In every hollywood action movie it seems the bad guys in any urban area seem to have access to unlimited fully automatic Ak-47’s and the likes. However from what I understand fully-automatic weapons are actually pretty hard to get a hold of at least for the regular citizen and thus are pretty rare.
I know in the 1920’s and 30’s auto weapons became a scourge but in current times are there many criminal at least in the US still using automatic guns or this more of a hollywood fantasy? To clarify i’m not talking semi-automatic assault rifles and the like but full auto-fire.
Legally owned? Less than never. Last cite I saw said 2 murders since 1934, a couple dozen other non-homicides.
Illegally? Some from a few decades ago could be modified. That’s much harder now. Others getting their hands on the depends on their wherewithal. I doubt Doughboy would been able to get one in real life. If anyone has the it’s probably involving the drug trade.
Suffice it to say, people who buy Class III weapons are willing to put in usually $10,000 plus and also spend tons on ammo. They’re not usually planning heists.
I brought up a question in one of the gun threads a while ago, how easy is it to modify a semi-auto to full-auto, and the answer was “not”. Gunsmiths with the skills to turn a semi into a reliable full auto are few and far between, and they’re making way too much money repairing guns for rich people to risk serious jail time. Semis like the Mac 10, which used to be modifiable by the application of a simple kit, now require extensive machining before they can be modified (see above re: reliable).
As far as actual crime is concerned, there was one case of a police officer using a full-auto weapon that was in the evidence locker to commit a crime, and a few weeks ago somebody accidentally fired a burst from his illegally-owned full-auto rifle through the roof of his apartment, killing a child upstairs.
-In 33+ yrs working in or with law enforcement, once, an ingram Mac-11-used in a robbery- 9mm, [the mac-10 is .45cal], he threw it on the ground and ran, a good idea, as getting caught with an unlic. class 3 adds 10yrs to sentence or gets you 10yrs alone. btw no one hurt.
Automatic weapons are quite expensive. Most crimes using guns are robberies, with a minor amount of ‘loot’ stolen. It’s just as easy to do such a robbery with a $25 ‘Saturday night special’ pistol as with an expensive automatic weapon. And that is a much better ‘return on investment’. Most criminals are chronically broke, and so don’t have money to invest in expensive tools of the trade – they use whatever cheap guns they can get their hands on.
Yeah, but it turns out without proper training, the extra firepower is nearly useless and you end up hitting bystanders as well as (or instead of) your rivals.
Yeah, your normal automatic weapon gets about ~4 seconds of firing time with a normal ~30 round magazine and the trigger held down. Most “gangstas,” let alone most soldiers, won’t know how to manage that.
It’s not going to be a good answer for your question, Keyser, but it’s the best data I can find. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives puts out a report every year listing all of the ‘firearms traces’ they are asked to perform. Often, a firearms trace is requested because the firearm is found at a crime scene, or suspected of being used in a crime, but not always. Anyway, they break out the data a variety of ways, and one of those ways is they list all “machineguns” that were traced in the year. From the linked Excel sheet, you can see that in 2012, 679 traces were requested in the Machine Gun category, out of a total of 235,883 firearms/destructive device traces.
Again, this doesn’t mean that 679 machineguns were used in a crime. It could be a lot less. Perhaps ATF was called to an arson scene, and among the torched possessions were several machine guns? Maybe they opened a storage unit and found an unregistered AK? On the other hand, it could be more—I don’t see how the BATFE could trace a firearm where the serial numbers were filed/etched off. Or where somebody built something like a Sten Gun.
One thing you’ll find if you choose to dig further is that full auto firearms statistics are often conflated with semi-auto “assault weapons” statistics. It makes it difficult to determine what’s what. There have been several other threads on the Dope on this subject incidentally.
I’m not sure what “machine gun” means, but I also suspect it includes a lot of semi-automatic weapons of a particular shape. “Any other weapon” though, that implies a weapon where unlawful possession is 10 years in a federal PMITA prison.
IIRC, the firearms used in that robbery had been illegally modified. If I do remember correctly, then it was not like in the movies where they got ahold of stolen assault rifles.
‘Machine gun’ (and ‘assault rifle’) has a specific definition. A ‘machine gun’ can fire more than one round per pull of the trigger. ‘Semi-automatic’ means that you only get one round per pull of the trigger. Shape has nothing to do with it.