Like California, Maryland could soon make it illegal to sell or transfer some of the most popular pistols in the country, and the National Shooting Sports Foundation is warning Gov. Wes Moore about the consequences of signing a gun ban bill into law.
SB 334 and HB 557 would prohibit the manufacture, sale, and transfer of semiautomatic pistols the state defines as “machine gun convertible pistols.” The bill would put an end to the sale of virtually all Glocks and other striker-fired semi-automatic pistols in the state, because they can be illegally modified to fire full-auto through the installation of an after-market “switch” that is already illegal to possess under state and federal law.
Rather than focusing on those who would illegally modify these firearms, the Democrat-dominated legislature in Maryland is trying to use those criminals as an excuse to go after lawful gun owners, makers, and sellers.
“To borrow on a line from James Carville, whom Democrats revere, ‘it’s the criminal, stupid,’” said Lawrence G. Keane, NSSF’s Senior Vice President & General Counsel. “These bills, and similar laws passed in other states, punish 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, Maryland’s lawmakers pander to gun control donors and antigun special interests to ban an entire class of firearms, which the U.S. Supreme Court’s Heller decision clearly holds violates the U.S. Constitution. Should Governor Moore sign these bills into law, NSSF intends to have Maryland’s Attorney General Anthony Brown explain in court why Maryland willfully violates the rights of her citizens and ignores its responsibility to hold criminals accountable.”
Under the bills’ language, the ban includes pistols with a cruciform trigger bar that Maryland lawmakers say can be readily converted by replacing the slide backplate with an illegal MCD, and it directs the Maryland Department of State Police to publish a list of prohibited models. These include the same handguns used by Maryland State Police and the Baltimore Police Department, although law enforcement is exempted from the proposed prohibition. The proposed ban would to take effect on Jan. 1, 2027.
Yes, the Supreme Court has held that bans on an entire class of firearms like handguns are unconstitutional. The gun control lobby, though, wants to test just how far that applies. Can bans on subsets of handguns, like all striker-fired pistols, survive judicial scrutiny? These are arms in common use for lawful purposes, after all, including by law enforcement.
And if these pistols are as inherently dangerous as the bills’ sponsors claim, then there’s no reason why the Baltimore PD and the Maryland State Police should be able to continue to purchase them. Guns can be stolen, and police officers can be the victims of theft just like the rest of us.
Investigators were scouring the scene of a 2015 shooting in Southwest Baltimore when they found a blood-covered Glock pistol on the ground behind a row house. A ballistics analysis determined the gun had been used in the attack, which killed a 23-year-old man and injured a 93-year-old woman whose head was grazed by a stray bullet.
The Glock was a big break for investigators in the case, but a check of its serial number led to a chilling revelation: The gun belonged to one of their own. Two months earlier, a Baltimore police officer had reported the pistol stolen from his car.
Such thefts are not uncommon. The Trace examined records from more than 100 law enforcement agencies and found that they had collectively reported the loss or theft of at least 1,781 guns between 2008 and 2017. The vast majority were department-issued handguns, but the count also included hundreds of rifles and shotguns, as well as four fully automatic submachine guns. The firearms were stolen out of glove boxes and closets, left in airports and on the roofs of cars, and in one case, forgotten in a high school bathroom. Some were later involved in crimes ranging from aggravated assault to homicide.
If the laws in Maryland, California, and the other anti-gun states pushing this legislation like Connecticut are upheld, you can rest assured that the gun control lobby won’t stop there.
We’ve already seen Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger try to redefine “assault firearm” to include any semi-automatic pistol with a detachable magazine of more than 15 rounds, and if the courts buy in to the theory that any firearm that can be readily “modified” to become a prohibited arm under state law can be banned from the get-go, it won’t be long before groups like Giffords and Everytown take aim at all semi-automatic firearms that can accept detachable magazines.
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