“Here, I think you might need this sometime.”
“Sweetie, I have a gift for you. Isn’t it pretty?”
I’m not the only one. I have a former sex partner whose uncle gave him five unregistered guns (a collection of some kind, apparently the things were noteworthy or interesting in some way). He had no idea what to do with them and after checking they were unloaded put them in a box and stuffed it in the back of the attic.
I was heavily involved in competitive shooting for a few years. I could probably find someone who has a “friend” making full auto recievers for AK or AR pattern guns with 3-4 phone calls.
Sorry, I suppose that sentence was a bit ambiguous. Mill means end mill. A Bridgeport, basically. Which also serves as a precision drill press and tapping machine. In fact I had a CNC mill in mind, but that’s more of a time-saver than anything.
Carbide tooling and all that is cheap and easily available. I use it all the time.
The heat treatment stuff if the farthest beyond my abilities, but is all possible in a home shop. Also, I did not mean to imply that everything would be completely from scratch–although I suppose I could make my own springs, there is enough off-the-shelf stuff that I doubt that would be necessary. We are, presumably, still in a world where mcmaster.com still works.
I’m quite certain that I could do a far better job than the guns in this article which, although highly unreliable, still manage to kill a fair number of people.
Rifling is one of the trickier bits. But making custom cutting tools is not tremendously difficult. One technique is to make a series of bullet-shaped cutters with progressively taller cutting elements around the circumference; these would just be pushed through the barrel incrementally.
Of course, you can just buy rifled barrels off the shelf without any kind of ID or background check. Though I guess that’s cheating.
You think scores of people were butchered or maimed by a young Sheldon Cooper?
I live in Taiwan, so there is a zero percent chance of that possibility.
For the connections in the States, I only regularly talk to my 81-year-old mother. Ive got a few friends that I stay in contact with, but they all are white collar professional types and I doubt they would know either.
My best bet would be a “Need Answer Fast” in GQ before the thread gets shut down.
Oh good grief!
I called him a socially awkward kid because it was germane to the topic of conversation. Socially awkward people don’t typically have the networking skills it takes to obtain a weapon illegally. At least, I don’t think they do.
But whatever, if you need me to state the blindingly obvious, here ya’ go: Mateen was a total scumbag, shit stain, goat fucker. And the world became a better place now that his life has been extinguished from it.
Feel better?
Felons can buy firearms at gun shows thanks to the gun show loophole. If that was closed, presumably organized crime and organized terrorist organizations will find a way to obtain weaponry.
The small time criminal faces greater challenges. It’s my understanding that the black market for guns is very different from the black market for drugs. Drug dealers have plenty of return customers. In contrast, the black market for guns is pretty thin: it’s more difficult to connect buyer and seller. Empirically, this has been shown to be the case in Chicago. Pdf cite: http://home.uchicago.edu/ludwigj/papers/EJ_gun_markets_2007.pdf
I wish people would stop calling it that. If one must call it a loophole, it’s the “private sale loophole.” It has nothing to do with gun shows.
I just stripped a Sig Sauer P220 as an example of an typical Browning short recoil-style semi-automatic firearm. Not counting the magazine (which is its own special kind of problem) and the slide lock (which could be deleted from a design without impacting the basic functionality) there are four springs that are necessary for the firearm to function, none of which could be purchased from McMaster-Carr or any other generic source. Of course, turning custom springs isn’t hard per se–I’ve done it by hand with piano wire and a blowtorch–but doing it and getting consistent properties in a spring that will last more than a few hundred cycles takes a significant amount of training and experience. Machining on the tool steel that the working mechanism of a firearm is made of is not trivial and many would-be gun manufacturers have gone out of business underestimating the difficulty of achieving the necessary tolerances to operate an autoloading weapon reliably. Cutting rifling isn’t just a matter of pushing a reaming disc down a barrel; it also has to be kept straight to sub-mil tolerances, and sear and contact surfaces need to be machined and polished down to reasonably smooth and regular surfaces for reliable operation. Unless you have specific experience in gunsmithing and machining tool-grade steels, claiming that you “could build one fairly easily” is unqualified bombast.
Of course, you could make a straight blowback, open bolt firing submachine gun from mostly stamped and folded sheet metal and an unrifled heavy pipe barrel connected together with pipe fittings capable of firing low power straight wall cartridge ammo (.32 ACP or .380 ACP) without having to do much in the way of machining or accurate fitting. It won’t be terribly reliable and certainly not very concealable, nor in any way accurate or safe, but I guess technically meets the criteria of the o.p. However, for the time it would take you to put together even that crapshooter, I could go down to Westlake or up to Sun Valley and source half a dozen service grade pistols.
Stranger
To be clear, in no way am I saying I could build something equivalent to even a fairly crappy off-the-shelf weapon. The context of the discussion is whether something suitable for a terrorist/spree killer operation is available to a felon.
There’s quite a lot of ground between zip guns made from pipe fittings vs. an AR-15 (or clone) made by a reputable supplier, as evidenced by large underground and semi-underground industries making weapons at just about any quality level one desires. A weapon used in such attacks doesn’t need to last more than a few hundred cycles.
Obviously you’re correct that the time/value of making a weapon is not all that high. And by the standards of the OP, there are still other, more efficient solutions to “making” weapons–the “80% lower receiver” route being the most obvious, and trivial even for a rank beginner.
Yes. But I also think that when she does, right wingers will claim it isn’t the truth.
Correct. The majority of sellers at a gun show are FFL holders. The “loophole,” is that a person can sell to another person, both residents of the same state, without background checks. So when a private person, not normally in the business of selling guns, sets up a table at a gun show, perhaps with the goal of selling off items in his collection, he doesn’t have to fill out federal transfer forms and call in for a background check.
The majority of sellers at gun shows are, of course, businesses and not private sellers.
And the “loophole” applies with equal force to Bill, who sells his old Ruger to his friend Ted down the street, with no gun show involved.
This, pretty much.
Adding gender to the mix, in my case it would be a situation of me making a case about how I need one for my safety, and the family members would probably limit me to one of those “lady guns,” like the kind marketed to women to carry in a small purse. They’re responsible enough* that they would most likely set it up that they’d give me a 15 minute lesson before sending me home with it. (I’m having sort of a moment now, rolling my eyes at the sexism of how I know this would play out if I wanted a more powerful gun – a lot of “well now, that would be an awful lot of gun for a little lady, tsk tsk” – combined with the fact that I adamantly don’t want any kind of gun at all.)
I have zero clue about how to go about purchasing an illegal gun from a stranger.
Hell yes. Rednecks have their sources.
Sure I could; one, maybe two phone calls.
I blame the DEA. By keeping cannabis illegal, they’ve created a situation where otherwise law abiding folks (like me) have to asscociate with people who “have ties”.
This is often why I thought pot is the “gateway” drug. Had it been legal in the first place, far fewer people would be messing with the harder stuff.
The kety term in the OP is “if you had a mind to.”
If I on a whim decided to acquire a firearm today - which would be illegal as I am not a holder of the license needed to do so - I would not have one by day’s end, just because it’s never crossed my mind before and I likely couldn’t figure out where to get one, and then I’d give up.
If I had a mind to get one - if I really was determined to acquire a gun - of course I could; I’m not stupid, I have money, and I could easily figure out the best way to get my weapon of choice. It would take a little while so I could ensure my tracks were hidden but it’s not that tough to get illegal things if you really want to get them.
I said “no”, not because I couldn’t get a gun if I wanted to, but because here in Texas, there are just about no laws making my purchase of any gun illegal, since I’m not a felon or part of any other group restricted from buying firearms.
So the only ways I can think of to get an illegal firearm would be to somehow find someone with a stolen gun, or maybe one used in a crime and buy it from them. Even then, I’m not sure that my purchasing would actually be illegal, if I had no reason to believe that there was anything amiss about the gun.
Straw purchase is about the only illegal way I can think of, and I’d probably have a hard time finding someone who wouldn’t just say “What are you up to?” Why don’t YOU go buy it?"
I know the exact spot where I could, and how to do it. I’ve been told the same information by three drug addicts, two cops, and several other people.
I know the area to go to inquire but they might think I look like a cop.
Most of the illegal guns I’ve taken off of people have been pieces of shit so I would rather get one legally.