The nearly nonexistent scourge of Glock switches

www.americanthinker.com

The media has busied itself in the last year or so adding another existential menace to the scourge of “assault weapons,” which are supposedly killing many of our youth. Oddly enough, they often turn out to be black criminals in blue cities because that’s who commits most of the violent crime. Another inconvenient problem is: there is no such thing as an “assault weapon.” Anti-liberty/gun cracktivists made it up to scare people. No such thing exists in firearm nomenclature, and words matter. The best translation is: “any gun we want to ban right now.” Practically, it means AR-15s and similar semiautomatic rifles.

The trouble with that is rifles are used in only a tiny fraction of all crimes committed with guns, and AR-15s are an even tinier fraction of that tiny fraction. So, not very existential after all.

Graphic: Glock 19, Author

The anti-liberty/gun crowd have latched onto “Glock switches,” and four blue states have banned Glocks and other “convertible” handguns. What the…?

A “Glock Switch” is a small device that replaces the small plate at the back of Glock slides. It slightly alters the mechanism to allow automatic fire. It appears most of them have been made in China, which is no surprise. The Chicoms do everything they can to steal from and disrupt America. Such devices are treated exactly as machine guns under federal law. Their mere possession is as illegal as illegal gets. Putting one on a Glock and shooting implicates a bunch of other federal and state crimes.

Graphic: Glock Switch, ATF, Public Domain

Also unsurprising is idiot gangbangers, most of whom are also young blacks in blue cities—surprise!—are the primary users of such things. Glock switches have, for the most part, replaced the, oh, millions of deaths happening every day in our blue cities, and most of the victims are…guess who?

This has caused Glock to completely redesign most of its handgun line—the switches don’t work on every Glock model--to foil the things, which of course caused four blue states thus far —California, New York, Maryland, and Connecticut--to take notice of Glock’s civic-mindedness and great expense and ban Glocks.

But just how dangerous are the switch-equipped Glocks? Fortunately, Dr. John R. Lott of the Crime Prevention Research Center keeps track of such things, much to the annoyance of the anti-liberty/gun crowd. He’s among the rarest of contemporary researchers. He makes his methodology and data sets available on request, so other scientists can confirm or falsify his results, which is how science is supposed to be done, but almost never is anymore. His results are not happy-making for Democrats:

Graphic: CPRC, used with permission.

We have tried to do an exhaustive search on cases where a Glock-style gun with a switch was used to murder people, but it is quite possible that we have missed some cases. The total that we have so far found is 43 murders from 20 attacks where someone was murdered, so slightly more than two people murdered per case. Part of the reason for their infrequent use is the danger that these devices pose to those who are using them. California and now Maryland and Connecticut have passed bans on Glocks or Glock-style guns because they use cruciform trigger bars. New York will soon finish enacting this ban. New Jersey is in the process of putting a registry together on people who have bought those guns since the beginning of 2016. There is no evidence that law-abiding gun owners are converting their handguns, and even the advocates for these laws focus on only the threat by criminal gangs. The NRA and the Second Amendment Foundation have brought lawsuits against these gun bans.

Oh. Considering there were 81 fatal lightning strikes in the same period, just how much of a problem is this, really?

The question is also how many of these murders would still have occurred even without a switch being used on these guns. More than half of these cases involve just one or two people being murdered so it is quite possible these attacks could have been accomplished with an unaltered handgun. Obviously, any murder should be prevented, but as a comparison, over the 2021 to 2024 period there were 80,657 murders(20,164 per year). Of those, 6,147 used knives or other cutting instruments and 1,968 involved rifles. So that means that over the five plus years from 2021 to May 2026, only the equivalent of 0.67% of the murders with knives and other cutting instruments over the four years from 2021 to 2024 involved Glock switches. Only an amount of 2.08% compared to murders with rifles. And only 0.051% of all murders.

Lott doesn’t identify the race or avocation of those killed, but I’d say it’s a certainty they could have been killed with unaltered handguns, and regularly are.

But at least in four states, crimes, including premeditated murder, are now just a tiny bit more illegal. That ought to make a difference.

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Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, lifelong athlete, firearm instructor, retired police officer, and high school and college English teacher. He is a published author and blogger. His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor.