Top police gun prone to accidental firing

When police Officer Randall Smith was accidentally shot in the head by a fellow officer with a Glock semiautomatic pistol in 1995, he sued the gun maker, claiming the weapon was defectively designed and unnecessarily dangerous.

Glock settled the lawsuit. But for the rest of his life, Smith, whose injuries left him permanently brain damaged and cost him his police job in Birmingham, Ala., is barred from talking about the case or revealing any details he learned about Glock before the settlement. His lawyer also is barred from talking, restricted by a confidentiality agreement that is a standard policy for Glock when settling lawsuits.

Glock?s and other gun manufacturers? insistence on confidentiality agreements is common in product liability settlements. The agreements have kept critical information about the safety record of the gun from the public and are a prime example of how the gun industry actively conceals information about injuries and fatalities connected with its products. The industry has done so with the help of Congress and the powerful National Rifle Association lobby.

As any lawyer could tell you, confidentiality agreements regarding legal settlements and documents examined during discovery in a lawsuit are extremely common. Lawsuits often deal with and uncover many kinds of internal details of business's operation that could provide valuable information to competitors, or even to those opposing the business on other grounds -- like gun control advocates. The existance of a secrecy agreement in no way presupposes that the manufacturer has something sinister to hide -- no more than if any citizen found himself hauled into court would want the details of his own life exposed to public view.

If the plaintiffs in this case felt they had uncovered some compelling evidence, they could have chosen not to settle. The Detroit News in this case is unhappy that the terms of the settlement did not give them additional information with which to attack the gun industry, justified or not; and I have little sympathy for their desire to do so.

As for the facts of this case, and many of the others relating to Glock firearms, they are somewhat different than the description given by this editorial might indicate. Glock firearms use a safety mechanism called a "trigger safety"; they operate on the principle that the gun should fire when the trigger is pulled. Each time, every time. Police departments often choose Glock for exactly this reason. Glock firearms are simple to use; point the gun at the target and pull the trigger.

As the article itself admits, "The guns safety features effectively prevent accidental discharges if the weapon is dropped or bumped. But the Glock has no safety features that prevent it from firing if the trigger is accidentally pulled." And this is by design. When you need a firearm, you need it to work. And when you are a police officer, the extra time needed to click off a safety could mean your life -- and doubly so if you forget about the safety, and try to fire the gun while it is engaged.

Following the rules of gun safety with a Glock will prevent accidents just as with any other firearm. Don't point the gun at what you aren't willing to shoot; don't pull the trigger unless you expect the gun to go off. Remember that each time you see someone talking about a firearms "accident": if they pulled the trigger while the gun was pointed at someone, it's not an accident.

People who buy Glock firearms do so making an informed decision about the qualities of the firearm. The popularity of Glock firearms with police departments across the nation suggests that the Glock designs are well-received and fill the needs of those departments well. That's an indication of the free market working as designed -- because other firearms, with more safety features and consequently less reliability in a crisis, are available if police departments wish to purchase them.

The gun has no manual safety to prevent it from firing if the trigger is accidentally pulled. In fact, the gun?s safety features ? extremely effective in preventing discharges if the gun is dropped or hit ? automatically are turned off every time the trigger is depressed.

In addition, most Glocks have no indicator that shows the guns are loaded and no magazine safety to prevent them from firing when the ammunition clip is removed. And unlike many other guns, the Glock is always semicocked and ready to shoot. This inner tension in its firing mechanism increases the likelihood of discharge if the trigger is accidentally moved, some gun experts say.

"What you have is a gun that is almost too eager to fire," said Carter Lord, a national firearms and ballistics consultant. "I think it may be an appropriate weapon for highly trained paramilitary officers in a SWAT team, but not for most police officers and certainly not for civilians."

Nonsense. The design features of a Glock are clearly oriented towards the simple principle of firing when the trigger is pulled, each time and every time. As they say in software development, that's a feature, not a bug. It does require careful handling, and some people may prefer a firearm with more safety features -- but that's no reason to prevent those who do have a need for the Glock's design features from buying firearms with those features.

If you don't want the gun to fire, don't pull the trigger. It's that simple.

One of the Glock?s most frightening attributes is its ability to easily be converted into a full automatic weapon capable of firing at the rate of 1,000 rounds a minute. Glock has issued no warnings and made no changes in its design that would prevent its weapons from being converted into submachine guns. Experts say the problem can be corrected with minor changes in how Glock pistols are made.

A full automatic Glock will fire 33 bullets in seconds with one trigger pull. And the gun can be quickly converted to full automatic mode for as little as $10 with homemade parts. It is a well-documented danger known to law enforcement.

"In some regions of California, police are treating any Glock they encounter as a machine gun until proven otherwise," states an advisory on the Association of Forensic Firearm and Toolmark Examiners Web site that lists dangerous or defective guns.

"The conversion from standard to fully automatic is fast and simple, requiring no technical expertise. The conversion is accomplished merely by swapping one piece for the other. A ?real pro? can make the switch in 15 seconds."

Now, this is an allegation that I haven't heard before. But, I do know the law on fully-automatic firearms. In case you do not, fully-automatic firearms are legal for civilians to own and transfer (but not to manufacture) by federal law. Some states restrict this further. But the federal law defining a fully-automatic weapon for this purpose defines it as any weapon capable of firing more than one round with a single trigger pull, or which is easily converted to do so.

Think about that for a moment. If you really could convert a Glock into a submachine gun in 15 seconds, the government would be regulating the Glock firearms as fully-automatic firearms already. The law makes no distinction between "fully automatic" and "readily converted to fully automatic". And yet, Glocks are made and sold for civilian use every day.

So is this a valid claim? It's hard to say. The Detroit News cites the Association of Firearm and Tool Mark Examiners website as the source of this claim. The only reference on that website is to an ATF advisory which is for "members only" and password protected. While the subject of the advisory is suggestive, without access to the full text it's impossible to tell exactly what it says.

Did the Detroit News get special access to this advisory -- or are they making assumptions based on the name and a website search?