Caffeinated Politics

The news from Illinois regarding gun control measures is, once again, uplifting.

State lawmakers are weighing another measure aimed at the firearms industry: requiring some gun manufacturers to redesign pistols so they can’t be easily converted into automatic weapons.

The latest effort by Illinois, long a national leader on gun control, mirrors legislation California passed last year and comes as lawmakers in New York, Connecticut and Maryland consider similar bills.

The legislation focuses largely on Glock-style pistols, said Alison Shih, senior counsel for Everytown for Gun Safety. Compared with other brands, Glocks and similarly designed firearms are particularly prone to being manipulated with machine gun conversion devices, also known as “switches” or “auto-sears” — small devices attached to the back of handguns that transform them into automatic weapons. With “15 minutes and common household tools,” Shih said, a person can convert a semiautomatic pistol into one capable of firing multiple rounds with a single pull of the trigger.

Last year, Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law a measure that effectively bans California gun dealers from selling most Glock and Glock-platform pistols capable of being modified into fully automatic weapons. It was the first-in-the-nation law of this kind. The law will take effect this July and classifies these firearms as “machinegun-convertible pistols,” expanding the state’s long-standing prohibition on automatic weapons. 

Though the switches or auto-sears used to help convert pistols to automatic weapons are already illegal to own under state and federal law, Shih said they can still be purchased overseas or produced with 3D printers using designs readily available online.

“It’s a pretty minor adjustment for them to make,” Shih said.

“It is really akin to being like ‘Please put some seat belts in your car before you sell the vehicle,’” she said of the proposed legislation. “We know this can save lives and sometimes industry needs a little bit of a nudge.”

I strongly applaud these moves as they are reasonable if we are honest about our desire to stem gun violence in our nation. We know that for years, law enforcement agencies across the country have warned about the explosion of illegal conversion devices that can turn a common semiautomatic pistol into a fully automatic weapon capable of firing hundreds of rounds per minute. These devices are small, cheap, and increasingly easy to obtain through online marketplaces or 3D‑printing files.

When this matter was before the California state legislature, members on the floor provided data showing a 784% increase in recovered conversion switches between 2019 and 2023 — and concluded that the problem wasn’t just the devices themselves, but the firearm designs that made such conversions effortless. So the elected officials fashioned a bill prohibiting any licensed dealer from offering, transferring, or delivering a semiautomatic pistol that “has design characteristics allowing for readily converting the firearm to fire automatically”.

The city of Chicago sued Glock in 2024, alleging the manufacturer’s Austrian parent company knowingly ignored a design flaw in its pistols that allowed simple modifications to fire automatic rounds. Chicago police officers recover thousands of illegal firearms every year, and Glock is by far the most common make of weapon. Between January and November 2025, more than a third of all guns recovered by the Chicago Police Department — nearly 2,900 — were manufactured by Glock, according to CPD data analyzed by the Tribune.

Critics will claim that criminals will always find a way to get a gun. We have heard that bunkum ad nauseam. That lingo ignores the basic reality that design matters. Cars are engineered to reduce the likelihood of fatalities. Consumer electronics are built to prevent electrical fires. Lethal firearms cannot be exempt from similar expectations.

No rational civilian needs a handgun that can be turned into an automatic weapon. No responsible manufacturer should be producing firearms that make such conversions trivial.

In a nutshell, I argue that if gun proponents spent half as much energy on constructive matters as opposed to sowing their grievances handed to them by the NRA, we’d have a nation of master gardeners by now.