The City of Chicago, represented by the Chicago Department of Law, Everytown Law, and Motley Rice LLC, secured an important victory today in its case seeking to hold Glock, Inc. accountable for its role in endangering Chicagoans by manufacturing, selling, and marketing pistols that can be easily turned into machine guns with a simple device known as a “Glock switch.” The case was brought in July 2024 in Cook County against Glock, two of its authorized retailers, Eagle Sports Range and Midwest Sporting Goods, and its Austrian parent company. In today’s ruling, the Court denied the defendants’ motions to dismiss in their entirety, allowing all of the City’s claims to move forward.
“We are extremely pleased that the Court denied Glock’s motion to dismiss in its entirety. This ruling is a major step towards holding Glock accountable for endangering the residents of our city,” said Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson. “As of 2024, our police department has recovered over 1,300 converted Glocks in connection with a wide variety of crimes, including homicides, aggravated assaults and car jackings. My administration remains committed to protecting Chicagoans from these terrifying weapons that have no place in our city, as part of our broader commitment to community safety.” […]
The decision reads, in part: “The City provides numerous instances illustrating the devastating consequences of Glock’s alleged negligence and complicity. The complaint lists multiple violent incidents involving modified Glock pistols, including shootings resulting in deaths and injuries to innocent bystanders, gang-related conflicts, and violent altercations that have significantly impacted community safety. These incidents serve to underscore the City’s claim of the widespread and severe public harm directly attributable to Glock’s business practices.”
Filed in July 2024, the lawsuit alleges that Glock unreasonably endangers Chicagoans by selling semiautomatic pistols that can be easily converted into illegal machine guns in a matter of minutes with a screw driver and cheap quarter-sized device called an “auto sear.” This illegal conversion allows the pistol to fire at a rate as fast as, or faster than, many U.S. military fully automatic firearms and machine guns. Although auto sears are not manufactured by Glock, they are so frequently used on Glocks that they are commonly known as “Glock Switches” and often have the Glock logo on them. The lawsuit alleges that the design of Glock’s handguns–unlike other popular handguns–makes them uniquely susceptible to easy modification to allow for automatic fire. Despite knowing for decades about this danger, and that Glock could take reasonable steps to fix the problem, Glock has chosen not to in order to maximize sales and profit. […]
The City also seeks to hold accountable two Chicago-area gun stores on Glock’s roster of preferred dealers, Eagle Sports Range in Oak Forest and Midwest Sporting Goods in Lyons for their role in endangering Chicagoans by manufacturing, selling, and/or marketing easily modified Glocks to Chicago consumers. Midwest Sporting Goods has consistently ranked in the top two dealer sources of crime guns into the City since at least 2009, and Eagle Sports Range has soared to be a major supplier of Chicago’s crime guns, despite only opening in October 2016.
The lawsuit alleges that both gun stores know that Glock pistols are easily and frequently modified into illegal machine guns and yet continue to market and sell Glock pistols into Chicago. Midwest Sporting Goods also is alleged to deceptively market Glocks as safe, but stays silent about auto sears. Eagle Sports Range takes it even further, by marketing a Glock handgun clearly equipped with an auto sear in videos posted on the store’s social media accounts, which customers can demo at the store’s indoor range.
The lawsuit also names Glock Ges.m.b.H, the Austria-based parent company of Glock, Inc., the U.S. subsidiary. The Austrian parent company works hand-in-hand with its U.S. subsidiary and plays a significant role in every aspect of the design, manufacture, and promotion of Glocks in the U.S., and also uses its U.S. subsidiary to distribute its easily modified pistols.
