Officials: Homemade machine guns fueling firearm violence
WASHINGTON — Elevenyear-old Domonic Davis was not far from his mom’s Cincinnati home when a hail of gunfire sprayed out from a passing car. Nearly two dozen rounds hurtled through the night at a group of children in the blink of an eye.
Four other children and a woman were hurt in the November shooting that killed Domonic, who had just made his school basketball team.
“What happened? How does this happen to an 11-year-old? He was only a few doors down,” his father, Issac Davis, said.
The shooting remains under investigation. But federal investigators believe the 22 shots could be fired off with lightning speed because the weapon had been illegally converted to fire like a machine gun.
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.
“Police officers are facing down fully automatic weapon fire in amounts that haven’t existed in this country since the days of Al
Capone in the Tommy gun,” said Steve Dettelbach, director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, or ATF. “It’s a huge problem.”
The agency reported a 570% increase in the number of conversion devices collected by police departments between 2017 and 2021, the most recent data available.
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.
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.
Once in place, they modify the gun’s machinery. Instead of firing one round each time the shooter squeezes the trigger, a semi-automatic weapon with a conversion device starts firing as soon as the trigger goes down and doesn’t stop until the shooter lets go or the weapon runs out of ammunition.
“You’re seeing them a lot in stunning numbers, particularly in street violence,” said David Pucino, deputy chief counsel at Giffords Law Center.
In a demonstration by ATF agents, the firing of a semi-automatic outfitted with a conversion device was nearly indistinguishable from an automatic weapon. Conversion devices with differing designs can fit a range of different guns, enabling guns to fire at a rate of 800 or more bullets per minute, according to the ATF.
“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.
Between 2012 and 2016, police departments in the U.S. found 814 conversion devices and sent them to the ATF. That number grew to more than 5,400 between 2017 and 2021, according to the agency’s most recent data.
They took hold in Minneapolis in 2021, and helped fuel record-breaking gun violence that year, said police Chief Brian O’Hara.