On September 30, Judge Kari A. Dooley of the District of Connecticut granted a preliminary injunction against House Bill 5043, Connecticut’s ban on the sale of “convertible pistols,” in Glock, Inc. v. Griffin, No. 3:26-cv-01525 (KAD), consolidated with National Shooting Sports Foundation, Inc. v. Griffin, No. 3:26-cv-01528 (KAD). The statute took effect October 1. The day before the ruling, I predicted that the State’s historical defense would fail. The order now answers that prediction in part, and it arrives while Connecticut is a respondent in Grant v. Higgins, No. 25-566, set for argument at the Supreme Court on December 2.
What the Order Actually Held
HB 5043 reaches semiautomatic pistols with a cruciform trigger bar that can be converted into machine guns by installing a pistol converter. It applies to pistols manufactured on or after October 1, 2026, and the sale of one is a class D felony. Pistols made earlier remain lawful to sell. That is narrower than the “Glock ban” of popular shorthand.
For purposes of the injunction motion, the State conceded that the statute implicates the plain text of the Second Amendment. That concession placed the burden where Bruen puts it. Judge Dooley wrote:
“Where the statute is presumptively unconstitutional, the burden then shifts to the Defendants to demonstrate that the regulation is consistent with the historical tradition of firearms regulation in this country.”
She concluded that the plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits, that they face irreparable harm, and that the equities favor relief. The motions were granted.
Why the Proving Laws Failed
The State offered two lines of history: founding-era “proving laws” and a tradition of regulating machine guns. According to the order, the proving laws came from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New Hampshire, which imposed manufacturing and inspection specifications before sale, and from Massachusetts, which required inspection of firearms manufactured in the state. The court found them an inadequate analogue:
“Each of the proving laws discussed were designed to ensure safety before the firearm enters the stream of commerce. They were not designed to, and indeed could not, forestall future misuse of the firearm (even if predictable) after it enters the stream of commerce.”
The difference in purpose is the heart of the analysis. A proving law asked whether the gun in the buyer’s hand would work. HB 5043 asks whether a criminal might alter it later. The first is consumer protection. The second is crime control imposed on the lawful manufacturer and the lawful buyer. The order also recorded the premise that defeats the State’s position: handguns with a cruciform trigger bar in their unconverted state are, in the court’s words, “not only safe, but extremely popular for purposes of self-defense.”
The plaintiffs’ response from history was the sawed-off shotgun. When that weapon was recognized as dangerous, the legal response was to prohibit the modified gun, not to prohibit shotguns. The State’s logic would let it bar every shotgun because a hacksaw can alter one.
The Limits of a Preliminary Ruling
I will not overstate what this is. Judge Dooley did not declare HB 5043 unconstitutional. She found a likelihood of success on a compressed record. She wrote that the State’s argument “is not without some force,” that the result “may derive from the condensed time frame” in which the issues were presented, and that “upon further development of the record, the outcome may well be different.” The State also relied on a historical tradition of banning machine guns, which the court took seriously even as it ruled against Connecticut. Connecticut may appeal to the Second Circuit, which in my view has rarely been receptive to Second Amendment claimants.
Those words deserve to be taken at face value. Under Bruen and Wolford v. Lopez, 609 U.S. 185 (2026), however, the burden rests with the State, and at this stage Connecticut has not carried it.
What It Signals for Grant v. Higgins
Here I move from the order to my own forecast. Connecticut will stand before the Supreme Court in December defending its AR-15 ban, having just seen a federal court reject its historical evidence for a different statute. Judge Dooley was nominated in 2017 at the recommendation of Connecticut’s two Democratic senators, Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, which in my view makes her reading of the doctrine more instructive, not less. A state that cannot justify a design mandate for a handgun by pointing to inspection statutes will have an equally hard time justifying the prohibition of an entire class of rifles by pointing to nineteenth-century regulation of other weapons.
I expect the Court to apply the same method she did: identify the burden, demand a relevantly similar historical analogue, and ask why and how the old law burdened the right. If it does, the outcome I anticipate for Eddie Grant, whom I met this weekend at the Second Amendment Foundation’s Gun Rights Policy Conference in Dallas, is a favorable one. That is a prediction, and the Court will decide the case on its own record. But Connecticut has now been reminded of the doctrine’s direction by a federal judge from its own bench.
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.