Prosecutors say gag order is needed to keep Trump from inviting ‘violent act’ on law enforcement

(NEW YORK) — Prosecutors on Monday told the judge overseeing Donald Trump’s federal classified documents case that a limited gag order was necessary to prevent the former president from inviting a “violent act” on the law enforcement agents involved in the case.

As assistant special counsel David Harbach attempted to demonstrate that Trump was aware of the “predictable response of some of his supporters” when he made false statements about FBI’s August 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago — including a campaign statement that President Joe Biden was “locked & loaded ready to take me out & put my family in danger” — Judge Aileen Cannon challenged the prosecutor to produce evidence and justify the constitutionality of the proposed gag order.

“The most important thing is it talks about an event that is central to this case in utterly misleading terms,” Harbach argued. “The government is at a loss to conceive any possible reason Mr. Trump would say something so false … and inviting of retributive violence.”

“Where on the attachments do you see a call for violence?” Cannon responded after criticizing prosecutors for not producing ample evidence of a pattern of conduct from Trump’s other criminal and civil cases.

Trump pleaded not guilty last year to 40 criminal counts related to his handling of classified materials after leaving the White House, after prosecutors said he repeatedly refused to return hundreds of documents containing classified information and took steps to thwart the government’s efforts to get the documents back. Trump has denied all charges and denounced the probe as a political witch hunt.

Cannon pressed Harbarch on the argument that a modification of Trump’s release conditions — rather than a standalone gag order like in the former president’s federal election interference case — would avoid issues related to the First Amendment.

“Do conditions of release still need to comport with the Constitution?” Cannon asked. “The First Amendment is in the Constitution.”

Cannon also expressed skepticism about the impact of Trump’s statements on the law enforcement officers, highlighting that any public filings included redactions for the names and identifying information of law enforcement agents. Harbach responded by arguing that some agents were previously doxed, and described Trump’s recent statements as “beyond irresponsible.”

Harbach argued that there is “ample danger between now and trial … that some sort of violent act will occur” because of Trump’s conduct, and said that Cannon needed to impose the restrictions on Trump’s speech to protect the integrity of the proceedings. When Cannon suggested waiting until trial to impose any restrictions on speech, Harbach argued immediate action was necessary.

“That die has already been cast … by defendant’s conduct,” Harbach said.

The first hour of the hearing grew contentious at times, as Cannon pushed Harbach for evidence and details.

“I don’t appreciate your tone,” Cannon told Harbach at one point. “I expect decorum in this courtroom at all times.”

“I didn’t mean to be unprofessional. I apologize for that,” Harbach later said

The request for a gag order by the special counsel follows a month of escalating rhetoric from Trump about federal agents’ use-of-force policy during their August 2022 search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate for classified documents.

In a filing last month, Smith argued that Trump’s statements that law enforcement officers were “complicit in a plot to assassinate him” were intentionally false and misleading, and “put a target on the backs of the FBI agents.”

Trump’s defense attorneys responded to the request by claiming that prosecutors have failed to demonstrate that Trump’s statements resulted in any material threats or harassment against law enforcement.

Echoing the former president’s defense against the limited gag order in his New York criminal hush money case, Trump’s lawyers wrote that the proposed gag order — which they describe as a “shocking display of overreach and disregard for the Constitution” — amounts to political interference by limiting Trump’s statements ahead of this week’s presidential debate and the Republican National Convention in July.

“[T]he motion is a naked effort to impose totalitarian censorship of core political speech, under threat of incarceration, in a clear attempt to silence President Trump’s arguments to the American people about the outrageous nature of this investigation and prosecution,” defense lawyers said in a June filing.

The gag order hearing, being conducted by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, follows a continuation this morning of Friday’s hearing in which defense attorneys are seeking to have the documents case dismissed on the grounds that Smith was unlawfully appointed as special counsel.

‘False and extremely dangerous’

Trump’s recent public statements related to the Mar-a-Lago search, during which agents found more than 100 documents with classified markings, have emphasized the use-of-force policy in place during the raid, which Trump has repeatedly associated with “Biden’s DOJ.”

Prosecutors argue that law enforcement employed the Department of Justice’s standard use-of-force policy, which allows the use of force “when the officer has a reasonable belief that the subject of such force poses an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to the officer or to another person.”

In filings, Smith also emphasized that the search was scheduled in the off-season when Trump and his family were not present at Mar-a-Lago and that it was conducted with coordination with Secret Service and Mar-a-Lago staff — and that Trump’s lawyer was notified before the search was executed.

In a rare public rebuke, the FBI issued a statement last month to confirm that law enforcement used standard protocols related to use of deadly force during the raid, adding that, “No one ordered additional steps to be taken and there was no departure from the norm in this matter.”

Attorney General Merrick Garland also described accusations that the DOJ authorized Trump’s assassination as “false and extremely dangerous” and added that the same policy was in place during the search of President Biden’s home during the investigation into his retention of classified documents.

Threats against law enforcement

Prosecutors have emphasized that the proposed gag order against Trump would be narrowly limited — solely prohibiting Trump from falsely speaking about “FBI agents intending to murder him and his family” — in order to protect the safety of law enforcement officials.

To illustrate the threat against law enforcement officials, prosecutors claimed that Trump’s rhetoric encouraged a supporter to make threats to an FBI agent associated with the Hunter Biden case, including threatening that supporters would “hunt you down” and “slaughter you” if Trump does not win the 2024 election.

Prosecutors also argued that a Trump supporter attacked an FBI field office in Cincinnati with an AR-15 and a nail gun in August 2022 after the raid on Mar-a-Lago — an attack which prosecutors say was partially inflamed by Trump’s comments on social media after the raid.

Defense lawyers wrote that Trump has engaged in his “constitutionally protected campaign speech” and that prosecutors have failed to prove that Trump’s statements have directly resulted in threats or harassment.

In addition to highlighting two examples of threats or violence, prosecutors broadly argued that Trump’s inflammatory language about the raid has created a “combustible atmosphere” that poses an immediate risk to law enforcement.

“No court would tolerate another defendant deliberately creating such immediate risks to the safety of law enforcement, and this Court should not wait for a tragic event before taking action in this case,” prosecutors said in a filing last week.

Trump’s other gag orders

Trump has generally been unsuccessful in challenging the gag orders imposed in his other criminal and civil cases, occasionally securing stays of the orders but failing to overturn the orders as unconstitutional.

New York’s highest court declined to take up Trump’s challenge to the gag order in Trump’s civil fraud case, which prohibited Trump from making comments about judicial staff.

Last week, the same court declined to immediately consider Trump’s challenge to the gag order in his New York hush money case — which prohibits Trump from making statements about jurors, witnesses, and others involved in the case — after determining that “no substantial constitutional question is directly involved” in Trump’s challenge. A mid-level appeals court last month found that the gag order “properly weighed petitioner’s First Amendment Rights against the court’s historical commitment to ensuring the fair administration of justice.”

Trump also unsuccessfully challenged the gag order in his federal election interference case that prohibited from making statements about prosecutors other than Smith, witnesses, and courthouse staff.

“Given the record in this case, the court had a duty to act proactively to prevent the creation of an atmosphere of fear or intimidation aimed at preventing trial participants and staff from performing their functions within the trial process,” a panel of Court of Appeals judges in Washington, D.C., wrote in an order last year upholding the gag order.

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Frequency and magnitude of extreme wildfires have doubled in last 20 years, new study finds

(NEW YORK) — More research is emerging to show how much more severe wildfires have become in recent decades.

The frequency and magnitude of extreme wildfires — the ones that cause the most damage to ecosystems, society and the climate — appear to have doubled over the past 20 years, according to a study published Monday in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

Researchers at the University of Tasmania in Australia used satellite data from 2003 to 2023 to identify active hot spots and calculate the summed intensity of a fire event.

“Extreme wildfires are on the rise,” Calum Cunningham, a professor of pyrogeography at the University of Tasmania and author of the study, told ABC News via email. “Surprisingly, this finding hadn’t been shown until now, owing to the relatively short length of global satellite datasets.”

The team found the increase in extreme events was mostly driven by more intense fires in temperate coniferous forests — which are forests made up of trees that have needle-like leaves — and boreal forests, which are a subset of coniferous forests, including in North America and Russia. This is likely related to the increased aridity in these forests over recent years due to climate change, researchers said.

In boreal forests, where the increases were the largest, large amounts of carbon have been released by extreme fires, threatening to create a feedback effect that further magnifies warming, Cunningham said.

The Nearctic and Australasia/Oceania regions were most affected by extreme events, researchers said. In addition, the six most extreme years for these escalated wildfires have occurred since 2017, the study found.

The rise in extreme wildfires “certainly [carry] the fingerprints of climate change,” Cunningham said, adding that he was shocked by the magnitude of the increases.

“Many of these extreme events occurred in years with record heat and dryness, when fuels become extremely dry, allowing them to burn at very high intensities,” he said.

A warming climate will be even more conducive to extreme wildfire events, highlighting the need for emergency planners to adapt and prepare for more devastating infernos in the future. Exponential increases in extreme fire activity will undoubtedly increase should global temperatures continue to rise, Cunningham said.

“If the atmosphere continues to warm and dry, as expected, then it’s likely fire [behavior] in some ecosystems will continue to worsen,” Cunningham said.

The new study adds to the growing body of research with similar findings.

In the U.S., the frequency of extreme fire risk has grown 20 times over recent decades, according to a report published by Deep Sky, a Canadian carbon removal project developer, earlier this month.

Levels of widespread extreme fire risk that used to occur once every 100 years are now expected to occur every five years, the report found.

The regions found to be experiencing the most increases in extreme fire weather are central Colorado and northern New Mexico, according to the report. Central California is facing staggering increases in extreme fire weather.

Last year, Canada experienced a record-breaking fire season, and wildfires have already begun to sweep through the West.

The path forward must include significant action to slow and reverse climate change as well as local-scale land management to implement strategies to reduce fire intensity, Cunningham said, adding that better evacuation protocols and hardening of existing buildings to make them more resilient to fires will all be necessary in the future.

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Biden-Trump debate’s a rematch, but will muted mics and other new rules make a difference?

(NEW YORK) — President Joe Biden and Donald Trump return to the debate stage Thursday for the first time in four years — but this time under a significant new set of rules.

ABC News spoke with experts on how that could help — or hurt — each candidate — and what difference it could make for American voters watching the showdown.

The two rivals will face off in a studio at CNN’s Atlanta headquarters in prime time on Thursday for the first presidential debate of the 2024 election.

While it won’t be the first time Biden and Trump have gone toe-to-toe on policy (the two sparred twice in 2020) it will look a lot different from debates past because of the guidelines established by CNN and agreed upon by both campaigns.

The candidates’ microphones will be muted unless it’s their turn to speak. There will be no live studio audience to react to zingers or other “moments” during the 90-minutes, a first since the 1960 debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon.

There will be two commercial breaks, though Trump and Biden won’t be able to consult with their teams during them. The candidates are not allowed any props or prewritten notes, and will only be given a pen, paper and water.

A CNN coin flip won by Biden means he will stand at a lectern on the the right-side of the stage while Trump will be on the left, though Trump will get the last word by delivering his closing statement second.

Overall, experts told ABC News the rules could make for a more substantive, issue-focused debate rather than the raucous personal attacks and talking over each other that defined the first Biden-Trump matchup.

Still, they said there is more than enough room for the buzzy theatrics that have defined modern presidential debates.

“Despite the fact that these rules are pretty strict, we’re going to see some fireworks,” Brandon Rottinghaus, a professor of political science at the University of Houston, told ABC News.

“How will Joe Biden handle a kind of off-the-leash Donald Trump? How bold will Trump be?” Rottinghaus said. “This is really a clash of personalities, and as much as it was in 2020, I think you’ll see those factors as important in this debate as any other.”

Many of the debate conditions were set out by the Biden campaign when it challenged Trump last month to participate in two debates before November. The campaign posted a video baiting Trump to agree, which he and his team did almost immediately.

Several experts said they believe the format will in fact benefit Biden.

“I can’t think of a better scenario for Joe Biden,” said presidential historian Douglas Brinkley. “Whereas, Trump plays better in front of a crowd. A shut-off microphone for Trump with no audience seems to me a demotion from his grandiose campaign style.”

Mitchell McKinney, director of the University of Missouri’s Political Communication Institute, agreed that the various rules “really do play into Biden’s advantage.”

Trump’s bombastic style made for memorable moments in the 2016 cycle when he lashed out at his Republican primary opponents and later lurked behind Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

The first 2020 debate between Biden and Trump spiraled into near-constant interruptions and candidates speaking at the same time. At one point, Biden turned to Trump and told him, “Will you shut up, man?”

Some microphone muting was implemented for their second and final debate, which turned out to be more civil.

There are still questions about how CNN’s rule about microphone muting will work in practice on Thursday.

Biden and Trump will be given two minutes to answer questions posed by moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, followed by one-minute each to respond and rebut. A red light will warn each candidate he has five seconds remaining. When their allotted time is up, the light will turn solid red. It’s unclear if a candidate’s microphone will be cut off if he’s still speaking.

It also remains to be seen whether the speaking candidate’s microphone will pick up efforts to interrupt by his opponent — even though that candidate’s mic would be muted.

“The attempt to control that, I think, is a good thing,” Alan Schroeder, a professor emeritus of journalism at Northeastern University who has written several books about presidential debates, told ABC News. “I don’t know in practice how that will work.”

Some experts said the more subdued setting could be good for Trump in that it could rein in some of his more inflammatory conduct — which was not popular with viewers in 2020.

“There’s a risk that no audience could make Trump look and act more like a normal candidate,” said Rottinghaus. “If there was an audience, he would definitely ham it up and would play to them, which oftentimes leads him astray.”

The CNN debate will be the first of two debates this cycle, and marks the earliest debate in U.S. history. The second will be hosted by ABC News on Sept. 10.

“I think it’s going to be an historic and epic debate,” Brinkley said. “The fact is that with Trump and Biden, it’s the first time ever that we’ve had two people that have been president going at each other.”

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‘A prayer answered’: American detained for ammo in Turks and Caicos says of flight home

(NEW YORK) — As Ryan Watson, an American tourist who had been charged with bringing ammunition to Turks and Caicos in April, boarded a plane after his release, he had only one thought on his mind.

“To know that I was on a plane headed home, that’s a prayer answered,” Watson said in an interview that aired Monday on ABC News’ Good Morning America.

A judge last week fined Watson $2,000 for four bullets discovered in his luggage as he landed in the country in April, with the judge citing “exceptional circumstances” to avoid a potential minimum sentence of 12 years in prison. Watson would face 13 weeks imprisonment if he commits a crime in Turks and Caicos in the next nine months, the court said.

Watson, a father of two from Oklahoma, was arrested on April 12 while returning with his wife from a trip to Turks and Caicos to celebrate several friends’ 40th birthdays.

There is no constitutional right to carry firearms in Turks and Caicos. The country prohibits anyone from keeping, carrying, discharging or using an unlicensed firearm or ammunition.

Watson speaking on GMA recounted his experience in Turks and Caicos, saying he would like awake at night, worrying about what might happen if he were put in prison.

“Like if things did go sideways, what my kids would look like when I did come out,” he said. “As a parent, that’s just not an easy thing to think about.”

He said his kids had been the first thing he thought of as he learned that he was facing more than a decade in prison if found guilty.

“Our kids first I mean, first and foremost, I initially and instantly think our kids aren’t going to have parents,” he said on GMA. “That was really hard to imagine.”

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Active shooting incidents in the US declined by 4% from 2022 to 2023: FBI

(NEW YORK) — Active shooter incidents in the U.S. declined by 4% from 2022 to 2023, according to new statistics released by the FBI on Monday.

In 2023, the FBI designated 48 shootings as “active shooter incidents,” compared to 50 in 2022, according to the FBI’s 2023 Active Shooter Report.

Last year also saw the number of those killed decrease from 313 in 2022 to 244 in 2023, according to the report. The shooters were largely male.

The FBI says from 2019 to 2023, there were 229 active incidents, which is an 89% increase from the previous five-year period.

The deadliest active shooting incident in 2023 was the Lewiston, Maine shooting, which left 18 dead in October 2023 after a gunman opened fire in two locations in the small Maine town.

California had the largest number of active shooting incidents with eight. The locations of the shootings were open spaces, places of businesses and education centers.

Law enforcement engaged in 12 incidents that resulted in the deaths of 13 law enforcement officials, the report said. In 58% of the incidents, the shooter had no connection to the location of the shooting, per the FBI.

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Blistering heat dome scorches cities coast-to-coast as it enters second week

(NEW YORK) — Cities across the heartland are expected on Monday to see temperatures close to 100 degrees, with the heat index in some locations reaching to 110.

More than 60 million Americans across 21 states are under heat alerts coast to coast.

The heat index is expected to soar between 100 and 110 in locations from South Dakota to Florida.

Temperatures this week will remain very hot over the middle and southern parts of the US, but not necessarily record-breaking.

The greatest heat risk this week will be in Oklahoma, where each day Oklahoma City is under extreme heat risk — a four out of four on the heat risk scale — due to their combined hot afternoons and very warm nights which won’t provide relief.

In South Dakota and Iowa, where there has been historic and catastrophic flooding, temperatures on Monday are expected to reach the 90s. Heat indices could reach up to 110 and a heat advisory has been issued.

Omaha, Nebraska; Kansas City, Missouri; Oklahoma City and Little Rock, Arkansas, are all forecast to reach around 100 degrees on Monday with heat indices up to between 105 and 110.

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Where do legal challenges to abortion bans stand?

(NEW YORK) — In the two years since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, litigation has been critical in restoring access to abortion care — but it has not been a successful path in all states.

At least 14 states have ceased nearly all abortion services and seven other states have restrictions in effect, limiting access to the procedure.

State courts around the country have been the site of battles over how to regulate abortion care — with abortion rights advocates making a number of different arguments in their efforts to restore access to care.

“Litigation also serves a very powerful role in educating the public. We’ve seen a lot of what the harms and the dangers of abortion bans are,” Jennifer Dalven, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union Reproductive Freedom Project, told ABC News.

One kind of challenge that has been made in lawsuits challenging abortion bans has been asserting a right to abortion under state constitutions. There have been five court rulings on cases of this nature since Roe was overturned.

In South Carolina, the court found that abortion is not protected under the privacy clause of the state’s constitution.

In Idaho, the court found that abortion is not protected under an unalienable rights clause in the state constitution.

In Indiana, a court found that the state constitution does not have protections for abortion but said there are protections for the life and health of the mother.

In Oklahoma, the court found that the state constitution protects abortion to preserve the life of the mother, but the courts did not speak on whether the right to abortion could be broader — an issue that could still be addressed in the future.

In North Dakota, the court found that the state constitution protects abortions to preserve the life and health of a pregnant woman — but the court did not speak to whether the right to abortion could be extended further.

Rulings are also pending in other states — including Utah, Wyoming, Wisconsin and New Mexico. Litigation has blocked bans in Utah and Wyoming while litigation continues.

“The courts there have been asked to decide whether their constitutions protect the right to abortion, and they have not issued final decisions, yet,” Amy Myrick, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights, told ABC News.

Colorado, Florida, Maryland and South Dakota will have an abortion question on the ballot in November.

“At the ballot every single time, voters have been asked whether they want to protect access to abortion, they have said yes, and that includes in conservative and battleground states, like Ohio, Michigan and Kansas,” said Dalven.

Active lawsuits in North Dakota, Idaho, Tennessee and Indiana are asking courts for protections for abortions to preserve the life and health of mothers in medical emergencies.

“If those cases go well, it’s not that the state court is going to declare a right to abortion, instead — hopefully — they will clarify the law and increase access for people who are facing horrible medical crises,” Myrick said.

The U.S. Supreme Court has not yet issued a ruling in a pivotal lawsuit brought by the Biden Administration against Idaho over its strict abortion ban. The lawsuit claims that the ban violates the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) — a federal law that mandates that facilities receiving medicare funds must provide patients with “stabilizing” emergency health care.

“The most extreme outcome would be they hold that EMTALA doesn’t preempt state law broadly,” Myrick said.

“Every state that has an abortion ban has a lot of nuance and specificities about what’s in that ban, so [the ruling] will still be pretty fact-specific as to how each ban interacts with EMTALA — even if they found that state law was going to prevail,” Myrick added.

The high court already issued a decision on abortion medication, preserving nationwide access.

A lawsuit brought in Texas by 22 women suing the state over its multiple abortion bans, saying their lives were put in danger due to the bans was dealt a blow last month, when the state Supreme Court issued a decision pushing back against the claims made by women in the lawsuit.

The court argued, in part, that a lower court judge overstepped when she permitted abortions “for any ‘unsafe’ pregnancy,” according to the ruling.

“All pregnancies carry risks. The law limits permitted abortions to address life-threatening conditions ‘aggravated by, caused by, or arising from a pregnancy.’ While merely being pregnant may increase a mother’s risk of death or injury, pregnancy itself is not a ‘life-threatening physical condition’ under the law,” the court wrote.

“In differentiating ordinary risks attendant to pregnancy — those that can be treated short of an abortion — from conditions for which the law permits an abortion, the Legislature drew the line at ‘life-threatening physical condition.’ Because the trial court’s order opens the door to permit abortion to address any pregnancy risk, it is not a faithful interpretation of the law. A trial court has no discretion to incorrectly interpret the law in ordering a temporary injunction,” the court wrote.

Similar lawsuits brought by women over state abortion bans are pending in Idaho and Tennessee.

Kate Cox, a Texas woman who had asked the court for an emergency abortion to preserve her fertility, was denied abortion care for a pregnancy with a severe anomaly. Cox left the state to access abortion care.

Litigation in Kansas, Montana, Alaska, Michigan and Ohio is also fighting state abortion restrictions.

Dalven argues that abortion is an issue that needs to be resolved at the national level — with legislation, warning that if Donald Trump is elected into office, Republicans could use a 150-year-old law, called the Comstock Act, to ban abortion nationwide.

The law, which remains on the books, is an anti-obscenity law that, among other things, “makes it a crime to mail anything that’s ‘indecent, filthy, or vile’ or ‘intended for producing abortion,'” according to the ACLU.

The law could prevent abortion pills, medical instruments, ultrasound machines and other devices used in abortions from being sent by mail.

“His allies have promised to use a law from the 1800s to ban abortion nationwide,” Dalven said.

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‘I feel terrified’: Inventor of ‘Glock switch’ technology says he regrets creation

(NEW YORK) — When Jorge Leon invented at the age of 22 a small device that turns Glock pistols into fully automatic weapons, he said he intended it to be used for the good of society, to help the military and police in his native country of Venezuela.

But 26 years after being granted a U.S. patent for his “fire selector system,” U.S. law enforcement officials say his creation is flooding the streets of American cities with these outlawed machine guns and many have fallen into the hands of teenage criminals indiscriminately using them to wreak havoc on communities both large and small.

“After seeing and reading about all those deaths, those unnecessary deaths of youngsters, of police officers, of broken families, I don’t feel nice about that, I don’t feel good,” Leon, now 59, told ABC News. “I regret filing that patent because … my technology, which was very well protected at that time, is free for everybody.”

Leon said that soon after his U.S. patent expired in 2016, he no longer had legal recourse to stop unscrupulous developers from taking his intricate drawings and detailed explanations of how his invention works and manufacturing them for the black markets as so-called “auto sears” or “Glock switches” and illegally selling them on the internet for as little as $20.

“I felt very bad, sure. I felt very bad because I created my invention always looking for the future to help, to help the military, to help SWAT teams, to help like a tool,” said Leon, who now invents surgical equipment.

With the official start of summer here, police across the nation are bracing for what one law enforcement expert described to ABC News as the “next level” of gun violence. Law enforcement officials attribute a dramatic increase in the number of shots fired at crime scenes across the country to a lethal combination: multiple people drawing guns in crowded settings to settle disputes and a growing number of criminals using Glock firearms converted to machine guns with extended magazines.

In numerous shootings that have erupted this year, police said Glock pistols fitted with auto sears devices have dramatically increased the number of people killed or injured.

“What that’s telling us is that criminals who already are owning these handguns illegally are now taking it to the next level, and they are trying to maximize the destruction that they cause,” Jillian Snider, a former New York City police officer and an adjunct lecturer at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told ABC News.

In a recent interview with ABC News, Martin Collins Jr. said his 19-year-old son, Marsiah, was one of four people killed in a shooting that erupted at a Sweet 16 birthday party in Dadeville, Alabama, on April 15, 2023, in which, according to police, a Glock with an auto sear device was used. Another 32 people were wounded in the shooting and police collected 89 shell casings at the scene.

“It’s the worst invention in American history, in world history,” Collins called Leon’s device.

In the year since his son was killed, Collins, a Marine who served in Iraq, said he has spoken with local, state, and federal officials, telling them converted guns are not just killing victims, but devastating entire families.

“I tell every congressman, congresswoman, senator, state representative, local representative until you walk into a funeral home and see your 19-year-old son wrapped in plastic from the morgue and knowing what they did to him, you will never understand,” Collins said. “But I live with that every day because I went to see what they did to my son.”

In numerous shootings that have erupted this year, police said Glock pistols fitted with auto sears devices have dramatically increased the number of people killed or injured.

“They’re falling into the wrong hands. They are falling into the hands of teenagers and young adults. Folks are making just horrible decisions, impulsive decisions with the inability to resolve relatively basic conflict,” Detroit Police Chief James White told ABC News after four people were wounded, two critically, in a June 1 shooting in which 93 shell casings and eight guns, including a Glock with an auto sear, were recovered at the crime scene.

On March 6, eight teenagers, ages 15 to 17, were shot at a Philadelphia SEPTA bus stop by three masked gunmen who opened fire, spraying more than 30 shots in a matter of seconds, according to the Philadelphia Police Department. One of the guns seized in the crime was a Glock 22 pistol with an auto sear and laser sights. Five suspects, ranging in age from 15 to 19, were arrested and charged in the shooting, according to police.

On April 20, two people were killed and seven were injured at a block party in Memphis, Tennessee, when multiple people pulled out guns, including at least one fitted with an auto sear, and opened fire, according to the Memphis Police Department.

On April 12, 2024, Memphis police officer Joseph McKinney was killed and two other officers were wounded in a firefight that erupted as they responded to a suspicious vehicle call. They were confronted by two teenagers in the car, one armed with a handgun modified with an auto sear, according to the Memphis Police Department. An 18-year-old suspect was killed and a 17-year-old accomplice was wounded, police said.

On April 11, 2024, a 14-year-old boy was arrested in Columbia, South Carolina, and charged with murder in the fatal shooting of a 16-year-old boy and his father during a robbery, according to the Columbia Police Department. Police said the young suspect, who shot himself in the leg during the incident, was armed with a pistol illegally modified with an auto sear.

According to a 2023 report by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, 5,454 guns with machine-gun conversion devices were taken into ATF custody at crime scenes between 2017 and 2021, a 570% increase in the five-year period.

‘It’s going to get worse’

Asked about teenagers as young as 14 wielding guns equipped with an auto sear that can now be produced with 3-D printers, Leon responded, “I feel terrified.”

He said there are tens of millions of Glock pistols in the United States, most owned by responsible gun owners, but each capable of being converted into machine guns in as little as 15 seconds.

“It’s going to get worse. Just imagine the quantity of Glock pistols that are out on the streets,” he said of one of the most popular guns sold in the United States.

From slingshots to guns

Leon said he has had a passion for inventing things since he was a child, recalling that at age 12 he built the most powerful slingshot on his block.

“At 15, I designed my own car, and I built it. At the same age, I made a working microscope for biology class,” he said. “Guns were something that caught my attention because of the precision required and the complexity of the components in order to function.”

Leon said that he was 16 years old and working at a gun repair shop in Venezuela when Glock first introduced its firearms in the county in the mid-1980s. He said that after studying the Glock pistol closely, he discovered it did not have an external manual safety but did come with a trigger safety mechanism that prevents the guns from firing if accidentally dropped or bumped from the side.

He said he became obsessed with inventing an external manual safety for the Glock. But as he set out to build one, he discovered what he described as “a gate left open” by inventor Gaston Glock: Manipulating the gun’s trigger bar could convert the weapon from a semiautomatic, which requires a pull of the trigger for each shot fired, into a fully automatic weapon in which numerous rounds can be fired by depressing the trigger and holding it.

“I discover some kind of a design flaw in that particular gun,” Leon said.

Leon said that when Gaston Glock, an Austrian engineer, got word of his full-automatic conversion device, he asked to meet him while on a visit to Venezuela in the late 1980s.

“We sat and had breakfast at his hotel for him to see my invention. So that happened. And he suggested to me to leave that as a curiosity,” said Leon.

Georgia-based Glock Inc. does not make the auto sears and has no affiliation with those who manufacture them. The company did not respond to requests from ABC News for comment.

Leon said he continued working on his design in private, creating six different prototypes. The last one, he said was “very light, very reliable, with very few moving parts.”

He said he did nothing further with his invention until a friend working in the intellectual property field asked him in 1996 if he was interested in getting the device patented in the United States.

“Together, with intellectual property lawyers in New York, I filed that document and I introduced that patent in 1996,” Leon said. “Two years later, I got the patent pending certificate.”

Leon said he was “surprised” that his patent was approved, given the laws against possessing machine guns in the United States.

In 1934, the National Firearms Act was signed into law by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, outlawing machine guns that were being used by gangsters against police and rivals, including the 1929 Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago when famed mob boss Al Capone’s crew used machine guns, or Tommy Guns, to kill seven members of a rival gang. The law defined the term machine gun to include “parts designed and intended for use in converting a weapon into a machine gun.”

In 1994, five years before Leon’s invention was patented, President Bill Clinton signed the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, which outlawed military-style semiautomatic weapons and high-capacity magazines that hold more than 10 bullets. The ban expired in 2004.

“My technology was clearly defined in that patent, every dimension, every detail, the physics, the properties, how it works … so in this way, there was very explicit information there in the patent. Anyone reading the patent could understand perfectly how it works,” Leon said.

Under the rules of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the agency must grant a patent when an application meets the statutory requirements under which a patent may be obtained, including being novel, non-obvious, adequately described and enabled, and falls within one of the classes of subject matter that are eligible for patent protection.

There is no statutory authority for the U.S. Patent and Trade Office to determine whether the invention is beneficial to society and the potential uses of an invention can significantly change as technology continues to develop, according to the agency.

“Ownership of a patent does not grant an individual or entity the right to produce the invention, but rather the right to exclude others from making it, using, offering for sale, selling, or importing into the United States the invention claimed in the patent,” according to the agency’s website.

“I feel like I tried to do the correct thing to keep my technology in safe hands during all that time. But what happened was all the information that was available for everyone who wanted to print out the patent and to make very light, reverse technology and manufacture an illegal Glock switch,” Leon said.

Leon said he offered the device to police departments and the military at what he described as a low price. He estimates he has made little money on the device and ceased manufacturing it several years ago.

‘No control’

After his patent expired, Leon said his invention “escaped from my hands.”

“That, for me, [was] like a heart-crushing feeling because you care about something, then it’s not any more yours. It’s something hard because there was no control on that technology anymore,” Leon said.

Leon said he felt “frustrated” and helpless as he saw his invention being co-opted and used by criminals.

“We have to find a way how to control this unleashed bad thing that occurred, joined together with the bad design of a Glock pistol and with the stolen technology of the U.S. patent that belonged to me,” he said.

According to a lawsuit filed in March against Glock Inc. by the city of Chicago, the Chicago Police Department recovered more than 1,000 Glock guns that had been modified into automatic weapons between January 2021 and Dec. 31, 2023.

“These terrifying weapons have caused death and destruction throughout Chicago: they have been recovered in connection with homicides, aggravated assaults, batteries, kidnappings, burglaries, home invasions, carjackings, and attempted robberies,” according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit alleges that Glock Inc. has known about the dangerous workaround for decades, and mentions in a footnote Gaston Glock’s meeting “with the inventor of the ‘Fire Selector System'” in the late 1980s.

“Glock’s willful decision to not take any meaningful action to address this problem in its sales to civilians — despite its awareness — is immoral, unethical, oppressive, unscrupulous and unreasonable,” the lawsuit states. “This is especially so given that the aspect of Glocks that allows the pistols to be so easily modified can also be easily changed to prevent that modification.”

The lawsuit notes that other guns produced by manufacturers like Smith & Wesson or Sig Sauer cannot be easily converted and would “require time-consuming and difficult engineering well beyond the capability of most civilians.”

On June 10, Glock Inc. responded to the lawsuit by filing a motion in the U.S. District Court for the Nothern District of Illinois asking that the litigation be dismissed. In its motion, the company argued that the city of Chicago’s complaint “asserts claims that are barred by the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act [PLCAA].”

“The City’s attempt to hold Glock, Inc. liable for the actions of criminal third parties is precisely the kind of action that prompted Congress in 2005 to enact the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act,” according to Glock’s motion. “With limited exceptions, the PLCAA bars actions that seek to hold firearm manufacturers like Glock, Inc. liable for alleged injuries ‘resulting from the criminal or unlawful misuse’ of a firearm by a third party.”

In its lawsuit, the city alleged Glock is violating the Illinois Consumer Fraud and Deceptive Business Practices Act (ICFA), but Glock countered that the “ICFA is unconstitutional because it interferes with interstate commerce, is unconstitutionally vague, and violates the Second Amendment.”

“Just as Chicago looks to blame certain carmakers for the City’s inability to stop auto thefts in the City, Chicago seeks to place the blame on Glock, Inc. for crime involving the use of Modified Glock Pistols,” according to the company’s motion. “Chicago does not claim that Glock pistols fail to function properly when they are sold by Glock, Inc. and, in light of their popularity and reliability, does not seek to restrict their sale to, or use by, law enforcement.”

Glock’s attorneys also stated in its motion, “Like all semi-automatic pistols, Glock pistols can be illegally converted to fire fully automatic through the installation of a device known as an auto sear.”

The company added that the city filed a similar lawsuit against Glock and other gun manufacturers 20 years ago “arguing that their sale of legal handguns created a public nuisance in the City based on third parties who illegally possessed them and used them to commit crimes.”

“The Illinois Supreme Court unanimously held that the City’s complaint failed to state claims under Illinois law based on lack of duty and proximate cause,” according to Glock’s motion.

‘The American people don’t deserve this’

Leon said he sent a letter on May 13 to Glock’s general counsel Carlos Guevara about re-designing the mechanical configuration of its guns so they will no longer accept auto sears, but has received no response.

He said he hopes to speak with American lawmakers soon to explain to them the problem and come up with a solution.

“The Glock mechanical configuration should be banned, just the configuration until the company comes up with a newly designed weapon,” Leon said.

He added that such a ban has to be national instead of state by state, noting that people could go to neighboring states with no ban to purchase Glock weapons.

“When something wrong happens with a car and provokes an accident or something, they recall all the cars in order to make a correction. But what do we see in the gun industry? Nothing. People die every day and the gun industry is mute,” Leon said.

He said he began speaking out earlier this year for the first time after being contacted by a Minnesota television journalist about the rise of the auto sear. Leon said he decided to publicly address the issue after undergoing life-threatening open heart surgery late last year that gave him a new lease on life.

“If I am going to invest my time in something, the time I have left, I want to do it for the right causes. I want to do it for something that will promote life,” Leon said. “This is my word of commitment that I am looking forward to helping and cooperating with a solution because the American people don’t deserve this. They don’t deserve this crime rising because of the full-auto.”

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