Inexpensive add-on spawns a new era of machine guns
LAS VEGAS — Caison Robinson, 14, had just met up with a younger neighbor on their quiet street after finishing his chores when a gunman in a white car rolled up and fired a torrent of bullets in an instant.
“Mom, I’ve been shot!” he recalled crying, as his mother bolted barefoot out of their house in northwest Las Vegas.
“I didn’t think I was going to make it, for how much blood was under me,” Robinson said.
Las Vegas police say the shooting in May was carried out with a pistol rigged with a small and illegal device known as a switch. Switches can transform semiautomatic handguns, which typically require a trigger pull for each shot, into fully automatic machine guns that fire dozens of bullets with one tug.
By the time the assailant in Las Vegas sped away, Caison, a soft-spoken teenager who loves video games, lay on the pavement with five gunshot wounds. His friend, a 12-year-old girl, was struck once in the leg.
These makeshift machine guns — able to inflict indiscriminate carnage in seconds — are helping fuel the national epidemic of gun violence. With them, the shootings are increasingly lethal, with added risks for bystanders, according to law enforcement authorities and medical workers.
The growing use of switches, which are also known as auto sears, is evident in real-time audio tracking of gunshots around the country, data show. Audio sensors monitored by a public safety technology company, SoundThinking, recorded 75,544 rounds of suspected automatic gunfire in 2022 in portions of 127 cities covered by its microphones, according to data compiled at the request of The New York Times. That was a 49 percent increase from the year before.
“This is almost like the gun version of the fentanyl crisis,” Mayor Quinton Lucas of Kansas City, Mo., said in an interview.
Lucas, a Democrat, said he believes that the rising popularity of switches, especially among young people, is a major reason fewer gun violence victims are surviving in his city.
Homicides in Kansas City are approaching record highs this year, even as the number of nonfatal shootings in the city has decreased.
Switches come in various forms, but most are small, Legolike plastic blocks, about 1 inch square, that can be easily manufactured on a 3-D printer and go for around $200.
Law enforcement officials say the devices are turning up with greater frequency at crime scenes, often wielded by teens who have come to see them as a status symbol.
The proliferation of switches also has coincided with broader accessibility of so-called ghost guns, untraceable firearms that can be made with components purchased online or made with 3-D printers.
“The gang wars and street fighting that used to be with knives, and then pistols, is now to a great extent being waged with automatic weapons,” said Andrew M. Luger, the US attorney for Minnesota.
Switches have become a major priority for federal law enforcement officials. But investigators say they face formidable obstacles, including the sheer number in circulation and the ease with which they can be produced and installed at home, using readily available instruction videos on the internet. Many are sold and owned by people younger than 18, who generally face more lenient treatment in the courts.
Social media platforms including YouTube ban content that shows people how to make illegal weapons. However, such content is protected under the First Amendment and remains widely available online.
Federal law enforcement officials have contacted Glock, the company that produces a weapon that has come to define an entire class of easily available 9mm handguns, in search of ways to modify the weapon to make it harder to attach switches. Carlos Guevara, a vice president at Glock, said the company has collaborated with law enforcement officials to target illegal sellers and users of switches but has determined the design of the pistol cannot be altered in that way.
In 2021, a man with a gun modified with a switch fired at two police officers in Houston, killing one and injuring the other. One of the gunmen in a 2022 gang shootout in Sacramento that left six dead and injured 12 people carried a gun fitted with a switch, according to police. In recent months, shootings using modified weapons have been caught on camera in Milwaukee, prompting the city’s mayor to compare the scene with a war zone.
Devices that turn firearms fully automatic have existed for years, but they had not been a major concern for authorities until recently.
In 2019, federal agents began seizing a significant number of switches imported from China, said Thomas Chittum, a former associate deputy director at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives who now oversees analytics and forensic services at SoundThinking.
Soon, authorities began seeing a rise in switches — which in 2019 sold for as little as $19 — in several major American cities. Between 2017 and 2021, the ATF recovered 5,454 machine gun conversion parts, a 570 percent increase from the preceding five years.
Steven M. Dettelbach, director of the ATF, said that trend ominously echoed the days of “Al Capone and the Tommy gun,” when criminals often had more firepower than law enforcement.
In an interview, he recalled having asked one of his advisers to bring an inexpensive 3-D printer to his office last year to show how a switch was made. The speed, ease, and cheap cost, he said, were chilling.
The Justice Department has stepped up prosecutions of sellers and suppliers over the past few years. Under the Gun Control Act of 1968, it is a crime to manufacture a machine gun, a violation that carries a maximum of 10 years in prison. Prosecutors in Chicago this month charged a 20-year-old man with selling 25 switches and a 3-D printer to an undercover agent. In November, federal prosecutors in Texas charged a supplier who, they assert, had sold thousands of switches.
Switches are fast becoming embedded in youth culture, and have been the subject of rap songs and memes on social media. One of four teenagers accused in the killing of an off-duty Chicago police officer this year posted on the internet a song called “Switches,” rapping “shoot the switches, they so fast” as he showed an arsenal of weapons.
Caison Robinson said he knew about switches before he was nearly killed by one. Teenagers he knew began bragging about having acquired the converted guns, often from older siblings, he said. They called the switches “buttons,” he said, which came in several colors.
“It’s become a thing you get to be cool,” Caison said.
In an interview, he said that he tried to steer clear of armed cliques of teenagers in his Las Vegas neighborhood. “It’s like a trend now.”
On the day of the shooting, a soldier in uniform who happened to be nearby tended to Caison’s wounds until a passing motorist rushed him to the hospital.
One bullet struck his colon, part of which had to be removed, medical officials say. Another pierced his liver. A third punched through a principal vein in his abdomen. The other bullets broke his femur and caused nerve damage to his forearm.
Investigators concluded that the shooting was tied to a gang dispute and that Caison was not the intended target. In late June, Hakeem Collette, 17, pleaded guilty to battery with a deadly weapon and was sentenced to 10 years in prison. He will be eligible for parole in two years.