A pistol ban passed by the Maryland House and Senate, and that is currently being considered by Democrat Gov. Wes Moore, has drawn the ire of the firearms industry trade association.
According to the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), the misguided legislation would unconstitutionally infringe on the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding Marylanders by prohibiting an entire class of lawfully-made and lawfully-sold handguns, should it be signed into law.
The recently passed legislation, Senate Bill 334 and House Bill 557, would prohibit the manufacture, sale, offer for sale, purchase, receipt, or transfer of certain semi-automatic pistols that the state loosely defines as “machine gun convertible pistols.” NSSF wrote in a news release on the matter that the legislation singles out certain striker-fired handguns because criminals ignore federal and state law to illegally modify these handguns to attach a “machinegun conversion device,” or MCD (sometimes called Glock switch), which is illegal to both possess and to attach to a firearm outside of strict federal licensing.
“To borrow on a line from Jame Carville, whom Democrats revere, ‘it’s the criminal, stupid,’” said Lawrence G. Keane, NSSF’s senior vice president and 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.”
Keane added that instead of enforcing the law and holding these criminals accountable, Maryland’s lawmakers pander to gun control donors and anti-gun 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,” Keane said.
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.
While over half of the states have laws outlawing possession or use of so-called “Glock switches,” the legislation is basically meaningless since such devices are already illegal under federal law. States that go even further by banning pistol models simply because they can be illegally modified run afoul of the Second Amendment and should be punished through the courts for passing such an infringement.
If the governor signs the measure, the ban will take effect on January 1, 2027.
