You may have heard that if you customize your defensive pistol, some shameless attorney will drag you into court claiming you “made that pistol even more deadly.” This, so the story goes, will lead to your immediate incarceration or the loss of all your worldly goods in a civil suit. Maybe. So make sure you have a good lawyer, but also make sure you and your lawyer know what you are talking about and what modifications to your gun actually do.
First you need to understand that lawyers can and will say anything to win a case. You have heard me say it before and I will say it again: lawyers care less about truth and more about winning. So, if a lawyer thinks he or she can win a case by making an outlandish claim, you can expect an outlandish claim to be made.
The direct question is this: Will making simple modifications to your firearm put you at greater risk of a lawsuit following a defensive shooting?
The short answer is no. That’s because you can pretty much count on getting sued if you are forced to use your gun in self-defense. You have heard all the excuses before; all the quotes by angry, grieving parents on the news: “He didn’t deserve to get shot like that. He was just turning his life around. He was a good boy.” So, expect to get sued whether you modify your gun or not.
To ensure that you don’t give an aggressive anti-gun attorney any MORE reason to go after you, just make sure that you don’t make any modifications to the safety mechanisms or the factory trigger settings on your firearm.
It used to be all the rage for 1911 shooters to pin down the grip safety on a 1911. I have also seen shooters cover the grip of a 1911 with a slip-on rubber overgrip that also depressed the grip safety. Doing something like this gives an attorney the chance to stand up in open court and say, “The defendant INTENTIONALLY disabled one of the safety mechanisms on his firearm. How could you NOT call this gross negligence?
Gun owners who choose to reduce the trigger pull weight can also open themselves up for similar attacks, but the opposite side of that coin is that not all trigger work reduces the pull weight. If you pay a competent gunsmith to create for you a smooth trigger pull with a crisp break, but insist on retaining that 5- to 8-pound pull weight, you should be OK. What you have done is made the gun more accurate and thus safer, because now you are much more assured you will hit what you are shooting at. But still, an attorney can say you created a “hair trigger.” Remember, attorneys can say anything they want.
Other upgrades to your pistol, like a beveled magazine well or an improved magazine release or slide stop lever, should go largely unnoticed during the investigative stage of the lawsuit, but if someone asks, those modifications do not make your firearm more deadly. Those modifications make your firearm easier to operate under stress and therefore add a level of safety.
The same is true for the addition of new and improved grips or sights. You are not making the gun more deadly. You are making it safer.
As gun owners, we face all sorts of threats. Legal wrangling is just one of the things we have to plan for. A good legal defense starts with knowledge.
