Today, Explained - Our (machine) gun problem

Episode Date: May 2, 2022

For less than $20 plus shipping everyday people can turn their handguns into machine guns. The Trace’s Alain Stephens explains the rise of the “auto-sear.” This episode was produced by Hady Mawajdeh, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Richard Sima and Laura Bullard, engineered by Paul Mounsey, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained   Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ahead on Today Explained. Gun violence surged during the pandemic. Even now that we're inching our way out of the pandemic, the shootings haven't abated. And as if you didn't already have enough to worry about, there's the proliferation of something called the auto-sear. It takes your everyday handgun and turns it into a machine gun. And you're ready to go. No more mechanical resistance. You now have a fully automatic machine there with a sustained rate of fire of 2,000 rounds per minute.

And it's disturbingly easy to get your hands on one. And so they've really kind of been, you know, an equal opportunity employer to anyone who just needs maximum firepower to commit their acts of violence. The rise of the auto seer and what to do about it, coming up on Today Explained.

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. It's Today Explained. I'm Sean Ramos-Firm, and this is Alon Stevens. I'm an investigative reporter for The Trace, and I cover pretty much all things gun, but I specialize in arms trafficking.

The Trace is a news organization that only reports on guns and gun violence. Over the past couple of years, Alon has had his eye on a niche yet increasingly popular firearm accessory that turns guns like the wildly popular Glock handgun into a rapid-firing, fully automatic weapon. They're pretty rudimentary in design when you see them. They look like the size of about like a thimble or a small Lego block. They're pretty innocuous in appearance if you don't know what you're looking for. But what these devices do essentially is they override a mechanism, the semi-automatic controls and your kind of standard firearm

and allows it to fire fully automatically as a machine gun. And once installed, you can put this thing on and off the gun and you get an automatic weapon in just a couple of seconds. So this thing's called a switch. They go by a couple of different names on the streets, you know, switches, chips. But, you know, the technical term is called an auto sear.

And actually, they've been around since the 1970s in some fringe kind of small gun modding communities. And they kind of stayed that way until about four or five years ago. And then suddenly they just kind of blew up in popularity. A couple of things have kind of happened. So first of all, the internet is like the great equalizer. The information and the know-how, the instructions have been disseminated online. There's three parts to make a Glock fully automatic. A different end cap that has a hole in it so that your selector can be installed this is the

selector switch and then this here is a different disconnector we made these parts but also it's kind of been this perfect storm right at home manufacturing technology has just become cheaper and more widely available than it's ever been this video is talking about an update to the auto sear and also the cam files that are now available for the auto sear so we're talking you know cnc machines but we're also talking 3d printers what is up youtube so today i'm going to be showing you guys how to 3d print the block autos here because obnoxious amounts of you guys have joined the discord server wondering how to do it. With this information out here you know cad files surfacing out here it just became a lot easier for people who say listen I want to get you know an illegal machine gun or I want to

modify my gun to fire fully automatic. In fully automatic mode you keep your finger depressed at all times when the slide comes in and the round goes into battery, right at that split second, that disconnector is already pushed forward as if you're pulling the trigger and it will drop this piece down, allowing the pin to fire. It's created really kind of a smuggler's paradise for these devices. He caught 45 here with a Glock 17 and thanks to NC silencer it has a fun switch on it. Yes, semi and full. You hear about mass shootings constantly. Are auto-seers being used in some of these bigger shootings?

Yeah, you're seeing these things pop up in a variety of different crimes. The destruction left behind from multiple rounds being fired is evident in shootings that are plaguing North Minneapolis and uptown. Not only in mass shootings, though, we've seen them in shootings of police officers who are just going out and executing search warrants. You see them in carjackings. We've seen them in the hands of extremists. It's very dangerous and scary. Those automatic weapons could potentially take us out.

And so they've really kind of been, you know, an equal opportunity employer to anyone who just needs maximum firepower to commit their acts of violence. history of machine guns in this country. Can you just help all the people out there who don't really have a lot of experience with firearms understand the difference between, say, a machine gun and an AR-15 or like an AK-47 or something like that? So yeah, so when we say AR-15, AK-47, we're talking about like gun type. Let's back it up here and let's talk about gun function because that's really what we're kind of trying to discuss here. So the majority of firearms in this country are semi-automatic, meaning you pull the trigger once and it fires a single round. Now, what we're talking about with these automatic conversion devices or an automatic weapon is we're talking about a firearm that when you pull the trigger, it fires multiple rounds.

And typically, you know, it fires multiple rounds at a high rate of fire. So we're talking 600 rounds per minute, all the way up to, you know, 1200 rounds per minute. That's 20 rounds a second with a single pull of a trigger. And by legal definition in this country, that is what is considered a machine gun. And so when we say a machine gun, really, it could be any type of weapon that has this fully automatic capability put on it. So, you know, that could be an AR-15 all the way down to, you know, a Glock handgun. If it's firing fully auto in the eyes of the law, it's considered a machine gun. So the federal government for the last 90 years has waged a pretty successful campaign

on limiting the flow of automatic weapons inside the U.S. So we go all the way back to the 1930s. Come on, boys, we're going for the record. Three banks in two hours. I think the public enemy era of crime. Come and get me, Capus! You flat-footed, green-brained, soft-ass sons of... People running around with Tommy guns and stuff like that.

I'm bigger than any John Lauer lived! The federal government said, listen, we have to do something about this. So they instituted the National Firearms Act. Here's how it worked. Anyone purchasing a fully automatic weapon would have to pay a $200 tax. That might not sound like a lot, but adjusted for inflation. It's approximately $3,500. Which at the time was, you know, very cost prohibitive.

And then all the way in the 1980s, the federal government then kind of further bolstered their stance on automatic weapons. All new manufacturing in the U.S. for civilian use was outlawed. So what this essentially did was it really kind of created a very limited flow of the automatic weapons that can legally be had within the United States. So if you want to get a legal automatic weapon, you have to register it, you have to pay a tax stamp. But on top of that, they're just exceedingly rare. So if you want to get a legal automatic weapon, you have to register it, you have to pay a tax stamp. But on top of that, they're just exceedingly rare. So they command very expensive prices. So for people who are trying to get automatic weapons outside the purview of the law, they are forced to come up with creative ways. And the most common way for them to do that

is an automatic conversion device. And you're ready to go. No more mechanical resistance. You now have a fully automatic machine there with a sustained rate of fire of 2,000 rounds per minute. And out of these automatic conversion devices, the auto sear is overwhelmingly the most popular. And so people have gone to that

as kind of their new means to get illegal machine guns. Ooh! Yeah, baby! Okay, so it sounds like there's two things going on here. There's a path to legally having a machine gun in this country, but it is sort of onerous and expensive. And then there's a path to having an illegal machine gun in this country. And it's a little shady, but pretty cheap. Yeah, but I wouldn't say that's just a little shady.

It's like really shady. I mean, you know, if you get caught with just one of these, whether it's installed or not on a gun, you know, it's like 10-year federal prison sentence, right? 10 years. Yeah. So, you know, it's a serious crime. Just if you have one, not even if you used it.

Yeah, just for having it. Okay. And then you add on any additional crimes, right? If you get caught using this. So, you know, this is modern arms trafficking as we speak. And so people essentially are taking these devices that, again, they don't look like they're that scary. But, you know, under the federal government, these are machine guns and they're mailing them off in envelopes and stuff like that. And they're being sold for pretty cheap as well.

Tell me more about that. What does this black market look like? You have a couple of different avenues. You have people that are making them at home, you know, in their own machine shops. You have people that are 3D printing these things. And then you also have, you know, the international community that has seized on this as well. There's a company actually that we were looking into in our investigation in China that had sold essentially hundreds of auto sears over a 15-month period to U.S. customers before they had been detected by the federal government. And they were selling these things as low as $20 an item. Huh. Some random company in China is selling auto sears to turn weapons into machine guns for 20 bucks online.

Exactly. Yeah. And but they had sold hundreds of these things before the federal government had figured out what was going on. And then they had quickly had to reach out to Chinese anti-smuggling authorities to have them try to shut down these companies and production factories based in Xinjiang. How are people finding like random Chinese companies selling auto sears? Well, it's actually interesting because they look so benign that they were able to openly advertise and sell these devices freely on the web as Glock switches. We were actually getting comments from viewers surprised at how easy they were to find and actually buy one.

Yeah, that's one of the biggest problems that law enforcement has, how easy they are accessible on the internet. But yeah, we found websites. The ATF tells us social media sites are selling them. And during the course of my investigation, we were able to find plenty of websites that had these. They would have pictures of these things. They would sometimes remove maybe a letter or two, right? It would say something like, you know, lock sitch or something like that. And they would use these types of codings. But it would be obviously a, you know, a Glock switch and they would take Cash App and PayPal and various forms of payment. And like USPS will deliver your auto sear to you.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, you know, HSI has had to work with USPS, you know, Postal Inspector Authorities has had to work with Border Patrol and they've literally seized, you know, pallets and shipments of these things in places like LAX and JFK airports. But, you know, locally also,

there's a whole new market of gun modders, guys who install it and sell the fully kind of put together machine gun out on the streets. And they command some pretty good prices per item. I'm Mike and I sell switches. How many switches do you estimate you've sold over the years? Oh, a few thousand.

A few thousand? Yeah. We spoke to one guy who would sell modified automatic Glocks for anywhere between $300 to $3,000 a weapon. The switches are on the market like PS5s, and you can spend the same amount and get you a switch. They will not have to worry about nothing. And actually, he ended up getting out of the game because he had lost a close friend to a guy with one of these automatically converted Glocks. He was actually one of my runners and he got killed by one. It was my God-awakening signs of where if you keep doing this, then the same thing can happen to you. This is pretty much then got out of hand.

Give us an idea of how much are auto seers being used in crimes involving firearms. We're seeing these actually kind of rise exponentially. So I'll just give you some stats here. So, you know, when I talked to the ATF, they said that in 2020, they had seized 300 converted automatic weapons. By 2021, that number had rose to 1,500. I actually even more so like to point to Homeland Security Investigations because their data actually is a little bit more holistic

because they have been kind of tackling this issue in more of a kind of a task force approach, right? So they've been working with, you know, a whole body of federal entities. And they said that since 2019, they had seized over 4,300 of these devices and had opened up over 600 investigations. I want to remind people that this is at the federal level. One of the things that I, when I talked to multiple federal sources about this story, they had all reminded me that the federal government

and the U.S. Attorney's Office has only a limited amount of resources, right? A lot of the other machine gun cases, they tell me that they're kicking down to local and state courts. And those local and state courts usually don't have as strong machine gun laws. Five states currently in the U.S. don't have any machine gun laws on the books. So, you know,

they say that really when we look at the federal cases, we're only seeing a very small window of actual auto-seer use. So it really is kind of the tip of the iceberg on what's going on out here. The rest of the iceberg is coming up in a minute with Alon Stevens from The Trace on Today Explained. back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time

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Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Today Explained, Ramesh Verm here with Alon Stevens from The Trace talking about his reporting on auto seers that can turn your everyday handguns into machine guns. All the more terrifying because it's easy to do and a lot of people are doing it even though

it's illegal. Well, I kind of want to like back up there because when we talk about guns, one of the things that like we need to talk about is that guns as a commodity are very difficult to enforce at the local level. You know, when you look at the flow of firearms and how they move, they move not only from state to state, they move from out of the country. When we look at drugs, the local police don't do much when it comes to drug enforcement. It's very much kind of left to the DEA because that's how that illegal commodity moves across the country. And when we look at the federal government agency that's tasked with doing this for gun crime, like the Bureau of

Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, they just kind of don't have that. But I will say this one universal. Pretty much everyone in the law enforcement community is saying that this machine gun problem is probably not going to go back in the jar. And so they're going to have to really rethink and reshape how they move forward. And they kind of want to signal that to policymakers as well, that like we're really in this new era of gun trafficking and this has to be considered. President Biden just a few weeks ago came out and spoke about ghost guns and the inherent dangers there. Folks, a felon, a terrorist, a domestic abuser can go from a gun kit to a gun in as little as 30 minutes.

But I'm not sure if he mentioned auto seers. Where does this fall in his list of priorities on gun control? So first of all, it takes some trickle time. You know, it takes some time before the highest in power begins to kind of recognize this as a problem. You know, I have been reporting on ghost guns since back in 2019 and have been following that very closely. And like you said, we're just now seeing a response really from the top government officials

about doing something. I will say this though, just recently after this reporting, 41 Democratic Congress members did write a letter asking the ATF to kind of articulate a plan on what they're going to do about these machine gun devices. We are writing to ask you for your urgent attention to the growing gun violence throughout the country, including the increased use of illegal machine gun conversion devices known as auto sears or switches. So there's definitely questions being asked about what's going on in the space. These devices, which can allow weapons to fire at a rate of up to 1200 bullets per minute, make shootings more deadly,

make our law enforcement officers' jobs more dangerous, and increase the risk that innocent bystanders could be injured or killed when such a volume of bullets is unleashed. When it comes to something like the auto sear, it's much more difficult, right? The auto sear itself is already patently illegal to own whether it's installed or not. So I think it would have to raise some new questions. And I, quite frankly, I don't know if the federal government has even, you know, had those conversations right now at that level on this topic. So because this is something that's already illegal, you don't see a lot of action at the federal level. Where does that leave local law enforcement,

though militarized, going up against civilians with machine guns? Well, you know, it leaves them in kind of a precarious environment because, you know, the federal government is concerned that local law enforcement may not even be able to recognize these things until it's too late. And so the first route, I guess, federal law enforcement decided to take right now is just simply this awareness one. Since Officer Jeffrey's murder, the ATF stepped up training local law enforcement,

in some cases, as easy as showing officers what to look for. Every time we put on that training, there's officers that tell us, oh, we came across those and didn't know what they were. What about the manufacturers of these firearms themselves? Could they do something to their firearms to make them, I don't know, less susceptible to this modification that turns a Glock into a machine gun? Are they getting like let off the hook here for having guns that can be manipulated this way in the first place? I mean, manufacturers, due to a variety of laws

and also due to a very powerful set of lobbying groups, have almost always been absolved of their responsibilities. That's just the story of the American gun. You hardly ever see lawsuits against gun companies, and that's due to a lot of the gun laws. And due to the political situation, you rarely see the ATF do anything really particularly strong in the regulatory side of things because of that political situation. So to expect them to kind of try to push responsibility onto gun companies that have historically shown no interest in even stepping in that arena, I think is overly optimistic in this space. extremely effective modifications that are increasingly easy to find, and people are buying them, and the people who are buying them tend to be

extremists, criminals, people who are willing to risk a 10-year prison sentence to modify a firearm, and the ATF isn't doing a whole lot about it? It leaves us, yeah, in a pretty bad situation. We have a level of technology that has essentially eroded 90 years of gun control policy almost overnight. And it has now essentially come to bear onto a federal agency

that has been politically eroded over the last 30 years. And so it really is kind of this scenario that is kind of endemic to America's issues with gun violence overall. We have a law enforcement apparatus that doesn't really understand gun violence. We have a lot of special interest groups in corporate control that have influence. And, you know, meanwhile, Americans have a thirst for high firepower. And we'll find interesting and unique and technologically creative ways to access that. And that's what's happening right now. Alon Stevens is a reporter at The Trace.

You can find his reporting on the auto seer at thetrace.org. Some of his reporting was done in collaboration with Vice, including some of the audio you heard today on the program. Shout outs to Vice. Our show today was produced by Hadi Mawagdi, edited by Matthew Collette, engineered by Paul Mounsey, and fact-checked by Laura Bullard

and Richard Seema. I'm Sean Ramos-Furham. It's Today Explained. you