The never-ending war on one of America’s most popular pistols

• Americans love Glock handguns.

According to the ATF’s Annual Firearms Manufacturing and Export Report, from 2020 to 2024, Glock manufactured 2.25 million pistols in the U.S. And, while not a perfect analog for Glock pistols, ATF’s annual Firearm Commerce in the United States reports showed that from 2019 to 2023, nearly 6.5 million handguns were imported to the U.S. from Glock’s home country of Austria.

In 2018, Glock Inc., put out a press release noting that GLOCK is currently the preferred pistol for 65% of law enforcement agencies. These firearms are currently being used by the FBI and other federal law enforcement organizations. Even aspiring confiscator-in-chief and San Francisco handgun-ban supporter Kamala Harris, when asked on the 2024 campaign trail what type of gun she owns, claimed, I have a Glock.

Indeed, a version of an Oct. 9, 2024, New York Times article on the vice president’s handgun bore the headline Kamala Harris Owns a Glock, an All-American Gun. The paper of record acknowledged that Glock is a hugely popular brand for private gun owners.

This popularity creates major problems for modern gun control advocates — who still cling to their movement’s longstanding goal of prohibiting civilian ownership of handguns.

First, the sheer number of Glocks and similar pistols in civilian hands creates a political hurdle. The ATF manufacturing and import data show that demand for handguns outpaces that for rifles and shotguns. A 2023 NBC poll found that 52 percent of American voters live in a gun-owning household, and Pew Research polling from the same year found that [g]un owners in the United States continue to cite protection far more than other factors … as a major reason they own a gun. Voters can be fickle, but many take exception when you try to ban and take their stuff.

Then there’s that pesky Second Amendment.

In District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), which invalidated a general handgun ban in our nation’s capital, the U.S. Supreme Court made clear that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms ‘in common use at the time’ for lawful purposes. Along with gun controllers’ favorite target, the AR-15, it is difficult to imagine a firearm more in common use for lawful purposes like self-defense than Glock pistols.

Faced with these practical and constitutional obstacles, gun-control activists are resorting to their usual tactics of misinformation and fearmongering. In this effort, the civilian disarmament crowd is trying to conflate common Glock pistols with illegal machine guns.

Specifically, anti-gun jurisdictions seek to hold Glock liable, or ban Glock pistols outright, for the fact that some criminals use illegal devices (auto sears, or so-called switches) to illegally modify Glock semi-automatic pistols into illegal machine guns.

The opening salvo in this new battle against Glock began in 2023, during the Biden-Harris administration.

U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) noted in an April 30 press release, On December 20, 2023, the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention (WHOGVP) met privately with representatives from Glock, during which the Biden Administration requested that Glock change their pistol designs. Ironically, Biden and his family were at the same time being protected by Secret Service agents likely relying on the rugged, dependable and celebrated engineering that had earned Glock a massive share of the law enforcement and civilian markets.

As Comer went on to detail, Three months [after the meeting], on March 19, 2024, the City of Chicago filed suit in state court against Glock with Everytown Law, the litigation arm of Everytown, listed as counsel for the plaintiff. The Oversight Committee is investigating potential collusion between the Biden-Harris administration and the gun-control group on this activist litigation.

The Chicago litigation is ongoing and seeks to hold Glock liable for the criminal misuse of its product. Other cities, including Baltimore and Philadelphia, have since filed similar suits.

Next came the legislative bans.

On Oct. 10, 2025, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed AB 1127, which bans the sale of what the legislation termed machine gun-convertible pistols starting July 1, 2026. Without naming the company, the definition of machine gun-convertible pistol targeted a specific design feature of Glock pistols.

In May of this year, Connecticut and Maryland enacted similar legislation banning the sale of so-called convertible pistols and machine gun convertible pistols, respectively. That same month, anti-gun New York lawmakers slipped a convertible-pistol sales ban into a budget bill that was signed by Gov. Kathy Hochul (D).

NRA has filed lawsuits challenging the California and Maryland Glock pistol bans. In the Maryland case, NRA made clear to the court, Even considered apart from other semi-automatic handguns, Glock and Glock-style pistols are ‘in common use’ by any measure. Indeed, they are among the most popular handguns in the nation.

The mere idea of holding a company liable, or prohibiting a product outright, because a criminal may later illegally modify it into an illegal item using illegal parts is ridiculous. U.S. tort law has long held that a person or entity cannot be held responsible for an unaffiliated third party’s criminal acts. Moreover, this lawfare campaign raises bizarre questions.

Could all rifles and shotguns be banned, as they can be fashioned into illegal, unregistered short-barreled rifles and shotguns with a common hacksaw? Can glass-bottle manufacturers be held liable when someone fashions their product into a Molotov cocktail (an illegal destructive device)? Surely these bottle makers must be aware of this potential. Just where does the madness end?

The federal government and anti-gun jurisdictions already have the tools to address illegal machine guns without resorting to attacking gunmakers and the rights of law-abiding citizens.

Federal law, 18 U.S.C. § 922(0), makes clear, it shall be unlawful for any person to transfer or possess a machine gun unless it is done in accordance with the National Firearm Registration and Transfer Record (NFRTR). It is impossible to register a modified Glock pistol in the NFRTR, as registration of new machine guns was frozen in 1986.

Mere possession of a modified Glock pistol is punishable by up to 10 years imprisonment.

Moreover, the federal definition of machine gun includes any part designed and intended solely and exclusively, or combination of parts designed and intended, for use in converting a weapon into a machine gun. Therefore, possession of just the switch, without an accompanying firearm, is punishable by the same 10 years of imprisonment.

Those who use a modified Glock pistol in the commission of certain violent or drug-trafficking offenses face up to 30 years of imprisonment.

Anti-gun jurisdictions are more than welcome to refer cases involving illegal machine guns to the DOJ for federal prosecution. Of course, this would require these soft-on-crime but hard-on-lawful-gun-owners jurisdictions to stomach potentially severe sentences for the dangerous criminals they seem determined to coddle.

As for state law, take Illinois. In the Land of Lincoln, 720 ILCS 5/24-1(a)(7) prohibits the sale, manufacture, possession or carry of a machine gun, including any combination of parts designed or intended for use in converting any weapon into a machine gun.

A violation of this provision is a Class 2 felony punishable by three to seven years of imprisonment.

Yet, according to an article from news website CWBChicago, when a Windy City teenager was arrested on March 24, 2024, for allegedly pointing a gun at a person at a soccer field and a search turned up a switch-equipped firearm, the perpetrator received only 36 months of probation. The same delinquent was later charged for an Oct. 6, 2025, murder. This is not, unfortunately, an isolated example.

Civilian-disarmament advocates have stirred up other hyperbolic fearmongering campaigns against Glock. In the mid-1980s, the company’s polymer-framed Glock 17 took the world by storm, prompting hysteria over supposed plastic pistols, a.k.a. the hijacker’s special.

Glock didn’t create the first polymerframed production pistol. In 1970, Heckler & Koch developed the VP70 pistol, which utilized a polymer frame. Its appeal was limited. The March 1980 edition of American Rifleman noted that the civilian designated VP70Z’s crude sights and heavy trigger pull make it a difficult pistol to shoot accurately.

Polymer-framed pistols are now ubiquitous and inarguably in common use … for lawful purposes. But in the 1980s, and without Heller, handgun prohibitionists viewed this developing technology as ripe for attack.

In 1986, The New York Times noted that gun-control supporters contend that the Glock 17 is a forerunner of all-plastic pistols that could easily be smuggled by terrorists. That same year, The Washington Post, referencing the Glock 17, bleated, Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi is in the process of buying more than 100 plastic handguns that would be difficult for airport security forces to detect. The National Coalition to Ban Handguns (later the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence) carped in their forthright-titled publication The Banner that [p]lastic weapons technology has been rapidly increasing since the introduction of the Glock 17, complaining, the Glock is more than 70 percent plastic by volume.

NRA met with pistol designer Gaston Glock at the height of the plastic-handgun hysteria. In a subsequent article in the May 1986 American Rifleman, NRA noted that the Glock 17’s 19 ounces of steel should trip any metal detector. Moreover, the article included X-ray imagery of the pistol, so readers could judge for themselves the veracity of the anti-gun panic.

NRA members and other informed gun owners will need to confront the so-called convertible pistol frenzy in the same way they did the 1980s’ plastic pistols anti-gun hysterics — by sharing the actual information. Gun owners should help make clear to their family, friends, neighbors and communities that governments already have the laws on the books to target criminal manufacture and misuse of machine guns but do not adequately use them.

Moreover, Glock pistols are in common use by millions of Americans, including federal, state and local law enforcement, and thus unquestionably protected by the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

And yet, for all that, modern firearm prohibitionists still see them, as did their 1980s forebears, as ripe for attack, proving the Constitution, federal law, judicial precedent, objective facts and the expressed preferences of the American public do little to temper antigun fanaticism.

Source: John Commerford Executive Director, NRA-ILA, American Rifleman magazine, August 2026, nramedia.americanrifleman.org/display_article.php?id=5175440&view=