CT House Passes Ban on Convertible Pistols in 2026

The Connecticut House of Representatives passed a bill Wednesday banning the sale of “convertible pistols,” targeting a legal firearm that can be illegally modified to fire automatically.

The bill passed 86-64, with all House Republicans and 15 Democrats voting against it. Gov. Ned Lamont originally proposed the legislation, which would prohibit the sale of 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 measure focuses on guns with a “cruciform trigger bar” and would primarily affect Glocks, one of the most widely owned pistols in the country.

The bill now heads to the Senate.

Why Glocks, Specifically

Rep. Steven Stafstrom, D-Bridgeport, who led the floor debate for the majority, said the legislation is designed to pressure Glock’s manufacturer into redesigning its pistols so they can’t be easily converted. He pointed out that the company already sells a harder-to-convert model in Germany. The bill doesn’t aim to strip current Glock owners of anything they have. People who already own the pistols can keep them and sell them to friends or family members.

The bill’s backers say the problem is real and measurable. Hartford police confiscated 51 Glocks that had been modified into automatic weapons in 2023 and 2024, according to Stafstrom. He said one modified Glock killed a 20-year-old woman and her 4-year-old son.

“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.

California and Maryland have already passed similar bans on convertible pistols. New York is weighing comparable legislation, according to CT Mirror, which covered Wednesday’s floor debate.

The Opposition’s Case

Republicans pushed back hard. Rep. Greg Howard, R-Stonington, and Rep. Craig Fishbein, R-Wallingford, argued that banning a legal product because it might be misused sets a troubling precedent.

“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.

Fishbein drew a comparison to pool chemicals, which are legal but can be made deadly if misused. He didn’t stop there.

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

Howard also raised a practical objection that gets at the heart of the enforcement challenge. When Glock released its “V-series” models in late 2025, the new pistols used a different trigger mechanism than the cruciform trigger bar the bill specifically addresses. Howard said someone had invented a way to convert the V-series into an automatic weapon within days of its release. His argument: banning one design doesn’t end the problem. Manufacturers iterate, and so do the people looking for workarounds.

That’s the core tension here. The bill is not a broad gun ban. It doesn’t touch the vast majority of firearms in Connecticut homes. It targets one specific design characteristic in a category of widely owned pistols, and it’s explicitly calibrated to push a manufacturer toward a different product rather than to remove guns from circulation.

What It Means for Connecticut Gun Owners

The practical impact on most Connecticut residents is narrow. If you already own a Glock, nothing changes. You can keep it, hand it down, or sell it privately. The ban applies to new sales, not existing inventory.

The Connecticut General Assembly’s bill tracking page shows the measure advancing through a General Assembly that has passed gun restrictions in several consecutive sessions since the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown. Lamont has signed each of those measures into law, and there’s no signal he’d reverse course on a bill he proposed himself.

Republicans have enough votes to sustain a floor fight but not to block passage in a chamber where Democrats hold a comfortable majority. The Senate, also controlled by Democrats, is expected to take up the bill in coming weeks. If it passes there, Lamont’s signature would make Connecticut the third state in the country to ban convertible pistols outright, joining California and Maryland in a regional pattern that gun-control advocates say they hope spreads to New York and beyond.

The Glock manufacturer’s website does not currently list the harder-to-convert model sold in Germany as available for sale in the United States.