Press Release
Source: New York Times, Law360
Press Release
Press Contacts: Erik Cummins, Matt Hyams, Taina Rosa, Olivia Thomas
12.13.24
A Pillsbury group led by partners Ken Taber and Christopher C. Caffarone, counsel Michael Borofsky, and associates Thomas L. Howard III, Nicole Steinberg, and Lindsey Mitchell, are acting as Special Counsel to New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin and New Jersey’s Statewide Affirmative Firearms Enforcement Office (SAFE), in their pathbreaking lawsuit against Glock, Inc. and its Austrian affiliate, Glock Ges.m.b.H. (Glock).
The suit seeks relief for multiple violations of the State’s firearms industry public safety law for Glock’s knowing manufacture, sale, and distribution of its namesake handguns. As detailed in the Complaint, those weapons can all too easily be configured to fire automatically as illegal machine guns, using an inexpensive device widely available from others, commonly known as a “Glock switch.”
The lawsuit, filed in the New Jersey Superior Court’s Chancery Division, demands that Glock suspend sales of the switchable handguns to the civilian market through Glock’s network of New Jersey dealers, and seeks restitution for the public harm Glock has caused through its unreasonable, unlawful, and dangerous commercial practices. The Complaint details how Glock has long known that its handguns are easily, and frequently, switched from semi-automatic operation to a machine-gun firing mode through the simple attachment of the “Glock switches.” This ability to easily function as a machine gun is, as the Complaint explains, something actually built into the design of Glock’s handguns.
Glock switches can be purchased online for under $20 or can even be created on a 3-D printer for just pennies. They can be fitted into the backplate of a Glock handgun in only minutes. Glock switches then allow those handguns to fire up to 1,200 rounds per minute with just the single pull of a trigger. That firing rate is as fast as, or even faster than, many fully automatic firearms used by the United States military.
This December 12, 2024, case filing came on the same day that New Jersey also announced the formation of a multistate coalition to hold irresponsible firearms industry members accountable for their devastating impact on gun violence. As part of that effort, Minnesota also filed suit against Glock the same day.
The Pillsbury team is working alongside NJ Assistant Attorney General David Leit, Deputy Attorneys General Jonathan Mangel, Giancarlo Piccinini, and Loren Miller, and Honors Law Clerk Andrea Cavazos, from the Division of Law’s Special Litigation Section.
The lawsuit was recently covered in the New York Times and Law360 (paywalled).