The bottom line
California’s AB 1127 was sold as a law to stop illegal machine gun conversions. Within 48 hours of Glock’s compliant redesign hitting distributor shelves, someone had already engineered a switch to defeat it. This is not a surprise. It is exactly what gun control always does: burden law-abiding owners while doing nothing to stop criminals who operate outside the law by definition.
Attribution from Bearing Freedom. Watch the original video. Commentary, not legal advice.
What California actually did
On October 10, 2025, Governor Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 1127 into law. The bill, authored by Assemblymembers Jesse Gabriel and Catherine Stefani, prohibits licensed dealers from selling any semiautomatic pistol with a cruciform trigger bar that can be readily converted into a machine gun by installing a device into the rear of the slide. The law takes effect July 1, 2026.
The legislation defines the device at issue as a “pistol converter” — a component that, when inserted into the back of the slide where the backplate sits, interferes with the trigger mechanism and enables the pistol to fire automatically. These are commonly called Glock switches. They are not legal. They have never been legal. Possessing one carries a federal sentence of up to 10 years under the National Firearms Act. And they have been classified as machine guns under federal law since 1986 when the Hughes Amendment closed the civilian machine gun registry.
The ATF recovered 5,454 of these devices between 2017 and 2021 alone — a 570% increase over the preceding five-year period. Between 2019 and 2023, police recovered 11,088 auto sears nationwide, with 5,816 recovered in 2023 alone, a 784% increase over that window. Every single one of those recoveries represents a federal crime that was already on the books. Every single device was already illegal. And yet the solution California reached for was not tougher enforcement of existing law. It was banning the sale of legal handguns to people who follow the law.
The Glock Series V and how fast it failed
In response to AB 1127, Glock announced the V Series — a redesigned pistol line intended to comply with California’s new definition of a machinegun-convertible pistol. The V Series replaces the cruciform trigger bar with a different mechanism that, in theory, cannot accept a standard Glock switch. The company discontinued its Gen 4 and Gen 5 lines to pivot to this new platform.
Glock did not choose to do this because it wanted to. No gun manufacturer wakes up and decides to redesign a product that has been market-dominant for four decades because the engineering demanded it. Glock made this move under legislative compulsion, spending time and money on R&D to produce a product that would be legal to sell in a single state’s market.
Less than 48 hours after V Series pistols first appeared at distributors, video surfaced online of a functioning auto sear engineered specifically for the new platform. The redesign had been defeated before most customers had ever held one. The person who built that device did not care about California’s law. The person who builds the next one will not care either. That is the entire point.
Why this was always the outcome
Let me be straightforward about what a Glock switch actually is. It is a small piece of metal or polymer, often machined or 3D printed, that redirects the trigger reset mechanism to fire continuously. It is not a sophisticated device. The ATF has published materials warning about these devices that, ironically, do more to illustrate how accessible they are than to deter anyone with criminal intent. They can be manufactured at home with readily available tools. They can be ordered from overseas. They cost almost nothing. The federal prohibition on them has not made them scarce. It has not made them difficult to find. It has driven up their use by 784% over four years while enforcement remains perpetually under-resourced.
California’s answer to this enforcement problem was not more enforcement. It was redesigning the legal market for handguns. That is not a solution to criminal misuse. It is a cost imposed on legal buyers and legal manufacturers. Glock spent engineering resources on a platform change. Dealers will be required to clear existing inventory. Consumers who want to purchase the most popular handgun design in American history will have to navigate yet another California-specific restriction. The criminal who wanted a switch bought one from overseas for twenty dollars and did not notice any of this.
The Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation correctly identified AB 1127 as “a backdoor striker-fired handgun ban.” The NSSF noted that the law’s cruciform trigger bar definition sweeps in virtually every major striker-fired pistol on the market. Glock is the most prominent name, but the definition does not stop there. Smith & Wesson M&P pistols, Springfield Armory handguns, and various other platforms use trigger geometry that may fall within the law’s scope. California is not banning a small accessory used by criminals. It is legislating the most popular category of defensive handguns out of its retail market.
The NFA and the machine gun question
I want to address the deeper legal and constitutional picture here, because the Glock switch conversation does not exist in isolation. It sits inside a regulatory framework that has been broken from its foundation.
Machine guns for civilian ownership have been effectively banned since 1986, when the Hughes Amendment was attached to the Firearm Owners Protection Act. The amendment froze the civilian registry — any machine gun manufactured after May 19, 1986 cannot be transferred to a civilian owner. The guns made before that date can be transferred, but because the registry is frozen, prices have inflated astronomically. A pre-1986 registered machine gun that sold for a few hundred dollars in 1986 now commands tens of thousands on the transferable market.
The underlying National Firearms Act dates to 1934 and was passed as a tax measure, not explicitly as a firearms prohibition, because the government at the time believed a direct ban might not survive constitutional scrutiny. The $200 transfer tax has never been adjusted for inflation and remains at $200 today, which was a prohibitive sum in 1934 but is relatively modest now. The framework was regulatory architecture designed to suppress ownership through administrative burden rather than outright prohibition — and it has continued to operate that way ever since.
The Hughes Amendment is constitutionally suspect in a post-Heller, post-Bruen world. Heller established that the Second Amendment protects arms “in common use” for lawful purposes. Bruen held that firearms regulations must find support in the historical tradition of the founding era to be constitutional. The 1986 machine gun freeze is a post-New Deal administrative act with no founding-era analog. No court has yet applied Bruen to the Hughes Amendment directly, though challenges are developing. The realistic legal assessment is that it will remain in place for the foreseeable future — but the argument for its unconstitutionality is stronger than it has been at any point since 1986.
The lawsuit and what comes next
The Firearms Policy Coalition, joined by the NRA, the Second Amendment Foundation, and individual plaintiffs, filed a federal lawsuit challenging AB 1127 in the Southern District of California on October 13, 2025. The case, Jaymes v. Bonta, argues that semiautomatic pistols with cruciform trigger bars are constitutionally protected arms under Heller and Bruen because they are among the most common handgun designs in America, with millions in circulation, and are in widespread common use for lawful self-defense.
That argument is strong. Heller was explicit that handguns are the quintessential self-defense weapon and that a categorical ban on them violates the Second Amendment. Bruen requires that any gun regulation find historical support in the founding era. There is no founding-era tradition of banning the most popular handgun design based on the possibility that criminals might illegally modify it. That is not a historical analog. It is a 2025 California legislative innovation with no constitutional grounding.
The irony of this entire episode is worth sitting with. California passed a law, Glock spent millions redesigning a product to comply with it, and criminals defeated the redesign in less than two days. The only people inconvenienced by any of this are law-abiding gun owners and a manufacturer that tried to operate in good faith within an irrational regulatory environment. That is not a coincidence. That is what gun control is designed to produce.
Attribution from Bearing Freedom. Watch the original video. Commentary, not legal advice.
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