As AWR Hawkins notes in his tweet above, gun banners have now moved beyond their traditional attempts to ban AR-15s and “assault weapons.” We now have three states that have outlawed sales of GLOCKs and similar pistols.
It should be clear that anti-gunners never gave up on their dream of banning handguns, they just realized that doing so was deeply unpopular and decided to focus instead on “assault weapons” and ancillary restrictions like fees, wait times, etc.
The GLOCK switch moral panic, however, gave Everytown and the other gun control groups cover to demand that their allies in California and other blue states sue the company. Now, they’re getting them to ban GLOCK pistols altogether.
By banning GLOCKs and their clones, they ban the most popular handgun platform in the country, and they won’t stop there. They will find some pretext to declare other popular handgun models are also “too dangerous” and ban them, too. It’s a death by a thousand cuts strategy.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has done nothing so far to stop about a dozen states from banning the most popular rifles in the country. Bruen is working out great…if you live in a pro-gun circuit. Anti-gun circuits like the Ninth, the Second and the First are treating it like a joke and have effectively re-imposed interest balancing, and are upholding pretty much all draconian gun control laws that have been passed. So of course anti-gun states are emboldened to dip their toes into the handgun ban waters.
If the Court has any self-respect, if John Roberts cares about the legitimacy of his institution at all, they must take on a hardware case soon and make clear that bans on commonly owned firearms are unconstitutional. And then they need to follow that up with frequent summary reversals of anti-gun circuit court defiance of that ruling that will inevitably follow.
And this is your regular reminder that the shooting that was the impetus for the original California GLOCK ban bill was committed by a violent felon that Democrats’ policies let out of prison many years early.
Kostas Moros is Director of Legal Research and Education for the Second Amendment Foundation.