56%) had either stolen it (6%), found it at the scene of the crime (7%), or obtained it off the street or from the underground market (43%). Most of the remainder (25%) had obtained it from a family member or friend, or as a gift. Seven percent had purchased it under their own name from a licensed firearm dealer.”
These statistics show that the new Glock bans will similarly miss the mark. Almost all of the individuals who purchase the types of handguns that will be prohibited under the new law are law-abiding citizens who do not make such illegal modifications. The criminals that do, and who go on to use those illegal firearms in crimes, will not be stopped from engaging in these kinds of modifications when they are not obtaining their firearms from lawful firearm dealers in the first place.
There is also a strong argument that such bans may be unconstitutional. In the landmark 2008 case of District of Columbia v. Heller, the United States Supreme Court held that the Second Amendment protects an individual constitutional right to bear arms, and in the 2010 McDonald v. Chicago case, the Court explained that this right is fundamental. In Heller, the Supreme Court noted that “handguns are the most popular weapon chosen by Americans for self-defense in the home,” and held that “a complete prohibition of their use is invalid.”
The Supreme Court explained in Heller that “the handgun ban amounts to a prohibition of an entire class of arms that is overwhelmingly chosen by American society for that lawful purpose” of self-defense. Similarly, the ban on Glocks would remove from availability for law-abiding citizens one of the most common self-defense weapons.
What is most troubling about the ban is the rationale used to justify it. If a firearm or, for that matter, any object which has a legitimate purpose can be banned simply because a person may illegally modify it to commit a crime, it is hard to see what could stop any legal item from being banned under the pretext that someone might break the law to turn it into an illegal item.