The Glock series of semi-automatic handguns are not just the most popular single brand of firearms in the United States; over the past thirty or so years they've driven a revolution in the way America builds, buys and uses handguns.
The Austrian gun design in its many calibers introduced the idea of the "black polymer gun" to a nation where handguns and nickel or blued metal finish was as American as apple pie and Kid Rock.
Their simple safety system - it's all in the trigger - made shooting much less intimidating for a new generation of shooters.
And they were, in their early years, a great value for the quality of the firearm, boosting the quality per dollar ratio for mid-level gun buyers in a way that forced the market to respond.
So successful was Glock at civilian and police sales in the United States that the company built a fairly huge American manufacturing, distribution and sales base in the US.
In other words, the ugly black Austrian gun is an all-American success story.
And there's nothing California hates worse than an all-American success story.
A bill just passed by the California State Assembly would ban the sale of Glocks - all of then - to civilians in the state.
Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel authored AB 1127, which would ban the sale of semiautomatic pistols that could be easily converted with an attachment to a fully automatic weapon. The bill passed on a party-line vote 58-17, with Republicans opposing.
The ostensible reason for this, as mentioned, is that it's moderately simple to convert some Glocks into ad hoc machine guns - capable of emptying an entire magazine in one trigger pull (indeed, incapable of not dumping the entire contents of the magazine almost instantly):
Here's how an auto sear or "switch" works on a Glock pistol. The device overrides the trigger bar to allow for fully-automatic fire. A shooter can empty a 30-round magazine in a split-second with a single squeeze of the trigger. (Animation by Kaz Ishii / @VICENews) pic.twitter.com/9NR07PA8gX
— Keegan Hamilton (@keegan_hamilton) March 25, 2022
If it seems simple - it is:
Auto sears are devices that convert semi-automatic firearms, which are designed to fire one shot per trigger pull, into fully automatic machine guns, allowing a shooter to continue firing as long as the trigger is depressed and the gun has ammunition. In other words, with an auto sear (also known as a “machine gun conversion device,” or MCD), someone can fire an entire magazine’s worth of ammunition in mere seconds. Worse yet, auto sears are very easy to manufacture and can even be 3D printed, which is why these components — especially those designed by third parties for Glock pistols, known as “Glock switches” — are showing up at more and more crime scenes around the country.
They are, like all machine guns, broadly illegal for most Americans to own without jumping through a whole bunch of legal and financial hoops, that screen out the criminal element (as well as an awful lot of law-abiding citizens) pretty effectively. The parts are frequently manufactured by cartels in Mexico, smuggled over the border and sold to less scrupulous buyers in the US.
Of course, like most gun control legislation, it takes a broad swing at a very small target; it will ban the sale of one of the most popular fireams in general use in the nation's largest state. And the ability to relatively easily make oneself a Federal felon with one of the conversion devices is an issue that has been remedied by Glock in the later generations of the pistols - which, due to California's byzantine and sclerotic system of allowing firearms to be sold, not by class or type or even maker, but by specific model. The latest generations of Glocks aren't on the state's "approved" list. When will they be? They'll get back to you after they get that high speed rail line built.
tt is, of course, back-door gun control; the number of Glocks that get illegally converted is minuscule. It will, of course, get struck down in court; the definition "commonly used firearm" in the dictionary (kids, ask your parents) has a Glock as its illustration.
It's just yet another indicator of California's attitude about civil rights that don't involve making a mess or waving body parts around.
