Crime & Law
Chicago Expands Lawsuit Against Glock to Include ‘Irresponsible’ Suburban Gun Shops
A pistol is pictured in a file photo. (Tóth Viktor via Pexels)
Two suburban gun shops are “the most irresponsible gun stores in the country” and have helped flood Chicago’s streets with more than 1,300 Glock semiautomatic pistols converted into illegal machine guns, according to a revised lawsuit filed Tuesday by city of Chicago lawyers.
Because those guns have been used in a wide variety of crimes, including homicides, carjackings and robberies since 2021, Glock should be banned from selling them to Chicagoans and forced to pay for the harm the pistols have caused, according to a revised lawsuit filed by the city’s lawyers that will test a new state law designed to crack down on gun manufacturers.
“The city of Chicago will do everything in its power to end gun violence and counter the increase of fully automatic Glocks on our streets,” said Mayor Brandon Johnson said in a statement. “We are expanding this lawsuit to ensure that other irresponsible actors who have contributed to the proliferation of easily modified Glocks in our city are held accountable for their role in this deadly new frontier plaguing Chicago’s residents and communities.”
The city originally filed suit in Cook County Circuit Court against Glock in March, and the company successfully moved the case to federal court. Lawyers for the city dropped the initial lawsuit Monday, before announcing on Tuesday the revised lawsuit had been filed in Cook County.
Read a copy of the lawsuit here.
Glock could prevent the guns it sells to non-law enforcement officers from being modified into illegal machine guns, “but refuses to do so,” according to the lawsuit.
The revised suit accuses Glock of using gun stores like Eagle Sports Range in south suburban Oak Forest and Midwest Sporting Goods in west suburban Lyons to distribute the guns, “even though it knows or has reason to know that these stores are catering to criminals.”
A representative of Midwest Sporting Goods declined to comment. A representative of Eagle Sports Range could not immediately be reached.
“Midwest Sporting Goods and Eagle Sports Range know that Glocks are easily and frequently modified into illegal machine guns and yet continue to market and sell Glock pistols into Chicago,” according to the lawsuit.
Midwest Sporting Goods “has consistently ranked in the top two of dealer sources of crime guns recovered in Chicago dating back to at least 2009,” according to the lawsuit.
Eagle Sports Range is “the second-most frequent supplier of crime guns into Chicago only five short years after it opened in 2016,” according to the lawsuit.
Eagle Sports Range accounted for 4% of the guns that were traced to a known purchaser after being used in a crime in Chicago, according to the lawsuit.
Eagle Sports Range markets the guns by offering a “full auto experience” in part by demonstrating the use of a modified Glock at its range.
“Eagle Sports Range customers can thus ‘demo’ a Modified Glock at the store’s range, purchase a semiautomatic Glock from the store’s inventory, and then easily and illegally modify their new Glock pistol at home with an auto sear purchased off the internet,” according to the lawsuit.
Glock’s semiautomatic pistols can be converted to illegal machine guns with an auto sear — a cheap, small device commonly known as a “Glock switch,” according to the lawsuit. That violates the Firearms Industry Responsibility Act, which Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed into law in 2023 to hold gun companies accountable for conduct that endangers the public.
A spokesperson for Glock did not respond to a request for comment. However, in its response to the city’s lawsuit, the firm claims federal law protects it from liability over injuries “resulting from the criminal or unlawful misuse” of a gun.
The so-called Glock switches are the size of a quarter and can be purchased online for around $20 or manufactured at home using a 3D printer. Once installed, the switch allows 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 statement from the mayor’s office.
Federal officials reported a 400% increase in recoveries of illegally modified machine guns from 2020 to 2021 and a 570% increase in the number of modified Glocks recovered from 2017 to 2021, as compared to the previous five-year period, according to a statement from the mayor’s office.
The lawsuit asks a judge to find that “selling a weapon that can be so easily converted to an illegal machine gun and failing to take reasonable steps to prevent or mitigate the problem is an unfair business practice, is negligent, and creates, maintains, and contributes to a public nuisance,” according to a statement from the mayor’s office.
Contact Heather Cherone: @HeatherCherone | (773) 569-1863 | [email protected]
