CT House Passes Ban on Convertible Pistols

The Connecticut House of Representatives passed a bill Wednesday banning the sale of “convertible pistols,” pushing back against a growing trend of legally purchased firearms being modified into illegal automatic weapons on the state’s streets.

The bill passed 86-64, with all House Republicans and 15 Democrats voting no.

The legislation, originally proposed by Gov. Ned Lamont, targets pistols that “can be readily converted by hand or with a common household tool into a machine gun solely by the installation or attachment of a pistol converter.” The bill specifically addresses guns with a “cruciform trigger bar,” a design feature that makes conversion easier. Glocks, among the most widely owned pistols in the country, would be primarily affected.

Rep. Steven Stafstrom, D-Bridgeport, was among the bill’s lead advocates during Wednesday’s floor debate. He said the goal is not just to restrict sales in Connecticut, but to apply market pressure on Glock’s manufacturer to redesign the pistol at the factory level. He noted the company already sells a harder-to-convert model in Germany.

“Machine guns are illegal in Connecticut and they’re illegal in every other state in the country. But they are still showing up on our streets,” Stafstrom said.

The numbers he cited were stark. Hartford police confiscated 51 Glocks that had been modified into automatic weapons across 2023 and 2024. In one case, a modified Glock was used to kill a 20-year-old woman and her four-year-old son.

The bill would not force existing Glock owners to surrender their firearms. People who already own the pistols could keep them and transfer them to friends or family. That carve-out didn’t soften the opposition, which was vocal at a public hearing in March and on the House floor Wednesday.

Rep. Greg Howard, R-Stonington, argued the legislature was setting a troubling precedent by banning legal equipment based on the possibility it could be misused.

“I am opposed to a public policy that says that we are going to make it illegal for a law-abiding citizen to possess an otherwise legal piece of equipment because they ‘might be able’ to take that series of moving parts and turn it into something else,” Howard said.

Rep. Craig Fishbein, R-Wallingford, drew a comparison to pool chemicals, which can also become dangerous if misused. He suggested the legislature’s priorities are misaligned.

“Year after year we see the legislature attacking guns and not attacking criminals,” Fishbein said.

Howard also raised a practical concern about the bill’s reach. When Glock released its “V-series” models in late 2025, those pistols used a different trigger mechanism than the cruciform trigger the bill targets. Howard said that within days of the V-series hitting the market, someone had already developed a method to convert that model into an automatic weapon as well. He argued the legislation would always be running behind the curve of new firearm designs.

Connecticut would not be breaking entirely new ground with this bill. California and Maryland have already enacted similar bans on convertible pistols. New York is weighing comparable legislation. That regional alignment may help the bill survive any legal challenges, though the fight over it is far from finished. The bill now heads to the Senate.

The debate touches on a tension that has defined Connecticut gun policy for years: how to reduce the real, documented harm caused by illegally modified weapons without penalizing the far larger number of gun owners who follow the law. Stafstrom’s argument is that the cruciform trigger bar is a design flaw that serves no legitimate purpose for lawful gun owners and exists, in practical terms, only as an easy conversion point. Howard’s counter is that the same logic could eventually be applied to almost any firearm component.

The bill’s passage puts Connecticut one step closer to joining the small group of states that have tried to cut off the supply of easily convertible pistols rather than wait for federal action on machine gun conversion devices, which remain a persistent problem for law enforcement across the country.