Justice Department Sues California to Block New Ban on Glock-style Pistols and Parts of Handgun Roster

The U.S. Justice Department sued California on Wednesday to block enforcement of the state’s newly effective restriction on Glock-style pistols and to halt key parts of California’s handgun roster system, marking an unusual moment in the long-running fight over the state’s gun laws: the federal government itself is now directly challenging them in court.

The civil case, filed July 1 in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, is United States of America v. State of California, et al., No. 8:26-cv-01697. The defendants are the State of California and California Attorney General Robert Bonta. The Justice Department is seeking declaratory and injunctive relief, asking the court to rule the challenged provisions unconstitutional and stop their enforcement.

At the center of the case is California Penal Code Section 27595(a), which took effect Wednesday and bars licensed firearms dealers from selling, offering for sale, transferring or delivering what the law defines as a “semiautomatic machinegun-convertible pistol.” The statute does not use the word “Glock,” but it is widely referred to as a “Glock ban” because its definition is understood to cover the Glock platform and similar striker-fired pistols. Under AB 1127, enacted in 2025 as Chapter 572, the category includes certain semiautomatic pistols with a cruciform trigger bar that can be readily converted into a machine gun by installing a “pistol converter” as a backplate replacement using hand or common household tools. The law contains some exemptions, including for certain law enforcement and private-party transfers.

The lawsuit also targets parts of California’s longtime handgun roster system, which limits retail sales to handgun models that appear on a state-approved list after meeting testing and feature requirements. The Justice Department argues that roster rules tied to features such as chamber-load indicators and magazine disconnect mechanisms unlawfully restrict access to handguns that are in common use.

In its complaint, the department says both the new sales ban and the roster restrictions violate the Second Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment. The filing frames the case under the Supreme Court’s test from New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, which asks whether a firearms restriction is consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of regulation. The complaint also references the high court’s recent decisions in United States v. Hemani and Wolford v. Lopez.

“The Second Amendment is a sacred right,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a Justice Department press release.

California’s roster has been the subject of years of litigation, including Boland v. Bonta, in which a federal judge in 2023 blocked some roster requirements before appeals and later legal changes. Private gun-rights groups had already challenged both the roster system and AB 1127. What is new here is that the United States, rather than private plaintiffs, filed its own constitutional challenge on the same day the new pistol restriction took effect. For gun dealers and buyers in California, that makes the dispute immediately consequential, because the law now bars retail sales of the newly defined pistols unless an exemption applies. In a second statement from the press release, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon said, “The Civil Rights Division will defend law-abiding citizens from states that seek to disarm them illegally.”

No public response from California officials was identified in the material reviewed for this article.