A surge of illegal homemade machine guns has helped fuel gun violence in the US
A surge of illegal homemade machine guns has helped fuel gun violence in the US
In the last several years, a proliferation of tiny pieces of plastic and metal is fueling a spike in semi-automatic handguns converted to fully automatic fire.
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.
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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.
On the other hand I'd much rather get shot than stabbed or splashed with acid.
It's not like the US doesn't have all that on top of the gun violence.
'Course, the last time a dude threatened to stab me by pulling a knife on me, I threatened to shoot him by pulling out a gun on him in return, and he decided the best outcome for all would be to walk away.
He was right, I didn't get stabbed, he didn't get shot, and I was able to walk into the hell that was "pandemic Walmart" unscathed, as a direct result of me being armed.
So, what you're saying is that Europe should just get a lot of guns to get rid of people threatening knife violence?
Dude, there's a reason why the US has lots of gun violence. It's because of the easy access to guns.
No guns = no gun violence.
No I'm saying no knives = no knife violence.
That's just not how it works, because knifes are not specifically designed to kill people. Guns are. Some guns are even designed to kill as many people as possible as quickly as possible.
Some knives are for sure designed to kill people. You cutting potatoes with a karambit or balisong? Then there's arrows, or as I like to call them (as of this moment) shooty knives.
Furthermore, guns are technically designed "to fire a projectile" as knives are technically designed "to cut or pierce." The issue comes up with what is being fired or cut upon, which could be legal or murder in either case.
Furtherfurthermore, yes, guns do happen to be good at killing people, and sometimes that does need to happen as unfortunate as that is. We call that "self defense." Just so happens guns are the best tool for that job. Could I use a coin to screw in a flathead? Sure, but a screwdriver was designed to screw screws and as such is the tool I would prefer to use if I have to screw a screw.
Did everyone clap and called you my hero before you woke up?
Har har, no but your mom went home with me.
Actually I was there for bread so I just bought bread after.
I see this sentiment a lot, and I mean, realistically, would you? Getting splashed with acid mostly equates to a flesh wound, maybe with side effects like blindness, or muscular numbness. There's necessary skin grafting and things of that nature, sure. But that kind of attack, generally, strikes me as having much less lethal potential compared to, say, a shooting or a stabbing. If you get a hole poked in your heart, you're basically guaranteed dead within a minute, and if you get a hole poked in many of your major organs, arteries, veins, you could bleed out within the next couple minutes.
Compare that to an acid attack, which, granted, is extremely unpleasant as it burns away at your nerve endings, but would seem much less likely to be lethal, and has a much more straightforward path to recovery, in lots of cases.
The likelihood of dying making horrible injuries more bearable. Do I want to live a long life horribly disfigured with constant pain due to nerve damage, or just get shot and have it be done and over with?
As for stabbing, if they hit a vital area that would make it less unfortunate, but just the idea of getting stabbed is deeply unpleasant, whereas the emotional reaction to getting shot is "well, I should've moved out of the US"
Like once in a decade chemical attacks, as opposed to weekly school shootings? Tough decision eh?
Mostly talking about the regular acid attacks that happen mostly to women and children
I'm confused, I'm from Europe but live in Australia. I read about a mass shooting in the states pretty much every week. Often children as schools seem to be a prime target.
Can't remember last time I heard of an acid attack in Europe. Got some source for this being a regular thing and an actual problem even remotely comparable to guns in the US?
The stabbing rate in the UK for example is lower than it is in the US per capita. So the idea knives replace guns doesn't really seem to hold
Straight up false
I'm European and we don't do near enough on like half of those points.
most
This is the truth, thanks for saying it.
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
hardereasier 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.
20% of 600,000,00 is 120,000,000, not 1,200,000!
Ah shit I done misplaced a comma! Let me fix that, thanks!
Logged gun ownership has dropped. You can still buy a gun off the grey market and never fill out a 4473
Afaik Australia does not have ATF form 4473.
I thought you were talking about America in the second half of your post. Gotta go back to reading comprehension class I guess
Ah lol it happens!
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.
Any officer enforcing this would be killed and most cops would just outright refuse to enforce it anyway. There's a logistical problem of how this would even be done.
I lived in a town with maybe five cops for it and the three surrounding towns. Cops would to on several hour patrols, so if you called 911 at the wrong time it could take an hour for the police to actually show up. They knew about meth cooks in the area and they left them alone because the cops knew they would wind up dead and no one would ever find them.
Now, the whole population of the area was a few thousand people and most of them were armed. Now, if they couldn't deal with the meth cooks that no one liked, how exactly would they deal with the big chunk of the population that includes small business owners, members of the city council, and maybe the mayor?
This sounds like a case for a crackdown by the federal police then. And even more of a reason to take illegal weapons from people, who are willing to murder police officers with it.
What you describe is practically half an insurrection already. And this sounds like the kind of area, from where exactly that could happen with enough methed up MAGAhats. So instead of the 2A helping people to protect themselves from a hostile and unlawful government it will help hostile and unlawful people to establish an undemocratic regime and abolish the constitutional order.
Lol, yeah, the FBI that's been cracking down on the left for 100 years while ignoring the Klan? That's who you're taking about? They would rather join the insurrection. Who do you think these cops are?
They already won. That's the point.
I still stand by this being a clear indication of being unfit for gun ownership though.
I appreciate that you've been a good faith interlocutor so far, but I wanna push back on this just a little more.
The current rules governing SBRs in the United States were established in the 1930s in anticipation of an outright ban on handguns. The thought was that "sawed-off" or short-barreled rifles would be a way for people to circumvent the ban. And, because the law enforcement thinking at the time was distinctly classist, the mechanism for keeping these guns out of the hands of criminals was not an outright ban but a ludicrously high tax, in the neighborhood of $4500 in today's money.
But that ban on pistols never materialized. So now, we're left with a nearly 100 year old vestigial law that doesn't really serve much of a purpose: short-barreled rifles aren't any more deadly than full-length rifles (they tend to fire the same bullet louder and slower), and they aren't any more concealable than handguns. There really isn't an obvious public good that is served by these laws, and their enforcement gives away that the ATF understands that on some level: basically no one is ever charged for just having an unregistered SBR, it's almost always a rider-on to a different crime
or an excuse for a cop to fuck you up if they don't like you.Enter pistol braces. Ostensibly, they are a device that assists shooters that have lost the use of one of their hands to stabilize an AR pistol with the forearm of their one good hand (and to be clear, they serve that purpose well). However, some people notice that they happen to be shaped in a way that provides a lot of the function that a stock would, and begin using them on AR pistols as a way of getting the ergonomics and aesthetics of an SBR without paying the additional tax and waiting months for approval.
And for a really long time, the ATF was okay with this. Pistol braces were specifically allowed. That was, until a few years ago, the ATF decided to... Change their mind? "Re-interpret" existing rules was I think what officially happened. No new laws were passed, no democratic process took place, and no clear and present danger was being addressed. They just kinda decided "Hey these are illegal now, you have X days to comply".
Does aquiescing to that "interpretation change" have anything to do with being a responsible gun owner? To my mind, whether someone complies with that or not says more about their obideience to authority / fear of consequences than it does their responsibility or danger to society. There is no inherent moral good to following the law, and history is filled with responsible people who flout pointless or harmful laws.
short-barreled rifles aren’t any more deadly than full-length rifles (they tend to fire the same bullet louder and slower), and they aren’t any more concealable than handguns.
You know, I would push back on this a little bit. It's not really a necessity that they're more lethal than rifles, and more concealable than handguns, they can still do plenty of damage while occupying the middle category.
Handgun cartridges usually travel at below the necessary 2100 fps required to create permanent hydrostatic wound cavities, which means they need more shots on target to do a similar amount of damage. Unlike sawed off shotguns (which I think are registered as destructive devices? idk), which tend to be unwieldy to fire, especially at range, an SBR can be fitted with a suppressor, and has the potential to fire hotter and lighter loads capable of defeating level 3+ body armor, unlike a handgun. Probably not at the same time as a suppressor would be used, but, dealer's choice, I guess. All of this is in a package that can potentially be carried, somewhat easily, in a large to mid-sized coat along with spare magazines. Unlike a normal rifle, which might require something like a larger trench coat, or poncho, or what have you. SBRs are also going to be much more usable at range compared to your conventional handgun, it's sort of along the lines of an advanced PDW in that respect, with maybe a slightly larger form factor.
So, if we're kind of, thinking about the possible attack vectors that this could be used for, I think it's understandable why federal law enforcement might be a little bit more concerned about this, compared to long rifles, handguns, or shotguns, which occupy more distinct niches that are perhaps a little bit easier to safeguard against with conventional tactics. No comment on the pistol brace thing, that was kinda stupid, but the SBR ban doesn't make absolutely no sense, as long as you're evaluating it from a very particular perspective.
the SBR ban doesn't make absolutely no sense, as long as you're evaluating it from a very particular perspective.
A perspective that can't see bullpups, apparently
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.
Fixing US gun violence is trivial from a policy perspective. You tax bullets at an extremely high rate while also creating a social welfare system like Europe. This restricts the ability to execute violence while also addressing some of the biggest causes. But it's impossible to implement that because right wing terrorism is the point.
Right wing terrorism isn't a problem with America. It is America. It's how the system is supposed to work. It is the point.
Right wing terrorism keeps people traumatized. It ensures that anyone proposing a social safety net would be murdered. It is the extrajudicial extension of the oligarchy that controls America. What the government can't do, right wing death squads do instead.
If you stop mass shootings, you will destroy America. It isn't being stopped because it is intentional. It isn't being stopped because both parties, and, more importantly, the oligarchs who control them, benefit from it.
If you think you can stop gun violence in the US, you fundamentally do not understand what the US is. The KKK has been deeply involved at all layers of government across the US for generations. Today Aryan Brotherhood infiltrates police departments across the nation. The violence is the reality of America, the thing you think is America is just a facade.
America is colonial white supremacy maintained through terror, where guns are the primary tool of that terror. America is not normal, it's a two party dictatorship pretending to be a democracy. America is the problem, it cannot fix the problem anymore than Nazi Germany could have fixed their antisemitism problem.
Here you go. Another person that tells me it cannot be fixed, just it is for a new and different reason/excuse this time. I'll add you to the list, I also have a new excuse now!
Ok, so you, who have absolutely no context on the situation, keep being told that you're wrong by people who have context on the situation, and your responses is to record all the ways you're told you're wrong so you can gloat about how you keep getting told you're wrong by the ignorant people who actually have lived their entire lives in the place you know nothing about? Cool.
It's kind of like you're listening to the 5 blind people describe an elephant over the phone and you're like, "I have a cat, therefore you also have a cat. You need cat litter and everything you're saying is dumb."
America for Europeans is either Hollywood, major cities, or Europe with rednecks. You fundamentally do not understand the context. You keep comparing to Europe and Austrian, but those models don't work. Europe enclosed the commons generations earlier. It's not possible for Europeans to comprehend America.
I've driven for 6 hours straight with the radio on scan and not even found a signal in more than one part of the US. There are vast areas of nothing with no law and no possibility of control. The vast majority of the US is unpopulated. The closest analog would be Australia or Canada.
Except that Austria and Canada never had an economy that relied on chattel slavery enforced by "organized milita." That's what the "well regulated milita" is in the second amendment, it's slavers. Slavery and genocide are essential to the US in a way they aren't in any developed country. If you want to compare the US to something, you need to look at Brazil.
The US is more like a developing nation or a dictatorship than a democracy the way you think about it.
Americans have all heard the same things over and over again. Your arguments are old and bring nothing new. So what is it exactly you're trying to do here? What is the point if first hand information will change your articles of faith? Are you just trying to feel superior? Because coming in to a place, knowing nothing about it, and telling people they're doing everything wrong is a pretty old school European thing to do and it really isn't convincing anyone.
Ok, so you, who have absolutely no context on the situation, keep being told that you're wrong by people who have context on the situation, and your responses is to record all the ways you're told you're wrong so you can gloat about how you keep getting told you're wrong by the ignorant people who actually have lived their entire lives in the place you know nothing about? Cool.
Pretty much. And it's bullshit excuses conflicting with each others, so yeah pretty fun. You guys have no idea what you are talking about, keep making up different convoluted reasons.
All while ignoring the obvious one gets ignored. It's the fucking guns, the sooner you get onto it, the sooner you sort out this mess.
Or keep thinking that it just can't be solved and spent time on lemmy philosophising why it can't. Fine with me either way I'm pretty safe.
I can't save you from looking like an arrogant idiot if that's what you want to do. Have fun with your life.
Look I'm sorry it's just that I argue about gun control in the US a lot and you wouldn't believe the bullshit I have to read.
Checkout my comments. Since we started, I had to deal, in another thread, that guns in the US cannot be banned or farmers would be robbed. And another person is trying to argue that if there weren't guns, you'd be riddled with acid attacks like Europe, apparently, is.
In fairness you make some good points about issues in the States. It's just that you mix up things a bit too much and you make it all a bit conspiracy. Keep it simple, work on limiting access to the thing that is used for shooting, and you might see a reduction in, well, shootings.
Other countries have done it. I know you think it's not the same, but it's not like you are working on a better solution anyway, might be worth a try?