One day after Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont signed a ban on Glock pistols into law, the firearms industry's largest trade group announced it would take him to court, the latest in a rapid-fire string of legal challenges to Democrat-led gun restrictions spreading across blue states.
The National Shooting Sports Foundation declared Thursday that it would challenge Connecticut's HB5043, which targets so-called "machine gun convertible pistols," a category that effectively sweeps in one of the most popular handgun platforms in America. The NSSF, headquartered in Connecticut, said it was already lining up potential plaintiffs before filing suit.
Lamont signed the bill Wednesday, May 27. He did not respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Connecticut is not acting alone, and neither are the groups fighting back. The same week Lamont signed HB5043, Maryland Democratic Gov. Wes Moore signed his own version of a Glock ban into law on Tuesday. The National Rifle Association and the Second Amendment Foundation sued Maryland within hours of Moore's signature.
California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a similar ban back in October 2025, making the Golden State the first to move. Now Connecticut and Maryland have followed in quick succession, and each ban has met an immediate legal response.
The pattern is hard to miss. Democratic governors sign broad firearms restrictions. Gun rights organizations file suit the same day or the next. The laws land in court before the ink is dry. Virginia's recent semiautomatic firearms ban faced a similar wave of immediate legal challenges from the NRA, the Trump administration, and gun rights groups, a sign that Second Amendment organizations have built the legal infrastructure to respond to these bans almost reflexively.
Supporters of these bans frame them as responses to so-called "Glock switches", illegal devices that convert a standard semi-automatic Glock pistol into a fully automatic weapon. The devices are already prohibited under federal law. Possessing a machine-gun conversion device carries a penalty of up to ten years in federal prison and $250,000 in fines.
Current federal law, including the National Firearms Act of 1934 and 18 U.S.C. § 922, already makes owning or manufacturing a fully automatic firearm illegal unless it is registered or authorized by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
That is the core tension in this fight. The devices that convert Glocks to fire automatically are already federal crimes. What Connecticut, Maryland, and California have done is ban the pistols themselves, standard, factory-issue, semi-automatic handguns owned by millions of law-abiding Americans, on the theory that they could theoretically be converted.
NSSF Senior Vice President and General Counsel Lawrence Keene put it bluntly:
"This law, and similar laws passed in other states, punishes law-abiding citizens by infringing on their Second Amendment rights to legally obtain the firearms they choose to protect themselves and their families against criminals who, by definition, have no respect for life or law. Instead of enforcing the law and holding these criminals accountable, Connecticut's elected officials pander to gun control donors and antigun special interests to scapegoat the industry and ban an entire class of ordinary firearms, which the U.S. Supreme Court's Heller decision clearly holds violates the U.S. Constitution. Governor Lamont knew this yet didn't hesitate to trample on the Second Amendment."
Keene's argument rests on a straightforward reading of the Supreme Court's 2008 District of Columbia v. Heller decision, which held that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms in common use for lawful purposes. Glock pistols are, by any measure, in common use. The Glock 19X alone sold more than 100,000 units within its first six months on the market following its 2018 launch.
The NSSF's framing cuts to a question that Democratic sponsors of these bans have not answered convincingly: if the conversion devices are already illegal, and if federal law already imposes severe penalties for possessing them, why ban the underlying firearm?
The answer, gun rights advocates argue, is political convenience. Banning a popular handgun brand generates headlines and satisfies gun-control donors. Enforcing existing law against criminals who actually use conversion devices is harder, less visible, and less useful as a campaign talking point.
That dynamic has played out in state after state. In Virginia, a local prosecutor drew a constitutional line and refused to enforce that state's gun ban, arguing the law itself was unconstitutional, a direct challenge to the governor's authority and a sign that enforcement resistance is growing alongside the legal challenges.
Connecticut's law uses the term "machine gun convertible pistols," but the practical effect is a ban on standard Glock handguns, firearms that function identically to dozens of other striker-fired pistols on the market. The NSSF characterized the legislation as banning "an entire class of ordinary firearms."
What distinguishes this moment from earlier rounds of gun-control litigation is speed. The NRA and Second Amendment Foundation sued Maryland within hours of Moore's signature. The NSSF announced its Connecticut challenge the next day. These organizations are not waiting for the laws to take effect and then scrambling. They are filing preemptively, with plaintiffs identified and legal arguments ready.
The Supreme Court's 2022 Bruen decision, which required firearms regulations to be consistent with the nation's historical tradition of gun regulation, has given challengers a stronger framework. Banning one of the most widely owned handgun platforms in the country, not a conversion device, not an automatic weapon, but a factory semi-automatic pistol, is a difficult position to defend under that standard.
Democratic leaders in these states appear willing to absorb the legal costs and political risks. Whether they can absorb the constitutional ones is another matter. The Supreme Court has already turned back Virginia Democrats on other fronts, and the current Court's Second Amendment jurisprudence does not favor broad bans on commonly owned firearms.
Gov. Lamont's silence, he offered no public defense of HB5043 and did not respond to a press inquiry, is notable. If the constitutional case for the ban were strong, one might expect a governor to make it.
Three Democratic governors in three states moved within months of each other to ban the same category of firearm. The coordination suggests a deliberate strategy, likely driven by national gun-control organizations. But a coordinated legislative push does not make the underlying law constitutional.
Federal law already criminalizes the devices these bans claim to target. The bans themselves reach far beyond those devices to prohibit lawful firearms owned by millions of Americans. And the Supreme Court has said, clearly and recently, that the government cannot ban arms in common use.
Republican lawmakers in multiple states have condemned similar Democratic overreach, and the legal challenges are piling up faster than the bans themselves.
The NSSF has not yet disclosed where it will file its Connecticut lawsuit or named its plaintiffs. But the organization's track record, and the speed of the NRA's Maryland filing, suggests the case will move quickly.
When politicians ban a product that millions of citizens own lawfully, to solve a problem that existing federal law already addresses, the real target was never public safety. It was the Second Amendment itself.
