Communities around the U.S. have seen shootings carried out with weapons converted to fully automatic in recent years, fueled by a staggering increase in small pieces of metal or plastic made with a 3D printer or ordered online. Laws against machine guns date back to the bloody violence of Prohibition-era gangsters. But the proliferation of devices known by nicknames such as Glock switches, auto sears and chips has allowed people to transform legal semi-automatic weapons into even more dangerous guns, helping fuel gun violence, police and federal authorities said.
The (ATF) reported a 570% increase in the number of conversion devices collected by police departments between 2017 and 2021, the most recent data available.
The devices that can convert legal semi-automatic weapons can be made on a 3D printer in about 35 minutes or ordered from overseas online for less than $30. They’re also quick to install.
“It takes two or three seconds to put in some of these devices into a firearm to make that firearm into a machine gun instantly,” Dettelbach said.
Ultimately, guns are not very complicated machines. I’m making a semi-automatic rifle in my home office right now out of stuff you can get at a hardware store & some 3D printed parts, and I’m amazed at how simple it all is.
A lot of proposed gun control feels like trying to put the genie back in the bottle. Even states with hefty assault weapon bans like California and Maryland still have plenty of legal loopholes allowing people to own semi-automatic guns, and gun manufacturers are finding more all the time. I honestly think that anything short of straight up banning the sale of gunpowder will have a temporary at best effect on gun violence, and do less than nothing at worst.
The fact of the matter is that gun control bills at the federal level will cost a lot of political capital. A federal challenge to the 2nd amendment will rally conservatives in the same way that the recent overturning of Roe caused a surge for liberals. This is to say nothing about enforcement: it’s a common position among gun owners that they would simply refuse to comply with a gun confiscation / surrender, and I believe a significant chunk of them would follow through with that. See the recent ATF rules about pistol braces for an example of mass non-compliance.
So, we can fight the uphill battle of gun control for perhaps marginal returns, or we can try to address the things that drive people to violence in the first place. And I’m not just saying “muh mental health” either; we need to address housing costs, healthcare costs, education costs, wages stagnating behind inflation, broken-windows policing, the war on drugs, the mainstreaming of far-right propoganda, the decay of public schooling, white supremacy, queerphobia, misogyny, climate change & doomerism, corporate personhood, and a fuckload of other things making people angry and desparate and hopeless enough to kill people & themselves.
I firmly believe that addressing the material conditions that create killers will prevent more murders than any gun control bill, especially in the USA.
we need to address housing costs, healthcare costs, education costs, wages stagnating behind inflation, broken-windows policing, the war on drugs, the mainstreaming of far-right propoganda, the decay of public schooling, white supremacy, queerphobia, misogyny, climate change & doomerism, corporate personhood, and a fuckload of other things
This is basically what they’ve done in most European countries. Plus, they have very strict gun laws and no gun culture. All of that equals close to no gun violence.
Yeah but the violence we do see in europe is typically widely spread knife crime and chemical attacks on people. The most complicated and unique terrorist attacks I have ever seen happen on European soil.
I’ll take knife crime any day of the week over gun violence.
Can’t kill 60 and wound more than 400 from a hotel room window with a knife.
Like once in a decade chemical attacks, as opposed to weekly school shootings? Tough decision eh?
honestly think that anything short of straight up banning the sale of gunpowder
There’s hand-loading, and I strongly suspect that gunpowder is not the hardest component to manufacture.
Potassium nitrate and sulfur.
Gunpowder is the easiest part. The casing will be the hardest as you need pretty tight tolerances, but anyone who cares could have 50 trash cans full of cases in a week for a lifetime of reloading.
And if you don’t have cases for reloading, you can always use a case less design, then it’s just a matter of sourcing the projectile.
Of course there is always black powder, ball and cap, etc.
I have heard it before that the hardest part is getting access to reliable chemical primers. But I think if you were looking at all available options on an equal footing, you’d probably be more likely to go with some sort of electronic ignition system, or something of that nature.
Guns are harder easier to manufacture than cartridges. Honestly, when civil war finally does break out it will be ammunition, not guns, that the government restricts access to because that’s way easier to control and way harder to manufacture. Reloading still needs brass and primers, and those are hard to make for anything outside of a shotgun.
Edit: said exactly the opposite of what I intended to say.
I honestly think that anything short of straight up banning the sale of gunpowder will have > a temporary at best effect on gun violence, and do less than nothing at worst.
Even that won’t have an effect for long
https://youtube.com/@styropyro?si=pHDZxrbvONLxENCa
https://youtu.be/crBqplCIZoA?si=chovNs5707OHq7mU
Energy weapons may not be far enough along now to be of much practical use, but ban gunpowder and we will see what horrors are possible.
Also, while air rifles aren’t really as effective today as chemically-powered guns, they were used by militaries in the past, and if you increase the pellet size, they can put out quite a bit of energy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jTnrjVxtVo
That’s a 20mm pellet. The muzzle energy from that is about four times NATO 5.56, what a typical issue rifle will put out.
I honestly think that anything short of straight up banning the sale of gunpowder will have a temporary at best effect on gun violence, and do less than nothing at worst.
I don’t even think that would really help all that much. You would maybe increase the relative complexity required to build a gun, but I think you’d still get plenty of people who are able to utilize improvised home explosives in their homemade firearms designs. Of another variety, you’d also probably see a rapid influx and growth of the airgun market, which is already pretty far along in it’s ability to substitute and even outclass normal firearms, in some respects (mostly in cost, and consistent shot over shot accuracy, rather than in “combat efficacy”, depending on what you mean by that). I’m also sure you’d see designs that adapt more mundane forms of explosives. Propane strikes me as a particularly good candidate, but you could also probably just use normal gasoline as a propellant, hydrogen peroxide, H2O2, butane, you could probably even use wood gas.
I think there are too many machine shops in america to realistically stop america’s position globally as a firearms manufacturer, in a vacuum. As you say, you’d need to more combat the external factors going into it, rather than trying to kind of, try to make sweeping bans around it. Especially as those sweeping bans can be more selectively applied to particular communities, to increase their criminalization, as we’ve seen time after time.
The caveat I would place around that, is that handguns are a pretty terrible suicide vector, I think it’s something like half of all gun deaths are suicides. Of suicides generally, about a third will never try again, and it’s a spur of the moment decision, and about a third will repetitively try over and over, with the remainder falling somewhere in the middle of multiple attempts. So preventing guns from falling into those, at least third, of hands, could be a good form of regulation. Though, that point is somewhat unrelated to the conversation at hand, here, I just think it’s a pretty good point I don’t hear people bring up a lot.
Frankly even if the bans did work, people wouldn’t want them. The US does not care about gun violence because the people in power are pandering most to people unaffected by it since they’re who vote in the primaries. The US cannot and will not address its gun violence in the near future and it will not address the fundamental needs of its people if conservative leaders continue to get elected.
Basically, the US is probably screwed and is due for increased violence one way or another. Especially since we’re all allowed to own a deadly weapon and yet a good portion of us aren’t even literate.
This is to say nothing about enforcement: it’s a common position among gun owners that they would simply refuse to comply with a gun confiscation / surrender, and I believe a significant chunk of them would follow through with that. See the recent ATF rules about pistol braces for an example of mass non-compliance.
Then they need to be arrested. Noone should be trusted with guns and other dangerous weapons or machines if they deliberately break the laws surrounding the ownership of them. We don’t let people drive after they lost their licencse.
The estimates for the number of pistol braces out there ranged from 3 million on the low end, to 40 million on the high end. During the grace period to register braced firearms as SBRs without having to pay the tax stamp, the ATF received 255,162 applications to do so.
Even if we take the low number & account for folks destroying or converting their firearms, we can reasonably estimate a rate of non-compliance in the hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions. There is a very real possibility that arresting all those people would literally double the already ludicrous US prison population overnight. In a country that already has a worryingly militarized police force, I cannot imagine the mass arrest of millions of armed people will reduce gun violence.
To that point, the people like to cite Australia’s gun “buyback” program as a success…they only got about 20% of the guns. Now, you and I both know American compliance would be lower than that, but let’s use that number for a second and apply it anyway. With 600,000,000 guns in this country, we’d get 120,000,000 guns taken leaving 480,000,000 guns. Whooooo.
Furthermore, while gun owners have dropped, guns per person has increased, and there’s a burgeoning black market run by organized crime created by this ban. There also have been mass shootings since port arthur, and more mass killings without guns than that, too. Sure, they have “less than the US,” but the success of that program is vastly overstated.
I understood “not surrendering” as Police shows up and demands to be handed over the braced gun, to be met with a closed door or at gunpoint.
If people need to be told to hand it over, but comply then, i guess it can be handled with a fine. I still stand by this being a clear indication of being unfit for gun ownership though.
In the early 1900’s Roosevelt sent federal officers to try to assess and deal with a form of slavery called “peonage” that was pervasive in the South. These officers were shot at and ultimately chased out. Roosevelt gave up on enforcing the law.
The US government has failed multiple times to enforce laws that law enforcement agreed with. Overwhelmingly, law enforcement does not agree with outright firearm bans. Why do you believe that firearm owners could be arrested for refusing to give up firearms? Like, from a logistical perspective, how would that work exactly?
Why every time someone is trying to explain to americans that what you have is not normal, is fixable, and it has been fixed somewhere else there’s always some bullshit excuse like once in the 1900 hundreds their one thing happened once so there is no possible solution.
Europe doesn’t have that. Australia had a problem with gun culture and it was fixed after one mass shooting that shocked the country. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/15/it-took-one-massacre-how-australia-made-gun-control-happen-after-port-arthur
I totally expect someone to come up with but but but US is different, because of the above: bullshit excuses. And because I post that story a lot when gun restrictions are discussed. Yes the US is different, start thinking about a similar solution, you sent a fucking man on the moon in the 1960, you can do this too.
Sure yeah, THAT’S the problem
Right now the Second Amendment is untouchable to regulate and expanding its coverage.
The problem is the convert to automatic things and not the motivation to kill a bunch of people that has been apparently increasing and almost always carried out with legal and far too easily available non-converted semiautomatic weapons.
It is the scary looking things.
Edit: added text in italics since I left out an obvious detail
The problem is
the convert to automatic things and notthe motivation to kill a bunch of people
Don’t know where you’re going with the rest of your comment, but that part is the sine qua non of our violence problem.
This reads like pig-induced hysterics.
I’m not anti-gun myself, but there are far better arguments for the anti-gun crowd to use than this.
Calling a modified handgun a machine gun is some pretty impressive hyperbole, yeah.
I mean it’s a gun that fires continuously with a single trigger pull. How is that not a machine gun? Yeah it’s a machine pistol that’ll spend a clip in 3 seconds, but it’s still a machine gun.
A machine gun, traditionally, is a fully automatic firearm in a rifle format.
Think light machine guns (M249, PKM) or a sub-machine gun (MP5, P90)
A machine pistol isn’t technically a “machine gun” despite the name. In fact, the classification of machine pistols is a debated topic even now.
In many places, they are classified as any other pistol. In others, they considered a form of PDW or Personal Defense Weapon.
But, PDW can sometimes refer to a specific class of SMG like the P90. Basically, a compact firearm with a cartridge around 6mm or so. Which the P90 fires a 5.7mm round.
Its complicated. And we should not be painting all firearms with the same brush.
It’s an automatic pistol…
“Machine” doesn’t mean automatic, lol.
Just use words for what they are instead of trying to replace them for shock value.
I don’t expect you to do this, though.
It’s not an anti-gun argument.
The theory is that you CAN’T regulate guns because people will just 3D print inferior copies.
Ding ding. "3d printers must be regulated for safety and copyright protection "
Go to home depot and you can make a pipe shotgun that doesn’t even require welding to make. A lot of fully 3d printed guns are 9mm. If you havent shot both cartridges I cannot explain the difference between 9mm and a shotgun slug. Maybe it will suffice to say the bulletproof vests that stop 9mm, when hit with a shotgun slug often result in broken ribs, punctured lungs, and general chest cave ins. Your 3d printed gun will undoubtedly have better rate of fire but in terms of accuracy and level of destruction, the shotgun will compete just fine.
Ding ding. "3d printers must be regulated for safety and copyright protection "
But that’s impossible, not figuratively, but literally. 3d printers are devices designed for hobbiest-hackers you can’t put copy protection or drm controls on a device like that, it won’t work. If any legislation were passed to make that happen, there will be open source alternative firmware for these devices the very next day, months before the legislation would even take effect.
That is in other words, a waste of effort. The genie is out of the bottle and it can’t be put back in. The question is what will we do now that it’s out.
And yet we’re seeing a drop in gun related deaths after it spiked during the pandemic:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6b/1999-_Gun-related_deaths_USA.png
It’s too early to call this a trend, but assuming home conversion to full auto is getting common, it has not yet correlated with a rise in gun deaths.
I don’t think it will for an important reason: full auto actually sucks. Most people don’t know how to use it and tend to spray bullets while hitting nothing. Even the AR15, which has relatively low recoil, is not very accurate when you hold down the trigger like that.
One exception is the 2017 Las Vegas shooting (which was a bump stock, but effectively the same end result). He was shooting into a large crowd where every bullet was all but guaranteed to hit someone. Most mass shootings aren’t like that.
The way the military uses full auto isn’t necessarily to hit anyone, either. It’s to force the enemy to keep their heads down so your side can maneuver into a better position. That’s not how a lone mass shooter would operate. They don’t have a team where that tactic makes sense.
If I was told correct info I think even the armed forces dont like full auto outside of specific use cases like mounted guns with hundreds to thousnads of rounds in boxes and for supressing fired from rifles with detachable mags. If you really wanted to mow through a crowd for some ungodly reason a semi auto (not pump) shotgun with buckshot shells and a detachable mag would work as well as full auto rifle in an intermediate cartridge.
The way the military uses full auto isn’t necessarily to hit anyone, either. It’s to force the enemy to keep their heads down so your side can maneuver into a better position
The military from what I heard doesn’t. They use burst mode to improve the chance of hitting something, but not waste too much too easily.
It depends
Not all weapons have a burst mode. Often though, militaries prefer controlled bursts of full auto, but it depends on the role and weapons system. Machine gunners are more likely to go full hog than a rifleman for example, but that’s assuming that all soldiers do the most optimal choice in any given situation, which just isn’t true.
I’m not sure what your point is. So what if gun deaths are down since the pandemic? Viewing the chart you submitted as evidence we can pretty much just trace a continuation of the trajectory in gun deaths straight to where they would have been from before the pandemic to after - so they’re still trending upward overall. Also, the article doesn’t postulate an increase in gun deaths, just that modded guns are likely being used in crimes.
Who cares what the military does? These aren’t military users, and they’re using automatic fire to spray bullets in gang turf wars or whatever. They’re not known for taking the time to aim, and are just fine with taking out little kids or bystanders.
Overall, I have no idea what you’re trying to prove except “Look over there!!” and your points ramble all over the place.
Fact is that if more bullets fly probability says more people are gonna get hit. Maybe not today, but tomorrow.
Guns with conversion devices have been used in several mass shootings, including one that left four dead at a Sweet Sixteen party in Alabama last year and another that left six people dead at a bar district in Sacramento, California, in 2022. In Houston, police officer William Jeffrey died in 2021 after being shot with a converted gun while serving a warrant. In cities such as Indianapolis, police have seized them every week.
So again, not sure what you sound like you’re tying to minimize or dismiss. Full auto isn’t a problem? I can assure you that you’d feel differently if you were downrange in a shopping mall and someone decided to fire one up.
Overall, I have no idea what you’re trying to prove except “Look over there!!” and your points ramble all over the place.
I’m not the person you’re talking to, but this sentence makes you an imbecile saying that if somebody’s smarter than you, it’s their problem.
You might consider that if you just discard opinions of people competent in the subject, such as military and, well, usual gun nuts, the end result is not worth much.
The conclusion is that mass shooting deaths would actually go down if we just let people use full auto. It’s a counterintuitive result, but it’s all there.
Yes, there are fewer gun related deaths. But there are more mass shootings and guns have become the # 1 killer of children and teens. Source
this is false, this stat deliberately counts 18 and 19 year olds as “children” and purposefully includes gang related violence. great example of using statistics to sell a story.
how many gang members are going to surrender their firearms after a ban?
Where did you find that? Because the info states … “Of the 6,192 children and teenagers under 18 who were shot in 2023, more than 1,600 died.”
Gun violence is a symptom of socioeconomic inequality and a lack of mental health care. We could ban all guns today and while I’m sure there would be a reduction in violent events, people wanting to cause harm would switch to bladed weapons (see knife crime in the UK and axe attacks in China).
And even if he were right, when was the last time you heard of someone in the UK stabbing a hundred people at a concert, or thirty kids in an elementary school?
There’s been at least one organized mass stabbing in China, I don’t think everyone died but over a hundred people were stabbed by a half dozen or so attackers.
Yeah no it’s not. You’re try to compare a place with social safety nets to a country that doesn’t have any.
Trying to compare the EU to the USA for anything gun wise is pointless.
Here’s the company America is in, worldwide, for the right to own guns.
If somebody is going to try and kill me, I’d prefer they at least break a sweat in doing so.
Also there is empirical evidence that people are less “empathic” the further away they are from you. Shooting someone is psychologically much easier than stabbing someone.
Which leads to hundreds/thousands of people not dying every year due to being shot.
Even if it’s only one life saved, that’s great. But can’t we want to fix the systemic problems that lead to gun violence as well? It also fixes a lot of other bad things that don’t lead to gun violence, like homelessness, depression, preventable deaths, inadequate health care, etc.
What I’m saying is that guns aren’t the problem. They make the problem worse. I’d like to see us try to fix both instead of a half measure of different gun laws.
You’re not completely wrong. But (1) guns make it sooo much easier to cause a lot of harm, and (2) a gun gives you so much more confidence than a knife. Also: you can run from a knife, you can’t run from a gun
you can run from a knife, you can’t run from a gun
Ahh, not handicapable, I see.
But unintended ableism aside, you’d also be surprised, if you can get upwards of 25yrd away from the shooter, they probably can’t hit you for shit (doubly so if they have a glock switch, they reduce accuracy). Most criminals don’t train at all, much less for distance.
A knife battle sounds kinda better. I’ll have a greater chance to survive and some bad-ass scars.
The loser of a knife fight dies in the parking lot, the winner dies in the ambulance.
Buddy of mine (alright, coworker, but he was cool) decided to try and break up a bar fight one night, one of the guys ended up slicing his stomach right the fuck open. Like REALLY open. Was fucking wild, dude spent a long time in the hospital and never came back to work, but I did hear he was doing better so he at least did live.
Still though, point is, knife attacks are a lot more brutal than those who advocate for knives think.
Keep thinking that. Meanwhile most people here wouldn’t be able to fight off someone with a knife.
It takes size and muscle, shooting the attacker takes a single trigger pull.
You may not like to hear it, but guns aren’t going anywhere. Maybe if we stop making out gun owners to be some raging lunatics. Then they may be more likely to give them up.
This is all pointless anyway.
Knife crime in UK is still lower than knife crime in US. You’ve been drinking some weird kool-aid without faxt checking.
Its more like there are already hundreds of millions of guns in the US. Criminal element and the scum of society would keep theirs while the law abiding surrender theirs. Society would get worse and less safe.
I’d say its a symptom of our police and justice system being completely ineffective at cleaning up our cities and locking away violent offenders to keep them out of society. They’re more interested in milking the taxpayers for stupid shit that doesn’t require any effort like traffic tickets or massive amounts of overtime for doing nothing. There’s too many violent people out there and no one is doing anything to neutralize the threat to law abiding society.
I totally agree. The anti-gun crowd is just a bunch of useful idiots who refuse to tackle problems at their roots.
They’re also usually city-folk who don’t understand that people living in rural America only have guns to defend themselves. No cop is going to protect their farmhouse from robbers, lol.
So the pro gun in the US are just farmers that need to defend their farmhouse from robbers? You might want to sit down and think who the useful idiot is here.
Not too long ago here on Lemmy, someone told me that we need guns to protect ourselves from attacks by bears, mountain lions and rattlesnakes. Even in cities. They showed me a link about a bear harmlessly roaming around some suburb as proof of this necessity.
My pointing out that there have been 180 fatal bear attacks in all of North America since the 18th century, and many of those were bears in captivity, didn’t help.
What’s funny is that I don’t ever see any “sensible” gun owners telling these people to stop helping.
