Connecticut’s new “convertible pistol” law takes effect on October 1, and the manufacturer it targets has asked a federal court to stop it first. In Glock, Inc. v. Griffin, No. 3:26-cv-01525 (D. Conn.), Glock seeks emergency preliminary relief against H.B. 5043, Public Act 26-41, enacted May 26, 2026. A companion suit, National Shooting Sports Foundation v. Griffin, No. 3:26-cv-01528, presses the same claims. The defendants include Patrick J. Griffin, the Chief State’s Attorney, and Ronnell Higgins, the commissioner of public safety. The State has filed its opposition, no ruling has issued, and I expect Glock to prevail.
What Connecticut Has Actually Done
The statute defines a “convertible pistol” as a semiautomatic handgun with a cruciform trigger bar that can be turned into a machine gun, by hand or with a common household tool, solely by installing a pistol converter. Distributing, importing, or offering one for sale becomes a Class D felony. The act reaches pistols manufactured on or after October 1, 2026, and it exempts hammer-fired designs and pistols with a molded shield tab that is not readily removable.
It is not a ban on every Glock, and I will not describe it as one. The State calls it a basic, common-sense safety requirement. In practice, a manufacturer that declines to redesign its handguns on the State’s schedule is shut out of a market, and Connecticut’s law-abiding residents lose the ability to buy the pistols they choose.
The Criminal Act Is the Conversion
Installing a converter on a semiautomatic pistol is already a serious federal crime. That is the fact the State’s theory cannot escape. Every firearm is capable of criminal misuse. A pistol used in a robbery has been turned to a criminal purpose, and a pistol converted to fire automatically has been turned to a criminal purpose in exactly the same way. The law punishes neither the robber nor the converter. It punishes the company that made a lawful product and the citizens who would lawfully buy it.
District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008), forecloses this reasoning. The Court protected the handgun as the quintessential self-defense arm and refused to let its use by criminals justify a ban. A right does not lapse because someone else abuses the same instrument.
The Text Is Implicated and the Burden Is Connecticut’s
Under New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022), the inquiry begins with the plain text. In Wolford v. Lopez, 609 U.S. 185 (2026), the Court made clear that a law concerning arms implicates that text. A restriction on the sale of a class of handguns concerns arms. It also burdens the antecedent right to acquire them, since no one can keep or bear an arm he is forbidden to obtain. The First Amendment offers the parallel: in Minneapolis Star & Tribune Co. v. Minnesota Commissioner of Revenue, 460 U.S. 575 (1983), the Court struck down a targeted tax on ink, though the word “ink” appears nowhere in the Constitution.
Once the text is implicated, the burden shifts to the State to identify a historical tradition of comparable regulation. Connecticut cannot meet it.
Proving Laws Regulated Safety, Not Crime
The State’s principal analogues are the early firearm and gunpowder proving and inspection laws, under which a weapon was test-fired and marked before sale. They are not relevantly similar, for two reasons.
First, there were few of them. A handful of enactments in a small number of the original states is the profile of an outlier, and the Court has said repeatedly that outliers do not establish a tradition. United States v. Rahimi directs courts to derive a principle from historical analogues, and a principle requires a sufficient body of evidence. A couple of data points cannot support an induction.
Second, the laws differed in purpose. Proving statutes addressed latent defects, such as a barrel that would burst in the user’s hand. Their “why” was protecting the buyer from a product that did not work as promised. H.B. 5043 has no such object. An unaltered cruciform-bar pistol is safe and extraordinarily popular. The Connecticut statute is crime control, aimed at what a third party might later do in violation of existing law.
The State also invokes the more nuanced approach that Bruen reserves for unprecedented societal concerns or dramatic technological change. That language does not govern an arms-ban case, because Heller itself was one. And criminals have misused arms for as long as there have been arms. Nothing about that is unprecedented.
What Comes Next
This case arises in the Second Circuit, which has not been receptive to Second Amendment claims. But the Supreme Court has granted review in Viramontes v. Cook County and Grant v. Higgins, set for argument on December 2, 2026, and the respondent in Grant is the same Connecticut commissioner who is a defendant here. A district judge ruling on this motion would be wise to look ahead to that argument. I believe the petitioners will prevail, though that is my forecast. The history of the future has yet to be written, but the history of the past is already on Glock’s side.
This article is based on analysis by Professor Mark W. Smith, constitutional attorney and Host of the Four Boxes Diner 2nd Amendment channel. Watch the original video here. This does not constitute legal advice.