FEDERAL LAWSUIT TO BLOCK 'GLOCK BAN' FILED
CENTRAL NEW YORK GUN STORE, OWNERS, GROUPS SUE TO STOP NEW YORK GUN LAW EFFECTIVELY BANNING MOST POPULAR HANDGUN IN AMERICA
MALONE, NEW YORK Aug. 14, 2026
A central New York gun store, two state residents and a handful of firearm advocacy groups has sued to block New York's new "Glock Ban."
"A law that bans the sale or purchase of a weapon in common use violates the Second Amendment," the 17-page legal complaint in the case alleges.
It was filed in the Federal District Court for the Western District of New York on Thursday.
“Tyrants in New York have joined California and Maryland in imposing a new assault on our rights by banning some of the most popular handguns in America,” Brandon Combs, president of one of the gun groups named as a plaintiff in the case, the Firearms Policy Coalition, said in a news release.
The group, Combs said, “is already challenging Glock bans in other states, and now New York will once again have to answer for its authoritarian actions.”
The National Rifle Association and the Second Amendment Foundation also joined the suit. The lead Plaintiff is The Firing Pin, a gun store in central New York. New York residents Lucas Nelson and Daniel J. Geary are also plaintiffs.
New York’s Gov. Kathy Hochul proposed the Glock Ban as part of her 2026 budget. It was essentially motivated by viral social media videos showing Glocks that had been illegally converted into machine pistols.
Glocks are designed and marketed as semi-automatic handguns. Meaning, one pull of the trigger produces one shot only. But a small, cheap, easily-accessible drop-in part called a "switch" makes the gun capable of firing fully automatically. Meaning, the gun will fire so long as the trigger is held and the gun has ammunition in it.
The relative ease with which ordinary semi-automatic Glocks can be converted into fully-automatic machine pistols is what worried lawmakers so much.
In her proposal, Gov. Hochul took aim at gun manufacturers and said the new law was intended to "require gun manufacturers to design pistols so they cannot be quickly and easily modified into DIY machine guns through the use of illegal devices, such as Glock switches."
The state legislature passed the Glock Ban and Gov. Hochul signed it into law in May.
The new law follows a similar pattern. New firearms' regulations typically expand the definition of a gun to other weapons not traditionally legally defined as firearms, or they single out types or kinds of firearms for special restrictions.
The Glock Ban creates a new legal category of prohibited firearm called a "convertible pistol." A now-illegal convertible pistol is legally defined as “any semi-automatic pistol with a cruciform trigger bar that can be readily altered by hand or with common household tools so that it can be converted into a machine-gun by the installation or attachment of a pistol converter.”
Cruciform trigger bars have been in Glocks since Gaston Glock patented his first pistol in 1982.
The innovation was required because Glock wanted to make a gun without a separate safety switch that would need to be disengaged before the gun could fired—theoretically making it easier and faster to fire. The cruciform trigger bar takes the place of a separate safety, and prevents the gun from being accidentally fired.
Glocks are enormously popular among American handgun owners. Glocks and Glock clones make up more than half of the handguns sold in the United States, Forbes reported in 2021.
Under the Supreme Court's Second Amendment law, all weapons that are "bearable arms" in "common use" are constitutionally protected—unless the Government can prove a restriction on those arms "is consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”
According to the lawsuit, Glocks "are not relevantly different from any other type of semiautomatic pistol. Glock and Glock-style pistols are therefore in common use," and thus protected by the Second Amendment. "And there is no history of regulation that justifies the ban."
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