I seem to recall we’ve discussed this before, but if so I couldn’t find the thread.
In almost any major US city, you can buy illegal heroin or cocaine without much real difficulty, and with only modest difficulty you can buy a stolen handgun. My question is, how hard is it to buy military grade weapons such as automatic firearms? Here’s my hypothetical* list of requirements:
[ul]
[li]It has to be full-auto, either a submachine gun, assault rifle, or light machine gun.[/li][li]It has to be factory built, not some glorified zip gun that an amateur gunsmith turned out in his basement, and not a poorly-done semi-auto conversion.[/li][li]It has to be a caliber that you can legally buy the ammunition in the United States.[/li][li]It has to be in good condition, ideally new or well preserved, not a decades-old piece of worn out scrap.[/li][/ul]IOW, how hard is it to get the same kind of guns that Hollywood portrays Mafia types, mercenaries, and renegade spies as obtaining with trivial ease?
ETA: For purposes of discussion, let’s say that we’re talking about black market weapons, not the limited number of full-auto weapons currently on the Federal registry.
*Hypothetical! I swear! I can’t afford legal guns let alone illegal ones!
The only part that is regulated is the lower receiver. If you can get that, the rest of the parts should be available, legally, almost anywhere.
As for full-auto, there’s not much difference between semi- and full. Most semi’s can be converted although some are specifically designed so as to be difficult to defeat.
A WAG, but I think that outside of Hollywood there really isn’t much of a market for military weapons. Criminals are not looking to conduct military operations - they might want to shoot some rivals but that could normally be done just as easily with civilian firearms which would be much more readily available and less expensive. So any military weapons being sold are probably more akin to cool-looking collectables rather than tools for the job.
Just because…well, I live in a trailer park. It’s not so much that such things don’t exist, it’s just that those that have them…keep them. Of people who would own such an illegal weapon, you’d have to have contacts with either drug cartels (as in you’re a trusted dope buyer that they’ve known well for two or three years) or hardcore gun enthusaists (been in the military and/or know how to blow up dead cars for fun, gun club member, go out hunting regularly, own lots of firepower already…)
What is likely to be the best deal for your money? buy a semiauto Kalashnikov (cheapest reliable from what I’ve heard? Romanian SKS. Chinese AK’s are junk, according to scuttlebutt) and then find someone who will sell you an illegal conversion kit very carefully.
I wouldn’t want a full auto. Two reasons:
-BLAMBLAMBLAMBLAMBLAMBLAMBLAMBLAM’click’-and there goes $20,
-you’re going to get off target firing that many rounds that fast.
Precisely. A Sub-machine gun (say, an Uzi) has a rate of fire of approximately 600 rounds per minute. Firing from, say, a 30-round magazine, hypothetical you has got about five seconds of sustained fire before the magazine is empty. And unless you’ve been in the military or have been a shooter for a long, long time the chances of you hitting what you’re aiming at with such a gun are fairly low- but the chances of causing collateral damage and taking out innocent bystanders (thus really bringing the heat down) are very, very high.
Try and imagine how much 600 rounds of 9mm ammo would cost. And then work out how many spare magazines you’d need (20) for a minutes’ sustained fire, and what they’re going to cost. Then imagine how heavy that’s going to be. Even if you cut it down to three magazines, that’s still a lot of weight and expense for fifteen seconds of fire.
Look at it this way: The number of legally owned automatic weapons used in crimes in the US since the end of Prohibition can almost be counted on one hand with fingers left over. And whilst I don’t have the figures handy, I’d be willing to be the number of illegally owned automatic weapons used in crimes in the US during the same period is similarly minute.
Or, to put it another way: Despite the fact they look cool when used in movies, Automatic weapons are highly impractical for non-Military/Government use for the most part.
There have been two homicides with legally-owned machine guns since 1934 – and one of those was committed by a law enforcement officer. So, one homicide by a civilian-owned machine gun.
As far as crimes (emphasis mine):
‘Less than ten’. And those ‘could have been’ (IMO, ‘likely were’) ‘technical violations’.
Heh. What caliber of ammo can one not get in the U.S.?
Sounds like you’re looking for a weapon that grew legs on a military base. I’ve been to AR-15 police training with officers from multiple departments and found very few had full autos. There were some Chinese made full auto AK’s that someone tried to smuggle here once. But they got caught.
An older (older doesn’t have to mean junk. I have some older guns that have never been fired. With proper care & storage a gun remians in new condition forever) semi-auto will be easier to convert than the newer models. As dzero said, they are being made now days to be much harder to convert illegally.
With proper practice you can bump fire a semi-auto just as fast as a full auto.
There’s a paper that I don’t feel like finding right now, but basically it was an econ grad student who hung out with gang members in Chicago and got to know all the aspects of the gun business. The paper was mentioned quite heavily by the Freakonomics guy.
Basically, the gist was that guns of any quality were terribly difficult to get, and that most people buying black market weaponry didn’t have any idea what they were buying. To determine the caliber of the weapon, they would simply try to fit different rounds in until they found one that fit.
Higher up gang members also severely restricted access by lower ranking members to guns.
Getting ahold of fully automatic weapons was almost impossible. Getting a crappy 9mm or something meant you were paying 3 to 5 times market price, and ammo was also really tough to get.
I don’t think getting movie-style automatic weapons is within the range of most criminals.
Not only are fully automatic weapons not very useful for criminals, I think think the degree to which they are useful in the military is overstated. The US Army at least trains pretty much exclusively using semi-auto fire with anything other than machine guns. With machine guns you generally fire 3-5 second bursts, you still don’t just hold down the trigger. Even if you have a fully automatic weapon there is virtually no tactical situation in which holding the trigger until you run out of rounds is a good idea.
Theres too many things about this that doesn’t add up to me.
Most guns have the caliber forged on the barrel (revolvers and rifles) or the slide (semi-auto pistols).
What ammo? Outside of Illinois one can walk into a Walmart and buy whatever they need, no ID or special permit needed. The Wisconsin boarder is only 50 miles away from Chicago for Khrist sake.
Either that report was full of schmidt, or the people buying those guns were rather stupid.
If one were to buy one that as not on the registry, it would either be a stolen gun from LEO, one that had been snuck in the country or its owner never got around to registering it. Either way, that pool of firearms is extremely small.
Yes, these people are uneducated, and not gun nuts. And going 50 miles to pick up ammo from another state is not that easy. But you don’t have to take my word for it, download the paper. It’s pretty famous.
Can we assume you’re talking about someplace other than the U.S. (Canada?).
But having cocaine imported from 5000 miles away is? Gang members routinely cross state lines to buy ammo to sell on the streets, especially to people in Illinois where a FOID card is required to buy it.
Why would you think going 50 measly miles is a hardship?
If there were enough of a demand for gangs to pay 3-5 times market for a gun, then there is no way you wouldn’t have gun runners servicing them. Maybe the guy who wrote the paper wasn’t familiar with the concept of supply and demand. There is no limit to the supply of guns in the US. You just have jurisdictions that are more or less restrictive. Essentially what he’s saying is that no one with questionable morals was interested in making any money. Because as soon as you’re willing to go to a state with legal gun shows, you can buy as many guns as you can move. That goes 10^20 times for ammo.
Well, as interesting as your gut hunches are, I think the cite I provided is much more authoritative than your intuitions vis a vis the availability of guns to the criminal underclass. If you have a counter-cite, feel free to provide it, else I shall have to resort to the old “plural of anecdote/intuitional conclusions” etc. etc.
Also, given the amount of economic jargon and technical terms used correctly in the paper (by all 4 authors, not just “the guy”), I think the idea that the authors “weren’t familiar with supply and demand” carries little weight as a persuasive argument, especially since the paper deals with empirical observation of actual gang members rather than armchair theory.
Did you even read the paper? It’s quite well researched and explains all of its conclusions satisfactorily.
I’m not a gangster but I know gangsters (the Hispanic kind, not the Italian kind). They have automatic weapons. I’m talking piles of banana clips. A 16-year old friend of mine has at least three (semiautomatic) firearms, all illegally obtained and he isn’t rich by anyone’s standard. He’s fired illegally-owned automatic weapons before. If he wanted an automatic weapon he could get one. I could get one (through him) if I needed to.
I’m sure that report is legit, but it doesn’t describe how things are in Arizona accurately at all.
And of course the military’s goal in life is to openly and publicly kill as many people as they can in a cost-effective manner. Most of the time, a criminal isn’t interested in killing anyone, he just wants to intimidate people. In the case of a gang war, he still has to stay concerned with keeping things on the down-low. If he makes a lot of noise or is walking around town with an AK-47 slung on his back, he’s going to get noticed pretty quick.
In regard to accuracy comments and similar, I think PKBites is spot-on. After all, there’s a reason that our armed forces have generally switched from the full-auto M16 to selective fire options (3 round burst). Heck, try firing an M14 (or other 7.62mm NATO round) on full auto and see how many rounds you put on-target. The barrel climbs from recoil; that’s why a lot of folks had a tendency to shoot “from the hip” - the damned recoil will bruise your shoulder.
IME, most “gangsters” (we’re talking shitty cities in NJ - as though there were another kind) will use cheap ass semi-autos that you can buy brandy-new for $100. They usually feel (to me) like they’re made out of crushed soda cans, but if you’re looking to wipe someone out on the cheap, they’re tough to beat.
A “gangster” (and most of us are part of some kind of gang, whether nefarious or not) is usually looking to increase profits rather than spend $1500 on an AR15 or similar. SKSs can be had for $75, and easily converted.