The thing about Glocks is that the company found a design that worked and they haven’t really changed anything about it since the guns were first introduced. There have been minor tweaks here and there–there’s a reason there are new generations of Glocks every so often–but the guts of the things remain the same.

Sure, they all look alike, but they also all work and work well.

But then some jackwagon figured out how to turn a regular pistol into a machine pistol and people started selling the devices to do so. Glock had nothing to do with these, mind you, and the devices are illegal in and of themselves, but that hasn’t stopped some state and local governments from blaming them anyway.

Earlier this month, the anti-gun attorneys general of Minnesota and New Jersey filed nearly simultaneous lawsuits against firearm maker Glock, essentially claiming the company was violating the laws of those states by making guns that are too easy to illegally modify.

The efforts are part of a coordinated attempt (perhaps with encouragement from the White House itself) to sidestep legal protections Congress specifically enacted to prevent the gun industry from being subjected to such vexatious litigation.

A similar lawsuit was already pending in Chicago with the help of Everytown Law, the legal advocacy wing of billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s gun control empire. That organization literally publishes a manual on suing members of the gun industry, in open defiance of congressional intent.

State laws aiming to trump federal laws

All of these suits rely on recently enacted state laws that purport to empower authorities to abate alleged public nuisances caused by gun industry members who, though otherwise in compliance with the law, fail to exercise additional “reasonable controls” to prevent criminal misuse of their products.

Under these laws, it’s not enough for industry members to follow the many rules and procedures lawmakers have specified for the legal operation of their businesses. Rather, they must additionally anticipate how criminals might misbehave and then take affirmative precautions on their own initiative to prevent that criminal behavior. This provides a dual benefit for the state’s anti-gun politicians. First, it allows them to shift blame for their own failures to maintain law and order to the gun businesses. Second, it gives them a blank slate for imposing ever more burdens on gun businesses, without having to pass new laws.

Bingo.

And this won’t just stop with Glock, either.

Oh, they might not go about it with the exact same pretext, but they’ll still find one. They’ll manufacture one, if they have to, and we’ve already seen it. After all, they’re going after some of these companies based on their marketing, blaming them for somehow inciting or inspiring mass killers with their ads, all without ever showing a lick of evidence that these killers ever saw any of it.

It all started because of the Winchester settlement over Sandy Hook. It wasn’t even Winchester that made the decision. It was the insurance company that made the call, and they just cared about the bottom line, not the good of an industry, our Second Amendment rights, etc.

What this is all about is trying to make it too costly for companies to sell guns to law-abiding citizens. They want to pressure them into curtailing their own sales, protecting a portion of their business rather than risk losing everything.

And if these lawsuits are permitted to continue, they’ll do far more than allow politicians to keep putting the blame for their failures on others. It’ll doom the entire industry.