Sen. Will Barfoot, R-Pike Road (left) speaks with Senate Majority Leader Steve Livingston, R-Scottsboro in the Alabama Senate on April 16, 2024 at the Alabama Statehouse in Montgomery, Alabama. Barfoot’s legislation cleared its first hurdle in the Alabama House. (Brian Lyman/Alabama Reflector)
An Alabama House committee Wednesday approved one of the few bills remaining in the 2025 session that aims to regulate firearms.
SB 116, sponsored by Sen. Will Barfoot, R-Pike Road, won unanimous approval from the House Public Safety and Homeland Security Committee. The bill makes it a state crime to possess devices that turn semi-automatic weapons into machine guns.
“This is the Glock switch bill that many of us have been working on for several years now,” said Rep. Phillip Ensler, D-Montgomery, a longtime advocate of Glock switch bans who brought the bill before the committee.
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Barfoot’s legislation makes it a Class C felony, punishable by up to 10 years in prison and $15,000 fine, to “convert a pistol into a machine gun.” Using a Glock switch is already a crime in federal statute, but the legislation would allow people to be prosecuted by the state without having to pass off the jurisdiction to the federal government.
“It simply mirrors federal law to create a state level offense for possession of a part, or combination of parts, that convert a pistol into a machine gun,” Ensler said.
Local officials urged lawmakers in the Legislature to pass gun control legislation to make it more difficult for people to convert firearms into fully automatic weapons. Police said Glock switches were used in a mass shooting in Birmingham in September that killed four people and injured 17.
Alabama has one of the highest rates of firearm deaths in the nation. According to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, Alabama’s firearm death rate in 2022 was 25.5 per 100,000 people in 2022, the fourth highest in the nation. Alabama had more overall firearm deaths than New York State, which has almost four times the population of Alabama.
Barfoot’s bill passed unanimously in the Senate last week.
The bill is one of two that are nearly identical bills that the Legislature is considering for the session. The other, HB 26, sponsored by Ensler, also makes it a state crime to use a Glock switch that allows a user to fire multiple rounds with one pull of the trigger.
Gov. Kay Ivey expressed her support for the measure at a news conference with law enforcement and mayors from the state’s urban areas.
Barfoot’s bill is part of a public safety package that includes legislation to improve recruitment and retention of law enforcement by offering them enhanced immunity protection and providing their dependents with scholarships for college.
Other bills establish tougher penalties for people who commit violent crimes, place greater restrictions on parole and those released from pretrial detention, as well as enhanced monitoring and oversight for juveniles in the criminal justice system.
SB 116 and HB 26 are also the bills in the public safety package that Democrats have largely supported, while expressing concerns with the others.
HB 26 was supposed to be considered in the same Public Safety and Homeland Security Committee last week, but Ensler said committee chair Rep. Allen Treadaway, R-Morris agreed to delay a vote on his legislation per his request at the Feb. 26 committee meeting. Ensler said they needed to “clean up” the language in the bill.
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