Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson bragged on Tuesday that he, with the assistance of the anti-gun group Everytown for Gun Safety, found a unique way to harass gun-maker Glock, Inc. The maker of the nation’s most popular semi-automatic handguns is accused of not making its products foolproof.
The mayor calls it “a first of its kind”:
[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.
Not only can its semi-automatic pistol be turned into a machine gun by any backyard mechanic with a screwdriver, the company has somehow aided and abetted Chicago’s outrageous rate of gun violence by doing nothing about it. Furthermore, the company “knows” that its products can be modified easily, but as a matter of corporate policy and corporate greed, it has done nothing about it:
Glock knows that it takes little effort to convert its pistols into illegal machine guns and that criminals frequently do so.
Glock also knows it could fix the problem, but has chosen not to, putting profits over public safety and violating the law.
The lawsuit claims that the Chicago Police Department has recovered more than 1,100 modified Glocks in the last three years, concluding that the modification has somehow resulted in even higher crime rates in Chicago:
These terrifying weapons 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.
It’s unclear from the lawsuit just how the presence of a “modified” Glock in the hands of a criminal increases the number of gun-related crimes. But it is clear what its intentions are: preventing Glock from selling its firearms to law-abiding citizens, and punishing the company to for the city’s burgeoning crime rate:
Glock’s willful decision to not take any meaningful action to address this problem in its sales to civilians — despite its awareness — is immoral, unethical, oppressive, unscrupulous, and unreasonable.
And for that “willful decision,” the company must pay:
Through this lawsuit, Chicago seeks an order enjoining Glock from continuing to sell its easily modifiable pistols to Chicago civilians via its website and Illinois gun stores that serve the Chicago market.
The City also seeks an assessment of fines against Glock for each day that it continues to violate MCC § 2-25-090(a), as well as damages for the harm that Glock has knowingly and foreseeably caused to the City.
The irony is staggering. Ignoring the fact that most Glock owners are law-abiding citizens, and many have used their lawfully owned pistols to foil and neutralize threats presented by criminals, the city instead wants to punish both those citizens and Glock for not making its products foolproof.
Consider this: Hamilton Safe has become one of the largest manufacturers of safes in the United States, but nowhere on its website does it claim that its locks are unpickable. Where is the city of Chicago? Why isn’t it suing Hamilton? Because Hamilton doesn’t make firearms, it makes safes. And safes are not the target of gun-grabbers.
But the point is the same: Any lock can be picked. Any gun can be modified. Chicago should be focusing on its exploding wave of crime instead of seeking to punish Glock and its law-abiding customers.
Chicago, in its lawsuit, claims to be clairvoyant: It knows that Glock knows that its products can be modified. It further knows that Glock is deliberately and intentionally not making its products foolproof. Therefore, under this form of legal insanity, it is guilty of the escalation of crime in the Windy City and must be punished, along with its customers.
From the lawsuit:
Glock’s popularity within the criminal market is owed in part to the ease with which Glock pistols can be converted into machine guns.
Due to the susceptibility of Glock pistols to modification and Glock’s refusal to correct the problem, anyone with $20–$25 to spare and a desire to circumvent long-standing federal and state prohibitions on possessing fully automatic machine guns can do so by buying an auto sear and affixing it to a Glock pistol.
The task can be accomplished with a common household tool, like a screwdriver, and it typically takes less than five minutes with instructions readily available online.
Glock, and not the criminal, is to blame:
Glock’s willful decision to not take any meaningful action to address this problem in its sales to civilians — despite its awareness — is immoral, unethical, oppressive, unscrupulous, and unreasonable.
Apparently the City of Chicago is an expert on guns and how they are designed and manufactured: “Glocks … can also be easily changed to prevent that modification.”
But, because Glock doesn’t redesign its products to make them more difficult or impossible to modify, it is complicit in Chicago’s rising crime rate:
However, instead of taking reasonable action to put an end to the modification of its pistols by civilians, Glock has made the business decision to continue profiting from the sales of its easily modifiable guns to the civilian market.
The result endangers the health and safety of Chicagoans and increases and exacerbates the injuries and death from gun violence — draining the City’s public health, safety, investigative, and judicial resources and causing some City residents to fear using public streets, parks, schools, and transportation.
In other words, Glock, by its deliberate and intentional inaction, it is responsible for everything that is wrong in Chicago:
While Chicago has long struggled with an epidemic of gun violence, it is unquestionable that the ease of modification of Glocks and the resulting prevalence of Modified Glocks have made the situation worse.
Criminals armed with Modified Glocks are emboldened because of their military-grade firepower, and they kill and injure more people, increasing the terror felt by ordinary Chicagoans.
Perhaps those criminals “are emboldened” because the city is spending so much of its taxpayer resources on attacking Glock and its customers that it is neglecting better and more productive uses of those funds in fighting crime and arresting and incarcerating criminals involved in gun violence.
But no: Instead the city is bringing charges against the company for being a “public nuisance” under one of its laws and committing an “unlawful act” under another. And, it should be noted, the city is forcing Glock to hire expensive lawyers to defend itself against this legal insanity.
