In some recent threads on the Second Amendment, several people have posted that any gun control laws would have no significant effect even if they were enacted. The claim is that guns, even if illegal, would be widely smuggled in from other countries, stolen from legitimate owners, or manufactured in underground facilities.
Now that makes me wonder. As I understand it, full automatic weapons have been illegal for private ownership in the United States since 1934. I’ve always assumed that as a result, they’re pretty rare. But am I wrong? The above argument would say that there must be tens of thousands of automatic weapons floating around. Is this true?
Obviously, I’m not going to get a definitive answer. But I’m just looking for some signs. Do the police find illegal automatic weapons on a regular basis? Do people in the gun business “know somebody who knows somebody”? Is the National Firearms Act an empty law that has no effect because anyone who wants an automatic weapon (or any of the other weapons banned by it) has one anyway?
Well, there’s a lot to go into, but I don’t think automatic firearms have ever been illegal on a national level in the US. Just exceedingly difficult to purchase due to the paperwork, high tax stamp price, and the fact that the only automatic weapons that can be purchased are ones older than a certain date (so, there is a max number of existing weapons that have to be maintained and repaired, not allowing for newly built ones)
Assuming the addendum to your question is “In Civilian Hands”, the short answer is “No”.
For starters, full-auto stuff is incredibly expensive. Last I heard, the cheapest legal full-auto that could be obtained (provided you lived in a state which allowed full-auto ownership) was a MAC-10 and they ran to around $5,000. Something “interesting” like a Thompson or an Uzi or an actual M-16 or AK-47 was considerably more. That was a couple of years ago so it stands to reason the price has probably gone up due to attrition as guns (or more specifically, the parts in them) wear out or break.
Secondly, it costs a fortune to feed an automatic weapon. Assuming a rate of fire of 600 rounds per minute, a 30-round magazine is going to last about five seconds. Given what centrefire ammunition costs these days, it’s not an economic (or even, dare I say it, “sensible”) arms choice.
So, the vast majority of full-auto weapons in civilian hands in the US, to the best of my knowledge, are held by collectors (who know what they’re doing with them, how to care for them, store them properly, be responsible with them, etc etc etc) and there’ll also be a few owned as family heirlooms and so on.
Gasoline is unbelievably cheap compared to ammunition. You can have hours of fun driving in a car for less than it would cost to get a half hour of range time in, just because of the ammo costs.
Also, I believe there are many people who mistake semi-automatic weapons (1 trigger pull = 1 shot, bullets chambered automatically) for automatic weapons. I can’t tell you how many times I have had to remind reporters that police no longer use “service revolvers” which annoys them since it limits their writing options.
Right. Not illegal altogether, but highly controlled. Part of the arguments about the ineffectiveness of the gun control laws rest on there already being a large amount of illegal firearms in circulation that haven’t been stopped by already being illegal - that would include full-auto weapons that were acquired by illicit chanels (smuggling, theft), or semis that were clandestinely converted to FA (something that got a lot of publicity in the late 80s and early 90s, and was a contributing influence to the original so-called “assault weapons ban”)
As 2gigch1 states, there’s also a certain degree of confusion; most of what you hear referred in the media as “assault weapons” available for general sale are mechanically just semiauto repeaters - you fire as fast as you can pull the trigger. For most everyday applications that is plenty rapid-fire enough and an unfamiliar civilian may indeed believe that is auto fire.
Hah, don’t get me started on reporters who don’t bother to learn the basics of what they’re writing about. One of my favorites was back when Dick Cheney accidentally shot one of his hunting buddies, and an article said he had shot the man with a 20mm rifle or something ridiculous like that (a 20 gauge shotgun is a smallish shotgun mostly used for bird hunting, a 20mm rifle is something more along the lines of what you’d use against armored vehicles).
Tens of thousands? Possibly. This is a big country, there could easily be tens of thousands of anything out there.
Do the police find illegal automatic weapons on a regular basis? Yes, depending on what you mean by routinely. They sometimes find the odd full auto in busts and there are a lot of full autos being found around the Mexican border. If you were a cop, I don’t think it would be surprising to find a full auto, but that doesn’t mean they find them daily.
Citizens can own fully-automatic weapons that have been converted into semi-automatic weapons. There are a lot of gunsmiths out there that know how to convert them back. Pretty much any U.S. citizen without a felony conviction can get hold of an automatic weapon legally if they have enough money and time, or get one illegally if they have enough money. This is easier in some states than others, obviously.
Based on this documentary I saw called “Machete,” every drug gang out there has tens of thousands of fully-automatic weapons.
No they can’t. Unless you mean “weapons whose design has been modified to permit semi-automatic operation only”. Altering an existing automatic weapon makes no difference to its NFA status.
I’m constantly bagging on my LAPD buddy about what a crooked cop he is. Every time he tells me some story about doing a rolling pullover on a guy with trunk full of pot, I say something like “well that must have paid off your mortgage,” and he invariably shoots me this looks that says “yeah right, asshole—very funny.” Anyway, a few months ago he asked me if he could borrow my AR-15 for a private training exercise. Never missing an opportunity to torture him, I said “OK, but you’re not going to do anything funny to it, are you? It’s not going to fire three-round bursts when I get it back, is it?” He looked at me and replied in complete seriousness “do you want it to?” And this is a guy who told me that he lasted an entire three weeks in Rampart Division before he told them all to go fuck themselves and walked out of there. I just hung my head and cried in exasperation.
But no, real life is not like The Shield where every bad guy on the streets of Rampart or South-Central is packing a full-auto Uzi. Even rock dealers know that firing a 30-round burst from a handheld position while running backwards will get you the Crack Dealer’s Association Retard of the Year award.
The is correct. Any firearm that has EVER been an automatic firearm is still an automatic firearm in the eyes of the BATF.
Shorter version: Having a gun that is easily converted to full-auto, OR the parts to do so incurs the same legal wrath that having an actual full-auto gun would. The only legal way to own such a convertible gun would be if it were legally produced in the full auto configuration prior to 1990, and to register it and pay the transfer tax. Legally it would be a machine gun regardless of the configuration. Because legal full auto guns are so expensive, it would be more sensible to have a second inexpensive semi-auto gun to take any slow-fire wear off an expensive gun.
Longer Version:
What may be causing this myth:
Fully automatic firearms can be “demilled”: Crudely cut apart with specific pieces AND the places required to mount them removed.
In the eyes of the law, the gun then stops being a gun. It becomes scrap metal or spare parts. It IS true that there are people, including gunsmiths who use these demilled gun parts to build a semi-auto version of the real gun.
This requires that a semi-auto “receiver”, the main part of the gun, and the part that constitutes the entire gun in the eyes of the law, be either made or bought. If the de-milled gun was not US made, then a maximum of 10 parts (from a BATF list) can be used to assemble a “new” (in the eyes of the law) gun.
Such “builds” are missing critical parts to make them automatic weapons. The BATF considers such parts ALONE to constitute an automatic weapon. If you are found with the parts, you will be charged exactly as if you had a fully assembled and functional machine gun. In addition, the build’s receiver lacks provisions to mount these parts, and if such provisions are present, the BATF also considers that ALONE to constitute an automatic weapon. Even having just the text engraved where a selector lever would point to the full auto position makes it legally a machine gun.
My father was a licensed gun dealer when I was growing up and we literally had hundreds of guns over the years including four true machine guns (manufactured full-auto). One was an Uzi shooting nine 9mm rounds a second, another was a Mach 10 shooting nineteen .45 rounds a second, a Bull-Pup, and an M-16. I know people claim personal stories don’t mean much but I think they should in this case. You can own machine guns legally in the U.S. However, it is a pain in the ass to do legally and they are expensive as hell to shoot on full-auto mode. You have to pay for a federal stamp plus undergo a detailed investigation to own them. A number of his friends had them as well so I don’t think tens of thousands in existence in the U.S. is a low estimate all.
However, they aren’t much to be especially worried about. They are usually used for shooting demonstrations but they aren’t that much fun to shoot. The Mach 10 has a recoil like a rocket booster in your hands and burns through its 50 round clip in 2.5 seconds. It is mainly good for stunt shooting. It works much better in semi-auto mode.
There are also guns illegally converted from semi-auto to full-auto. You used to be able to buy converter kits that would convert a civilian AR-15 to an M-16 and there are probably a bunch of those out there. Those aren’t good civilian weapons however to use for bad purposes. They burn through rounds way too quickly and are hard to shoot accurately.
