JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – A gun switch or Glock switch is an attachment to a gun that is gaining notoriety and popularity on social media.
They’re easy to get and cheap to make, and the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office has found more of them attached to guns over the last four years.
“It makes the weapon fully automatic. You can imagine it’s pretty dangerous for a semi-automatic handgun, making it fully automatic. You’re talking about a 17-round magazine, unloading that in about two seconds,” said JSO Assistant Chief Michael Paul. “We’ve seen an increase; they’re more prevalent. You see them a lot on social media, a lot of people posing with firearms with Glock switches attached to them.”
Paul said detectives from the Crime Intelligence Task Force who are assigned to an ATF task force started being briefed about these before the pandemic. Now they are seeing them and seizing them.
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“You know, the internet tells people how to do all sorts of things. And anybody can go figure out how to do this on a 3-D printer. It is scary,” Paul said. “We have even seized 3-D printers from people who are making them because we can seize the printer based upon the fact that they were using it for an illegal activity.”
The Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office said it found zero gun switches attached to guns in 2020, but over the last four years it’s found:
- One in 2021
- 21 in 2022
- 37 in 2023
- 14 so far in 2024
Paul said those numbers don’t account for the gun switches the Sheriff’s Office finds that aren’t attached to firearms but likely have been at some point.
“You can buy the switches separately, and we recover those on a pretty regular basis too not attached to firearms,” Paul said.
News4JAX went to Green Acres Sporting Goods to see how a normal Glock operates and what the “switch” does to make it fully automatic.
“The sear engages back and forth, so what the switch does is just keeps it engaged,” Philip Gazaleh said. “It holds the slide release on the sear down, so it allowed us to go into full auto mode.”
Gazaleh said he has never seen a switch in person, but he said modifications to guns have been around as long as there have been guns. But this is one of the cheaper ways to do it, he said.
“It’s just a little piece of plastic on the back,” Gazaleh said. “All it does is prevent the sear from engaging. So, it’s not much. It’s probably 50 cents to build.”
But, he said, it goes against how gun owners should view and treat their weapons.
“You got to have gun safety, gun training,” he said.
Unfortunately, JSO officers are finding them in the hands of those who are not usually skilled or even trained gun owners, Paul said.
“It’s very popular in a lot of the younger crowd,” he said. “You know, when they’re taking pictures with guns and things like that.”
Officers do what they can to find the gun switches and get them off the street, but the ease of getting them makes it difficult.
“We see them on a regular basis being sold on social media. They’re very prevalent on the internet. You can buy them from China. People buy them all the time,” Paul said. “But social media locally is where we see them being sold by people. And those are typically ones that people buy from overseas, or they’re made on 3-D printers.”
Having a Glock switch is a federal gun crime, and if you are caught with one you could land yourself in prison with an extended stay.
“It’s treated just like a machine gun. That switch is the machine gun, and a person with no record could do 18 to 24 months in federal prison if they’re caught with one,” Paul said. “Really, if you have a record, you can do up to 10 years in prison.”