The gun-ban groups and politicians have moved their sights to Sturm, Ruger & Co., a publicly traded firearm manufacturing company.
They feel emboldened by perceived success with lawfare aimed at Glock, which recently announced it is discontinuing almost all its current models and that, instead, the Austrian pistol maker will begin shipping its new V series pistols.
Lawfare directed at Glock has been going on for some time. The excuse for this has been that some enterprising criminals have figured out how to illegally modify certain Glock models, which, if they work, can make some of these semi-automatic pistols into illegal machine guns.
This lawfare evolved into actual law when California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed Assembly Bill 1127, which is scheduled to take effect on July 1, 2026. Specifically, it provides that licensed firearms dealers “shall not sell, offer for sale, exchange, give, transfer, or deliver any semiautomatic machinegun-convertible pistol.”
Just after this legislation was signed, the NRA—along with the Firearms Policy Coalition, the Second Amendment Foundation, Poway Weapons & Gear and two NRA members—filed a lawsuit (Jaymes v. Bonta) challenging California’s new ban. The lawsuit argues that California’s ban on Glock-style handguns violates the Second Amendment, as the U.S. Supreme Court has held that “common” arms cannot be banned, and, moreover, that handguns cannot be categorically banned. California’s ban on many of the most popular handguns in America blatantly defies the Court’s precedent in D.C. v. Heller (2008).
With this “success” empowering them, the gun-control group Everytown for Gun Safety demanded that Sturm, Ruger & Co. discontinue the RXM. Connecticut Attorney General William Tong (D) also formally published a letter demanding that Sturm, Ruger & Co. cease production of its new RXM pistol. They argue that “Ruger must pull the RXM from the market unless and until it changes the pistol’s design.”
In his letter, Tong references Glock’s announcement that it will discontinue various handgun models. Tong then says that Ruger, under Connecticut law, “must enact reasonable controls to prevent the sale or distribution of legal firearms that can easily be converted to illegal firearms.”
Tong then says he wants “a statement from Ruger as to what it intends to do with the RXM,” and he says Ruger must “preserve for future production” documents, records and financial information related to the RXM.
As of November 18, Ruger had not responded, and the RXM was still being offered for sale.
Anyone paying attention to today’s gun-control politics is not surprised to hear that gun-control groups and the politicians they align with prefer to blame law-abiding citizens and manufacturers for the actions of criminals, but it is still important to note this, as this turns the American criminal justice system on its head. The criminal-justice system was designed to catch and prosecute criminals, not to target law-abiding citizens and the companies that make products that are specifically protected in the U.S. Bill of Rights.
What the gun-control groups see is a legal opening to get more guns banned. Firearms, after all, can be illegally modified. Criminals have long attempted to do this. But now, if gun-ban advocates can succeed in dictating gun designs, they will soon shift to demanding other standards, such as so-called “smart-gun” technology—they, of course, have made this demand before.
Meanwhile, they will have succeeded in making guns more expensive, which will be a bigger barrier to poorer, law-abiding citizens.
This is an incremental war on the Second Amendment that includes Connecticut’s newly enacted Firearms Industry Responsibility Act (FIRA), which empowers the state attorney general to bring civil enforcement actions against gun manufacturers that sell products “designed in a manner that is reasonably foreseeable to promote conversion of a legal firearm into an illegal firearm.”
“Violations can result in not only punitive damages and injunctive relief, but courts can impose penalties up to $5,000 per violation of the Connecticut Unfair Trade Practices Act. This, they say, makes the RXM illegal, even though they cannot point to a single violent crime committed with an illegally modified RXM,” reports NRA-ILA.
This is indeed another front in the civil-rights battle for your Second Amendment-protected rights.
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