A “Glock switch” device — pictured with a counterfeit logo — can convert the firearm into a machine gun. Glock Corporation doesn’t make converters for its products. Photo from the U.S. Department of Justice.

By Leslie Bonilla Muñiz
Indiana Capital Chronicle

INDIANAPOLIS — The Constitution’s Second Amendment protections don’t include machine guns, the Indiana Court of Appeals ruled Thursday, Feb. 19, citing existing case law. The term includes the fully automatic firearms and conversion devices.

The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department Officers arrested a then-18-year-old Jacob McGee, toting a Glock 22 fitted with a conversion device, in 2023. He was convicted of Level 5 felony machine gun possession in Marion Superior Court and sentenced to four years: two in community corrections and two suspended to probation.

McGee appealed. He argued Indiana’s ban on machine guns violates his constitutional right to bear arms, and, alternatively, that there wasn’t enough evidence that he knew the “Glock switch” made his firearm into a machine gun.

In a Tuesday, Feb. 19 opinion, a three-judge panel cited a long history of recognition that this constitutional right is “not unlimited.” It agreed with “the overwhelming number” of federal district courts and federal appellate courts that “have uniformly concluded” that the Second Amendment’s plain text doesn’t protect machine guns because they’re “dangerous and unusual weapons.”

“McGee’s Second Amendment challenge thus fails,” Judge Nancy Vaidik, the opinion’s author, wrote.

The judicial panel also decided there was enough evidence to support McGee’s conviction.

It noted that McGee said he bought the Glock 22 in a private sale for $800 the day before his arrest, and that it came with the switch. He testified the seller told him “what it was.” When asked what one does, he responded that it “make(s) your gun shoot fast basically” but said he didn’t realize it would enable the firearm to shoot multiple bullets in a single pull of the trigger.”

The trial court opined that McGee still understood the switch would amplify the gun’s ability to fire beyond semi-automatic functions. Vaidik wrote that he’d asked her court to “reweigh the evidence, which we don’t do.”

“The evidence is sufficient to prove McGee knew the switch made his gun a machine gun,” Vaidik concluded.