Gunmaker Glock has become the latest lawsuit target for Chicago City Hall, as the city seeks to extract potentially big money from the firearms manufacturer for allegedly violating Illinois law and city ordinances by selling guns the city claims are easy to convert to "machine guns."
On March 19, the city of Chicago filed suit in Cook County Circuit Court against Georgia-based Glock.
In a statement released Tuesday, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson asserted the lawsuit is intended to attempt to hold Glock responsible for Chicago's notoriously high gun crime and murder rates.
“The City of Chicago is encountering a deadly new frontier in the gun violence plaguing our communities because of the increase of fully automatic Glocks on our streets,” said Mayor Johnson.
The release noted Johnson is a member of the anti-gun rights political group Mayors Against Illegal Guns.
“Selling firearms that can so easily be converted into automatic weapons makes heinous acts even more deadly, so we are doing everything we can in collaboration with others committed to ending gun violence to hold Glock accountable for putting profits over public safety," Johnson said in the statement.
The city is partnering in the legal action with anti-gun rights activist group Everytown.
In the release, Eric Tirschwell, executive director at Everytown Law, said they intend to use the litigation to "hold Glock accountable for the unconscionable decision to continue selling its easily modified pistols even though it could fix the problem, knowing that by refusing to do so it is exacerbating gun violence in Chicago."
Glock did not reply Tuesday afternoon to a message from The Cook County Record seeking comment.
The lawsuit from Chicago and Everytown uses a new Illinois law, enacted by the state's Democratic supermajority, to build on the progressive activist litigation strategies seen in other cases.
Everytown has partnered with trial lawyers in Illinois and elsewhere to file potentially massive lawsuits against firearms manufacturers, seeking to extract massive payouts and financially punish the makers of popular American firearms on behalf of victims of massacres and mass shootings, such as those during the Highland Park Fourth of July parade in 2022 and at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut in 2012. In 2022, firearms maker Remington agreed to pay families of the Sandy Hook tragedy $73 million. A separate lawsuit remains pending in Chicago federal court against the world's largest gunmaker, Smith & Wesson, over the Highland Park killings.
Gun makers and Second Amendment rights supporters have described such litigation as a thinly veiled an attempt to use lawsuits to step around the Second Amendment and limit the availability of firearms to Americans seeking to exercise their constitutional rights, without direct government action.
At the same time, cities, states and other local governments have filed lawsuits against oil and gas companies, seeking to use such lawsuits to extract potentially massive payments from energy companies for selling petroleum products to Americans to fuel automobiles, power plants and other crucial segments of the U.S. economy, which they say resulted in emissions that they blame for disasters caused by climate change.
The city of Chicago filed its own lawsuit against energy companies in February. That lawsuit remains pending.
And, last year, Chicago filed suit against automakers Kia and Hyundai, claiming those companies made their vehicles too easy to steal, which the city blamed for its meteoric rise in auto thefts in recent years.
In the lawsuit against Glock, the city claims Glock has designed its semi-automatic pistols in such a way that they are easily modified into near- or fully automatic "machine guns," which they claim can be accomplished using only a screwdriver and a $20 part, which the complaint asserts are commonly known as "Glock switches," as they allegedly allow users to "toggle" the weapons between semi-automatic and automatic weapons fire.
A semi automatic weapon fires one shot for each time the trigger is pulled. An automatic weapon fires multiple rounds per squeeze of the trigger.
The complaint concedes that Chicago "has long suffered from an epidemic of gun violence." The lawsuit does not specify who is responsible for that "epidemic."
But the complaint asserts it is "unquestionable that the ease of modification of Glocks and the resulting prevalence of Modified Glocks have made the situation worse."
The lawsuit claims Chicago Police have seized more than 1,100 such modified Glock pistols from 2021-2023, and the federal Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives (ATF) has seized more than 8,000 Glock pistols from 2017-2021 - "thousands more than the next most popular crime gun."
And the lawsuit asserts the modifications allow criminals, and especially young offenders, to "handle the recoil of so many rounds coming out of the gun so quickly, resulting in bullets spraying everywhere."
The lawsuit asserts Glock knew about the alleged "workaround" for years, yet allegedly did nothing to remedy it. Further, the lawsuit asserts similar pistols from Glock's competitors are not so easily modified.
The lawsuit is the first filed under Illinois' new law explicitly allowing firearms manufacturers to be sued under the state's consumer fraud law.
The lawsuit specifically alleges Glock has violated city ordinances, which allow companies to be sued under any "unlawful act or practice under the Illinois Consumer Fraud and Deceptive Business Practices Act." Under that ordinance, the city is seeking to hit Glock with fines of $10,000 "per violation," and to order Glock to disgorge profits allegedly "obtained through its unlawful practices."
The lawsuit further accuses Glock of causing a public nuisance, following the path set by the city's other litigation against the automakers and energy companies.
The lawsuit asks the court to order Glock to pay "a sum of money that will allow the city to abate the nuisance that Glock has created."
The lawsuit also seeks attorney fees.
In addition to attorneys from Everytown Law and the city's Department of Law, the city is represented in the action by attorneys H. Christopher Boehning, Emily G. Sasso, Maria E. Eliot and Sraavya Poonuganti, of the firm of Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison, of New York and Washington, D.C.