New Jersey’s Attorney General Matthew Platkin made abundantly clear the purpose of his lawsuit against Glock last Thursday: “With this lawsuit we are putting the homemade machine gun industry out of business.”
He went on to develop the faux case against Glock instead of criminals misusing the company’s popular handguns:
For decades, Glock has knowingly sold weapons that anyone with a screwdriver and a YouTube video can convert into a military-grade machine gun in a matter of minutes.
Glock’s ownership sits in Austria lining their pockets with profits paid for by American bloodshed fueled by their products — and we are sick of it. Our message today to Glock is clear: the days of putting greed ahead of the safety of our residents and law enforcement officers are over.
Anti-gunners Working Through the States
The attack on the private ownership of firearms in the United States by its enemies has been moving to the state level since the victory of Donald Trump. But the agenda remains the same: blame the gun, blame the tool that some use to turn the firearm into a fully automatic weapon, and ignore the criminals using the tool. The goal isn’t to protect public safety, as anti-gunners self-righteously and falsely claim. It is to bankrupt the gun makers, paving the way for emasculating the right to self-defense by private citizens against an overreaching government.
Platkin’s filing came on the same day that radical Muslim Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison filed his own suit against Glock. Said Ellison:
I am suing Glock for knowingly manufacturing and selling handguns that can easily be converted into machine guns. Glock’s actions, and their inaction, violate Minnesota law, and put kids, communities, and law enforcement in danger.
This has to stop.
Today’s lawsuit against Glock is about protecting our kids and protecting the guardians who look out for us. Attorney General Platkin and the New Jersey Office of the Attorney General are great partners in this effort, and I thank Attorney General Platkin for his strong leadership in keeping the residents of our states safe.
Ellison said this with a straight face. So did New Jersey’s Ravi Ramanathan, director of the state’s anti-Second Amendment Statewide Affirmative Firearms Enforcement Office:
Glock knows that its guns are commonly switched to machine guns and routinely used to perpetrate violent crime but has done nothing meaningful to stop it.
Just like for any other product, in any other industry, the manufacturer of a product that could be so easily, illegally, and dangerously altered is legally required to modify its design to keep the public safe. Sales of the dangerous product would stop. The gun industry should not be treated differently than any other industry. That is what we are demanding today.
But this claim is a lie.
Frivolous but expensive lawsuits are the strategy. One may be right but go broke defending himself. And that’s the strategy here. It’s already bankrupted Remington Arms, and the anti-gunners are (and have been) targeting the gun industry’s biggest maker: Glock.
Glock has been manufacturing its handguns since 1982. According to Platkin’s lawsuit:
Glock deliberately designed them that way.… The ability to automatically fire a rapid burst of bullets with a single trigger pull … is inherent to the core design.… The design … makes it easy for the weapon’s user to insert a small external add-on component into the back of the gun, … [unleashing] Glock handguns’ inherent ability to fire as a machine gun.
Who Is the Real Criminal?
The real criminal, of course, is the individual miscreant bent on wreaking havoc. And that’s why Congress in 2005 passed the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA): to protect the American gun industry from bleeding out legal fees defending itself against frivolous lawsuits.
Glock, unfortunately, is all too familiar with the strategy and the argument. When the City of Chicago sued Glock back in March for allegedly violating its Consumer Fraud and Deceptive Business Practices Act, Glock responded by claiming that the law interferes with interstate commerce, is unconstitutionally vague, violates the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and is barred by the PLCAA. That protects companies from being held liable for criminal acts committed through illegal use of their products.
That isn’t the point. Platkin and Ellison and their sycophants know this. But they also know they, collectively, have more resources than does Glock, and the attrition through legal fees over time weighs in their favor.
That’s why AGs from other anti-gun, anti-Second Amendment states — Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, Michigan, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont — are threatening to file similar lawsuits against Glock.
The real danger of anti-gunners succeeding in their quest was put well by the editor-in-chief of Ammoland: Wrote F. Riehl:
The lawsuits echo strategies previously [successfully] employed in the tobacco and opioid industries, aiming to hold manufacturers accountable for the downstream effects of their products. Gun rights advocates argue this approach unfairly targets lawful industries while ignoring the root causes of gun violence.
The approach may be “unfair,” but it has the potential to accomplish financially what the anti-gunners have been unable to accomplish legislatively.
