Maryland Attorney General Anthony G. Brown and Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott have filed a lawsuit against Glock, Inc., alleging the company facilitates the spread of illegal machine guns in Maryland by selling pistols that can easily be modified with “Glock switches.” The lawsuit, the first under Maryland’s new Gun Industry Accountability Act, seeks to halt sales of these firearms, citing their role in escalating gun violence, particularly among Baltimore’s youth.
Per the news release: “Attorney General Anthony G. Brown and Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott, alongside Everytown Law and Motley Rice LLC, today filed a lawsuit against Glock, Inc., the manufacturer of handguns most frequently recovered in connection with crimes, alleging that Glock is facilitating the proliferation of illegal machine guns on the streets of Baltimore and across Maryland. The lawsuit also names Glock Ges.m.b.H, the Austria-based parent company of Glock, Inc., the U.S. subsidiary.
The lawsuit alleges that Glock unreasonably endangers and harms public health and safety in Maryland by manufacturing and selling to Maryland civilians semiautomatic pistols that can easily be converted to illegal machine guns with an auto sear – a cheap, small device commonly known as a “Glock switch.” According to the lawsuit, Glock has knowingly harmed Marylanders, particularly in Baltimore and among the City’s and State’s youth, by facilitating the proliferation of illegal machine guns and failing to implement reasonable controls to combat the unlawful possession, alteration, and use of its semiautomatic pistols. The suit is the first to use Maryland’s new Gun Industry Accountability Act, passed and signed into law in 2024.
“We will not allow the gun industry to turn a blind eye to grieving families and pursue profit over people’s lives. This case shows that our Office will hold members of the firearms industry accountable for their role in the gun violence epidemic,” said Attorney General Brown. “It is unacceptable for companies to distribute and market a product that they know can easily be modified to inflict terror on communities across Maryland.”
“Confronting the epidemic of gun violence in our communities means holding everyone responsible, from those pulling the trigger to those making it easier to access — and modify — weapons,” said Mayor Brandon M. Scott. “As we continue to achieve historic reductions of homicides and nonfatal shootings in Baltimore, we must continue to redouble our efforts to drive violence down even more. We’ve had significant success in litigation against manufacturers before, and I am confident that alongside our incredible partners Attorney General Brown and Everytown for Gun Safety, this suit will be successful in holding Glock accountable for the deadly impact they’ve had on our neighborhoods.”
“With modified Glocks, one trigger pull can be devastating to the community, putting so many innocent lives at risk,” said Baltimore Police Department Commissioner Richard Worley. “These illegal weapons have no place in our neighborhoods, and we must work together to keep them off our streets and out of the hands of criminals.”
“Glock’s role in facilitating the proliferation of illegal machine guns has been widely known, yet Glock has refused to take basic and meaningful steps to fix the problem,” said Eric Tirschwell, executive director of Everytown Law. “We are honored to be working with Mayor Scott and Attorney General Brown to hold Glock accountable for the reprehensible decision to continue selling its easily modified pistols, knowing that by doing so it is exacerbating gun violence in Baltimore and elsewhere in Maryland, disproportionately harming youth and recklessly putting law enforcement at increased risk of harm.”
While machine guns have been heavily regulated and restricted under Maryland and federal law for almost a century because of their extreme dangerousness, today’s lawsuit alleges that Glock’s continued sale of pistols that are uniquely easy to convert into illegal machine guns and its refusal to take reasonable steps to fix the problem has made it possible for criminals to arm themselves with fully automatic firepower–returning the machine gun to the streets of Baltimore.
Filed earlier today in the Circuit Court of Maryland for Baltimore City, the lawsuit reports that from 2023 to 2024, at least 100 Glock pistols illegally modified to fire fully automatically were recovered at crime scenes and in connection with criminal investigations by the City of Baltimore Police Department (BPD). According to the complaint, the problem is intensifying: recovery of modified Glocks in Baltimore nearly doubled from 2023 to 2024.
As the lawsuit alleges, a particularly shocking aspect of the growing problem in Baltimore is its impact on young people. According to the complaint, approximately half of the individuals arrested by BPD in connection with incidents involving illegally modified Glocks were under the age of 21. The complaint details incidents involving law enforcement officers being shot at with modified Glocks and numerous examples of fully automatic Glocks recovered locally in connection with serious and violent crimes and alleges that those armed with modified Glocks are emboldened because of their military-grade firepower.
Plaintiffs seek an order enjoining Glock from continuing to sell its easily modifiable pistols to civilian residents of Maryland. Plaintiffs also seek relief in the form of restitution and abatement for the harm that Glock has knowingly and foreseeably caused.
In recent years, the ease with which Glock pistols can be modified with Glock switches has gained national attention for its unique and outsized role in worsening America’s gun violence crisis. According to one Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) agent, the use of guns equipped with auto sears is “one of the scariest things” the agency has dealt with in decades.
Once installed, Glock switches allow pistols to fire up to 1,200 rounds per minute – a rate as fast as, or faster than, many fully automatic firearms and machine guns used by the United States military. According to a recent Everytown for Gun Safety report, twenty cities reported recovering more than 560 machine gun conversion devices in 2023 alone, at least two-thirds of which were “Glock switches.”
In July 2024, Everytown Law joined with the City of Chicago Law Department and the law firm Motley Rice to bring a first-of-its-kind lawsuit against Glock for its role in flooding the City of Chicago with weapons that can easily be converted into illegal automatic weapons. Shortly after initially filing that suit, a coalition of attorneys general from twelve states and Washington, D.C., sent a letter to Glock, calling on the company to preserve documents related to this issue. The Offices of New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison subsequently filed lawsuits against Glock, seeking to hold the company accountable for endangering the health and safety of New Jersey and Minnesota residents, respectively.
Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott is Co-Chair of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a joint program of the Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund and Everytown for Gun Safety.
The State of Maryland is represented by Assistant Attorney General Joshua Chazen. The City of Baltimore attorneys co-leading this suit are Sara Gross and Tom Webb of the Affirmative Litigation Division of the Baltimore City Department of Law. The Everytown Law team representing the City of Baltimore and State of Maryland includes Eric Tirschwell, Alison Barnes, and Nina Sudarsan. The Motley Rice team representing the City of Baltimore and the State of Maryland includes litigators Mimi Liu, Paige Boggs, and Brendan Austin.”