The House of Representatives on Wednesday passed a bill banning the sale of “convertible pistols” in an attempt to stop companies from manufacturing legal firearms that can be illegally altered to fire automatically. 

The bill passed by a vote of 86-64, with all the House Republicans and 15 Democrats voting in opposition. 

Originally a proposal from Gov. Ned Lamont, the legislation would ban 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 bill targets guns with what is called a “cruciform trigger bar,” and would primarily affect Glocks, one of the most common pistols in the nation. 

Rep. Steven Stafstrom, D-Bridgeport, said the aim of the bill was to place pressure on the manufacturer of Glocks to redesign the pistols — making them more difficult to convert into automatic weapons. He said the company already sells such a 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.

According to Stafstrom, the City of Hartford Police confiscated 51 Glocks that had been modified into automatic weapons in 2023 and 2024. Stafstrom said that in one instance, a modified Glock pistol had killed a 20-year-old woman and her four-year-old son. 

The bill would not affect people who already own Glocks from keeping them or selling them to friends or family members. Even so, the bill drew strong opposition from people who testified at a public hearing on the bill in March. 

California and Maryland have passed laws banning “convertible pistols,” and the state of New York is considering a similar bill. 

Rep. Greg Howard, R-Stonington, and Rep. Craig Fishbein, R-Wallingford, objected to the bill during Wednesday’s floor debate, saying the legislature shouldn’t ban things simply because they could be used in a way that’s illegal or deadly. 

“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 said that other legal items, such as pool chemicals, could also become deadly if used inappropriately. 

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

Howard also said that even if the state banned one type of “convertible pistol,” people could find other ways of modifying guns — as happened when Glock rolled out its “V-series” models in late 2025, he said, which have a different type of trigger mechanism than the cruciform trigger the bill addresses. Howard said within days of the release of the V-series, someone had invented a way to convert it into an automatic weapon. 

“For as long as human ingenuity is going to exist, and as long as 3-D printers exist and as long as physics exists, somebody, somewhere is going to find a way to manufacture, design something that can overcome the reset cycle of a pistol and make it fully automatic,” Howard said. 

Rep. Doug Dubitsky, R-Chaplin, questioned whether it was constitutional for the state to ban handguns with “cruciform trigger bars,” and whether the state Supreme Court would approve such a law. He warned that if every handgun could be illegally converted, the state could then ban all handguns. 

Rep. Bob Godfrey, D-Danbury, said the Connecticut Supreme Court had ruled on an earlier ban on military-style assault weapons that the legislature had the power to define which firearms are considered “defensive weapons” under the 2nd Amendment.

The bill also includes provisions that would redefine unfinished frames and receivers as firearms. This was intended to prevent the construction of “ghost guns” — when people purchase a series of firearm parts and then construct the gun themselves, avoiding required background checks or needing to serialize the gun. 

Fishbein and House Minority Leader Vincent Candelora, R-North Branford, told reporters Wednesday morning that the legislature should focus more on preventing people from committing gun violence, with initiatives like investing in gun violence prevention programs. 

“ We should be focusing on gun violence and not guns, because it’s like trying to pin down Jell-O,” said Candelora. “They could pass every law in the books to regulate guns and restrict guns and prohibit the purchase of guns — it doesn’t actually accomplish, I think, what we want to see, and that is a reduction of gun violence, especially in our cities.”