A simple device could help curb accidental gun deaths, but most firearms don’t have it

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In 1998, then-New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial sued 15 gunmakers for failing to make magazine disconnects and other safety features standard in their firearms. “What makes the violence in our community so vile and so heinous is that it can be prevented,” Morial said at the time.

Under pressure from local governments and the Clinton administration, which was also threatening to sue, one company proved willing to negotiate. Smith & Wesson voluntarily agreed, among other product safety changes, to make magazine disconnects available as an option on all its pistols. The agreement sparked a ferocious backlash from gun-rights advocates and industry groups, and led to a boycott that nearly drove Smith & Wesson out of business. The company, which ultimately abandoned the agreement, did not respond to requests for comment.

Emboldened by the win, gunmakers lobbied Congress for special protection. In 2005, lawmakers passed a federal liability shield that limits lawsuits against gun manufacturers when weapons are used unlawfully.

“No other industry is forced to defend themselves when a violent criminal they do not know, have never met and cannot control, misuses a legal non-defective product,” Wayne LaPierre, then the executive vice president of the NRA, said in a statement, calling the law a “historic victory.”

For the Adames family, it was another blow. When they sued Beretta, the gunmaker, over Joshua’s death, an Illinois court threw out the case, citing the new law. Beretta did not respond to requests for comment.

By deterring lawsuits, the 2005 law also took the pressure off other gunmakers to add safety features, such as the magazine disconnect, consumer safety advocates said.

“There are pressure points to change the industry and get them to make the product safer,” said Jonathan Lowy, founder and president of Global Action on Gun Violence, who has represented dozens of shooting victims. The federal liability shield “took away a pressure point, and that stopped some of the progress that we were seeing.”

John Burnsworth III was 14 when he stood in a kitchen and held a gun for the first time. It was March 2016, and he was hanging out with his friend from middle school, J.R. Gustafson, in Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania, the small town where they both lived.

Burnsworth pressed a small button to remove the magazine from the weapon, just as he would with a BB gun, he said in an interview.

“Freeze, hold your hands up!” Burnsworth jokingly called out to his friend — not realizing there was still a live round in the chamber.

The bullet struck 13-year-old J.R. in the head, and he collapsed to the floor.

The police arrived before the paramedics. An hour later, according to police records, J.R. was pronounced dead.

Burnsworth still remembers exactly how it happened: the flash of the gun, the blood pouring from his friend’s right eye, the casing hitting the floor near the refrigerator. He recalls the terror of sitting in the police car outside.

“I thought I was going to do life in prison,” he said. “I was just a young kid afraid for his life.”

He ultimately pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter in juvenile court, spent months in juvenile detention, and then was sent to reform school. Both the gun owner and a babysitter who gave Burnsworth the weapon pleaded guilty and were sentenced to a maximum of 23 months in jail. They did not respond to requests for comment; through their lawyer, the Gustafson family declined to comment.

Like the Adames family, J.R.’s parents hold the person who fired the gun responsible but also believe the manufacturer played a role in their son’s death. The Gustafsons are suing Springfield Armory for failing to equip its XD-9 semiautomatic pistol with a magazine disconnect or a more prominent loaded chamber indicator, a tiny metal piece meant to show whether there is a cartridge in the chamber.

But unlike the Adames’ lawsuit, the Gustafsons’ hasn’t been thrown out — and could dramatically change the way such cases are handled.

Though an appeals court rejected the notion that lacking a safety device constitutes a gun defect, it agreed with the suit’s assertion that the federal liability shield infringes upon states’ rights — in this case, Pennsylvania’s law governing lawsuits.

Springfield Armory, in its defense, points to decades of court decisions upholding the liability shield.

“It’s a horrible tragedy for the family who lost a child. But the person who pulled the trigger is the one that is responsible — or the adults who left the gun not secured,” said Keane of the NSSF, which has supported Springfield Armory in the case. “That’s not the responsibility of the manufacturer.” Springfield Armory did not respond to requests for comment.

Gunmakers and industry advocates aren’t the only ones who see gun accidents as primarily a failure of personal responsibility.

Sharon Skipper, a retired teaching assistant in Florida, lost her 25-year-old son, Thomas Gage Skipper, in January.

Gage, as he was known, had been watching a football game with his friend Tyler Shepperd when he took out the Christmas gift he’d just received from his parents: a Glock 9-millimeter handgun. The men had been best friends since elementary school, and had enlisted and served in the U.S. Marine Corps together.

Gage removed the magazine from the gun before he handed it to his friend, an eyewitness told a local news outlet. Shepperd, reportedly thinking it was unloaded, jokingly put the gun to his own head before turning it on his friend and pulling the trigger. Gage was pronounced dead a short time later at a hospital.

In an interview seven months after her son’s death, Skipper said she considered the shooting an accident that stemmed from both men’s irresponsible behavior and she doesn’t believe Shepperd, who now faces a manslaughter charge, should face prison. Through his attorney, Shepperd declined to comment.

“They were grown men who were playing with a gun,” she said. “They weren’t children. They were trained in guns.”

A supporter of gun rights, she said in the interview that she didn’t know about magazine disconnects and had “never given a second thought” to pushing for safer guns.

“I can’t really go around talking about how there needs to be more gun safety for 25-year-old men who know better,” she said.

But in a second interview months later, Skipper said that after talking with NBC News she had come around to the idea that more guns should have magazine disconnects.

“I got to thinking if there was something that could prevent this from happening to someone else,” she said, “then yeah, that would be a great thing.”

Despite its early promise, the magazine disconnect has been pushed to the margins of the American handgun market.

Just two out of the 20 top-selling handguns in an NBC News analysis of retail data have it as a standard feature. And law enforcement agencies that previously required magazine disconnects in standard-issue weapons have largely moved to guns without them.

Though the legal protections for gunmakers have made it easier for them to eschew the feature, consumer preferences have also changed over time.

With gun owners more inclined to purchase a weapon for personal defense rather than hunting or recreational shooting, many are drawn to newer handguns like the Glock, an Austrian-designed weapon intentionally stripped of some older safety features to make it easier to fire.

Glocks feature a lighter trigger pull than earlier generations of handguns, and have neither a magazine disconnect nor a thumb safety, a lever that needs to be flicked off to fire the weapon. Instead, an internal mechanism prevents the trigger from being pulled accidentally if it is dropped, the company says on its website. The pistols also come with a loaded chamber indicator.

But that doesn’t prevent a Glock from firing without a magazine, as the owner’s manual makes clear: The gun “will fire if the trigger is pulled when there is a round in the chamber, even with the magazine removed.”

Glock did not respond to requests for comment.

“Having something that disables the gun — that is not what a lot of people are looking for,” said Preston Spicher, a gunsmith and gun dealer in Delaware. Magazine disconnects are “becoming much less common for sure.”

Consumers may have moved on, but the deadly accidents have persisted.

In one case reported by media in Knoxville, Tennessee, an 11-year-old shot and killed his 20-year-old brother in 2009 after the 20-year-old — a competitive sharpshooter and aspiring Olympian — let him handle the pistol, thinking it was unloaded.

In another case, a woman in Las Vegas took out her new pistol in 2020 while walking in a dark parking lot with her 3-year-old and her friends, according to a police report.

“There’s nothing in there,” she told her friends, removing the magazine while her toddler walked ahead of her. She then pulled the trigger, inadvertently killing her son.

And in May, a 69-year-old Florida woman found her pistol in a piece of luggage, without the magazine inserted. She passed it to her roommate, thinking it was unloaded, and accidentally shot and killed her. “One stupid mistake of not making sure the f---ing chamber was empty when you thought it was,” she told police.

Industry groups like the NSSF say the best way to prevent such tragedies is for gun owners to store their weapons properly and educate themselves about how they function. But safety advocates say that consumers misuse products all the time and manufacturers should help protect them.

Lowy, who is representing the Gustafson family, compared firearm safety devices to airbags and seatbelts — once highly contentious features in cars that are now mandatory.

“It’s much easier to redesign a product to make it safer, than redesign a person to make them safer,” he said.

Even among blue states, product safety requirements for firearms remain rare.

California is the only one that requires new handguns purchased in the state to have both a magazine disconnect and a loaded chamber indicator. It’s the strictest law of its kind in the country — and one the state is now battling to keep.

The state’s requirements have changed the national firearms market, at least somewhat: Two guns with magazine disconnects — labeled “California compliant” — were among the top sellers last year, according to NBC News's analysis, and both were made by Sig Sauer.

On its website, Sig Sauer says its California-compliant M18 pistol has “the same unprecedented accuracy, extreme reliability, and unmatched durability.” Smith & Wesson, Springfield Armory and Ruger have also introduced new California-compliant pistols. Sig Sauer declined to comment, and the other manufacturers did not respond.

A billboard with a handgun and words "P365 welcome to California."

But even as some gunmakers are trying to tap a new market, the California Rifle and Pistol Association, a Second Amendment advocacy group, is now pushing to overturn California’s law — with the support of the NSSF.

Some congressional Republicans have gone a step further, recently introducing bills in both the U.S. House and Senate that would prohibit any state from mandating such gun safety features, calling the requirements “unnecessary and overly stringent.”

Reno May, a 30-year-old engineer and a plaintiff in the suit against the California law, is among many gun enthusiasts who believe the state’s restrictions violate the Second Amendment. On YouTube, where he has more than a quarter-million followers, he has voiced frustration that many popular handguns, such as newer-model Glocks, are illegal to buy new at retail stores in California.

In his own shooting practice, May said, he’s had magazines jostled out of place and worries that a gun with a magazine disconnect could leave him in a dangerous situation without a bullet at the ready.

“For firearms intended for personal protection, home defense and that kind of thing, it is a huge problem because it introduces a failure point, and it’s a failure point that can’t be remedied quickly,” he said.

A federal court is expected to issue a decision in the coming months. If California’s law stands, it could prompt other states to expand similar handgun safety requirements — unless Congress acts to stop states from passing such laws altogether.

On the other side of the country, in Pennsylvania, the Gustafsons await a decision on their own lawsuit challenging the industry’s liability shield. If they prevail, other families of shooting victims could potentially sue and help compel safety changes.

But a defeat could send their case straight to a Supreme Court that’s been generally supportive of gun rights.