Editorial: Credit is due to Mayor Brandon Johnson in an important gun victory

Next Tuesday will mark a profoundly sad anniversary. It will have been one year since the shooting death of Officer Enrique Martínez as he responded to call in Chicago’s Chatham neighborhood on the South Side.

The 26-year-old Martínez was shot to death allegedly by a man from inside a car using a handgun manipulated with a switch converting it into the equivalent of a machine gun. The suspect, Darion McMillian, now 24, was on electronic monitoring at the time for another pending charge and is in prison now awaiting trial on first-degree murder in Martínez’s death, among other charges.

So while Martínez’s family and his former fellow officers wait for justice to be done, it’s heartening to report that the administration of Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has contributed to pressuring Glock, a major manufacturer of handguns that are easily converted to automatic weapons with so-called switches, into reportedly changing their design to prevent the guns from being altered to become so lethal.

The city of Chicago sued Glock in March 2024 asserting (correctly in our view) that Glock was contributing to the mayhem and murder on Chicago’s streets. Last month, a Cook County Circuit Court judge denied the company’s motion to dismiss the city’s lawsuit, no doubt a factor in the company’s decision to take action at long last on this correctable problem.

In a release hailing Glock’s apparent move to no longer sell guns so easily convertible by third-party devices, the Johnson administration said it would continue to pursue the litigation, which asks for civil penalties and damages.

Chicago isn’t the only governmental body that’s taken action against Glock. Most notably, Gov. Gavin Newsom earlier this month signed into law a ban on the sale of new guns with Glock’s current design in California, the third largest U.S. firearms market. It’s likely not coincidental that Glock is moving so quickly to stop selling guns that can be transformed by a device the size of a quarter into automatic firearms.

But even if California throws around more weight than Chicago, Mayor Johnson can take some justified pride in being part of the pressure campaign that apparently is resulting in real change. (We use the word apparently because the news on Glock’s changes, slated to take effect Nov. 30, has come thus far from one of the company’s authorized retailers and not from the manufacturer itself.)

We applauded the Johnson administration’s decision to sue when they filed the litigation, but we were less than confident it would get results. Under Mayor Richard M. Daley, the city sued gun manufacturers over the use of their products in killing so many Chicagoans and the litigation was unsuccessful.

We won’t celebrate too much, either, until we hear from Chicago police Superintendent Larry Snelling. Snelling has been outspoken about the threat posed to his officers by these Glock switches, and we would expect he will weigh in once Glock’s changes are fleshed out and take hold.

But with those caveats stated, Johnson administration lawyers seem to have contributed to making Chicago’s streets a little safer in the future.

“We know that Glock switches have been used in the vast majority of mass shootings in our city,” Johnson said in a release. “They have taken far too many lives and caused tremendous pain and suffering in our communities.”

We’ve criticized this mayor on many occasions, but credit is due here. It’s difficult to make much overall progress when seizing illegal Glocks with switches, as Chicago police have been doing in concert with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, when new ones can so easily take their place.

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