Tong Calls On Ruger To Recall The RXM Pistol
On the surface, the RXM is another sleek entry in the crowded American handgun market—lightweight, modular, customizable. But On the surface, the RXM is another sleek entry in the crowded American handgun market—lightweight, modular, customizable. But that customization is at the heart of what pushed Connecticut Attorney General William Tong to issue one of the sharpest public rebukes a state has ever delivered to a firearms manufacturer. In a letter to Southport-based Sturm, Ruger & Co., Tong accused the company of selling a semi-automatic pistol that can be turned into a fully automatic weapon with shocking ease. His message was blunt: Ruger knows it, criminals know it, and the state knows it. Fix it—or face the consequences.
The letter is backed by a new tool: the Connecticut Firearms Industry Responsibility Act. FIRA isn’t symbolic legislation; it gives the Attorney General the power to bring civil enforcement actions against gun makers who fail to implement “reasonable controls” over how their products are designed or distributed. That includes controls to prevent the foreseeable conversion of legal firearms into illegal ones. FIRA shifts responsibility away from the fantasy that individual criminal intent is the sole driving force behind gun violence and toward the manufacturers who design weapons easy to modify, market them aggressively, and profit from that design.
In this case, Tong argues that the RXM is a near-perfect candidate for illegal modification using machine gun conversion devices—MCDs—tiny aftermarket parts that transform a semi-automatic pistol into a weapon capable of emptying an entire magazine in seconds. These aren’t fringe curiosities. MCDs have become a steady presence in violent crime investigations across major Connecticut cities. In 2023, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives traced 31 MCDs in Connecticut alone. Hartford police recovered 53. That isn’t rare; it’s systemic.
The incidents tied to these devices are brutal and indiscriminate. A 2023 ambush in Hartford left two men dead on a porch. A year later, in the same city, a 20-year-old mother and her four-month-old infant were shot and killed with a pistol converted using an MCD. A Bridgeport kitchen became a battlefield when a man was hit in the back by stray rounds from a gang shooting. New Haven residents watched bullets tear through their buildings when a converted handgun opened fire. In one Hartford raid, police seized more than 6,300 bags of fentanyl, cocaine, and 16 firearms—three already converted to automatic fire. The pattern is unmistakable: the devices multiply the danger and minimize the time for victims to react.
The RXM’s problem isn’t hypothetical, and Tong knows it. In the letter, he points to videos demonstrating the speed at which Ruger pistols can be modified. The design itself is the issue. A firearm that can be altered in seconds using a mass-produced illegal device isn’t merely a gun—it’s an invitation to weaponized chaos. The Connecticut Unfair Trade Practices Act comes into play as well. By failing to prevent foreseeable misuse, Tong argues, Ruger may be engaging in deceptive or unsafe trade practices.
Other manufacturers are starting to respond to the threat. Glock, faced with lawsuits and conversion trends, has reportedly discontinued certain pistol models and altered designs to resist MCD attachments. Shadow Systems is expected to follow. Ruger, however, has done the opposite—highlighting how quickly and easily their pistols can be modified. They market flexibility as a feature, even if that feature leads directly to bloodshed. Tong views that as an abdication of responsibility.
The letter doesn’t ask politely. It demands that Ruger preserve documents related to conversions, violent crimes involving converted guns, marketing materials, financial information, and awareness of Glock’s actions. It seeks clarity on Ruger’s plans for the RXM moving forward. The message is surgical: the Attorney General isn’t just waving a press release—he is preparing for litigation.
There’s a moral dimension here that’s easy to overlook in the noise of politics and gun debates. Regulators are not arguing over abstract rights or theoretical misuse. They are confronting a specific design that, in the hands of criminals, becomes functionally identical to a military-grade weapon. No training, no CNC machines, no underground workshops—just a part the size of a coin, often delivered in the mail. That’s the kind of shortcut that turns impulsive anger into mass casualty in seconds.
Tong’s closing line is not meant for rhetoric. “I have grave concerns with Ruger’s design and marketing practices, and I will not hesitate to enforce our laws.” In the language of attorneys general, that is the equivalent of a final warning. Ruger can change the pistol or defend itself in a courtroom where the victims of automatic fire will be named one by one.
Whether gun manufacturers like it or not, the era of looking away is ending. If a semi-automatic pistol can be predictably transformed into a weapon of war, the state isn’t going to blame only the person who pulled the trigger. It’s going to look at the companies that profit from the design that made it possible.
The Data At A Glance
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) publishes annual “trace data” for every state, including Connecticut. The 2023 report shows 31 “machine-gun conversion devices” recovered and traced in Connecticut that year. ATF+1
The 2022 ATF trace report lists 14 “machineguns” (or converted firearms) recovered in Connecticut, though it does not specify how many resulted from aftermarket conversion devices. ATF
News releases and law-enforcement statements sometimes supply additional numbers. For example, the state’s Attorney General recently noted that one police department reported recovering 53 conversion devices in the context of investigations in a given year.
The ATF trace system (or any public dataset) only counts weapons or devices that are recovered and entered into trace. A modified gun used in a crime might never be reclaimed by police, never entered into the trace database, or the conversion device discarded.
Many conversion devices are inexpensive, small, easily shipped, and sometimes 3D-printed — meaning they can be widely distributed and used without ever appearing in official statistics. Department of Justice+1
Due to the federal legal restrictions on publicly releasing trace data (see the Tiahrt Amendment), granular data (who bought it, when, where it was modified) is not broadly available to researchers or public records. Wikipedia+1
Many shootings and crimes are never matched to a traceable firearm. Some guns recovered by police remain untraced or fall out of the trace system because of missing purchase records or uncooperative sellers.
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