Last spring, the City of Chicago sued GLOCK over the alleged ease with which the company’s pistols can be converted to fully automatic fire by installing illegal “GLOCK switches.” This city is backed in the lawsuit by Michael Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety gun control advocacy operation.
The original case was filed in Federal District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. Yesterday, however, in a clear case of venue shopping, the City of Chicago pulled its lawsuit out of federal court and re-filed it today in Cook County Circuit Court. The city has also added GLOCK GmbH (the company’s Austrian parent) and two local retailers to the lawsuit.
You can read the latest version of the suit here.
As the Cook County Record notes . . .
The lawsuit claims Glock allegedly has long known about the modification, but has done little to remedy it. The lawsuit further claims similar weapons made by Glock’s competitors aren’t so easily modified.
The lawsuit specifically accuses the two Chicago area gun stores of either knowingly selling pistols that can be easily modified using auto sears or actively marketing Glock pistols to boast about the fully automatic capabilities of the weapons using the auto sear switches. The city particularly notes that the Eagle Sports Range shop was shut down by federal agents in 2022, but reopened under a family relative of the previous owner and allegedly has “continued its same dangerous sales practices.”
The lawsuit became the first filed against a gun maker under a new state law, specifically enacted to allow such lawsuits against firearms sellers.
The law, which revised Illinois’ consumer fraud law, was designed to allow the city of Chicago and perhaps others to build on left-wing activists’ and trial lawyers’ strategy of using lawsuits to advance progressive policy goals and punish companies making products or selling services that left-wing activists wish to end.
The strategy seems to be that, by including the two local retailers, it will be more difficult for the respondents to get the case moved to federal court.
Corporate defendants often seek to move lawsuits against them to federal court to better defend themselves under the federal courts’ generally stricter standards. Illinois state courts, such as Cook County’s courts, have built a reputation of being notoriously friendly to plaintiffs, with much more lax standards to prove injury under the law and wider latitude for trial lawyers to present evidence allegedly backing their claims.
Further, Cook County’s courts are dominated by Democratic judges, often chosen by Democratic Party leaders. The Democratic Party is noted for its strong stance in favor of strict gun regulation, such as controversial bans on so-called “assault weapons,” including one in Illinois enacted by the state’s Democratic legislative supermajority. Illinois’ law has been challenged in court as a violation of the Second Amendment, but so far without success, pending appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Watch this space.
It would be hilarious if Chicago v. Glock was what wound up killing the NFA.
Nice, but won’t happen.
Even Scalia’s ‘Heller’ decision recognized there were exceptionally dangerous weapons that could be regulated or outright banned…
Exceptionally dangerous like an AR15?