The Abode of McThag

Dun dun dun!

Legally, that's a machine gun and if you didn't spend $200 and get one made, and registered, before May 19, 1986; you're breaking the law.

So...

DO NOT DO THIS AT HOME IN THE REAL WORLD!

But we're talking about GURPS and Twilight: 2000 where the government has, largely, collapsed and even where it hasn't little to no effort is given to gun control.

To make one you need Armoury/TL7 (Small Arms).  A successful roll gets you one that converts most semi-auto AR-15's to full-auto only.  Change Rof from 3 to 13!.  Also change malf to 16.

A critical success means you don't have to change the malf.

You can also eliminate the malf penalty by fitting the link to the gun, Armoury/TL7 (Small Arms) -5, or by spending the extra time during manufacture to create a fine (reliable) version.

$50, neg. for Malf 16 version.

$100, neg. for Malf 17 version.

$250, neg. no Malf version.

DO NOT DO THIS AT HOME!

It's recently come to my attention that Pam Bondi's office thinks that SBRs are just for criminals.

What a waste of $600 on tax stamps and being all law abiding and shit.

I guess I'm just a very odd criminal that lets the government know what I'm doing...

Not so odd in putting my "crime" on the internet.  I've seen many real criminals do that.

The things are barely on the shelves and someone has already managed to make a switch for one despite all of the anti-Glock Switch provisions Glock made to change from Gen5 to GenV. 

With enough effort, any semi-automatic firearm can be converted to full auto or select fire.

Even the more complicated 1911 has been so converted.  All the way back in the 1920's!

PS: You will note that I did not tag this post with the "crime" label.  This Glock Switch appears to have been made by a licensed SOT/FFL, and is thus perfectly legal.

How many prosecutions for illegal machine gun possession are there?

Nothing I found on Google really says it distinctly and clearly.

This pdf from 1995 says 262,300 arrests for firearm offenses in 1993...  Real up to date information.

Google's AI answer is:

There is no single, regularly updated number for machine gun prosecutions, as this data is not tracked separately from other firearm charges. However, the increasing number of recovered illegal machine gun conversion devices (such as "Glock switches") suggests a rise in related cases. For example, the number of these devices recovered by the ATF at crime scenes jumped 570% from 2012-2016 to 2017-2021, increasing from 814 to 5,454. 

Machine gun conversion device statistics
• 2012–2016: 814 machine gun conversion devices recovered seized
• 2017–2021: 5,454 machine gun conversion devices recovered seized, a 570% increase
• 2019: 658 machine gun conversion devices traced
• 2023: 4,530 machine gun conversion devices recovered seized and traced by the ATF
Related prosecution and sentencing statistics
• While specific machine gun prosecution numbers are not available, overall federal weapons prosecutions have been rising.
• The number of federal felony convictions reached an all-time high of 9,559 in fiscal year 2022, continuing a trend of increases under the current administration.
• In 2023, the U.S. Attorney's office saw an increase in the number of felony arrests that resulted in prosecution. 

Notice they don't stick to apples or oranges in that answer?

It also doesn't mention a thing about arrests or prosecutions.

But... the five years of 2017 to 2021 gives 1,090.8 MG conversion devices traced a year.

If California is 28.3% of the gun owners in the US and the percentage of seizures* is even across the nation (yeah right!) then just 308.7 of those devices are from California.

Definitely need to harass the millions of legal gun owners there for that!

Even if ALL of the 1,090.8 devices were from California it's still bullshit to punish the innocent for the activities of criminals.  There's probably more than a million Glocks in private hands in California and that's only 1/10% of them.  Statistical noise even at the max annual rate.  Just half a percent if ALL of the 2017 to 2021 seizures were in Cali.  Even less for 2023...

Divide these numbers by 13 or so for the national estimate of 13 million Glocks in the USA.  0.03% of Glocks are seized with a switch if ALL MG conversion devices seized are Glock switchs!

But Glock's design needs to change.

But I'm willing to bet there's a substantial overlap in the Venn diagram between "gang member," "felon," "frequent offender," and "possession of illegal MG conversion device."

*I say seized and not recovered because recovered implies that the devices belonged to the government, who somehow lost them and is now retrieving them from the criminals.

The Army loses an M240 and finds it later = recovered.

MC Thug is arrested with a Glock switch from Temu = seized.

The Colt R75 Monitor, a variant of the BAR, was first offered for sale in 1925.

All you needed was money.  No background check.  No waiting period.  No tax stamp.

Just plunk down your cash on the counter and head home to bankrupt yourself buying .30-06 to feed it.

Did I say counter?

Mailing a check to Colt could get you one delivered by the Post Office in six to eight weeks! 

I'm not watching his channel any more, but I wonder if Mark Smith is celebrating this loss too.

Attorney Mark Smith of the Four Boxes Diner YouTube channel is thrilled that we keep losing at the circuit level over whether machine guns can be banned.

Core of his excitement seems to be that we're avoiding it going to SCOTUS, where we're sure to lose.

Dude.  We're already losing.  You're celebrating another loss.

I recognize the philosophy he's using.  As soon as we have the perfect defendant to fight this all the way to SCOTUS, THEN we pull out all the stops and...

I've been waiting for Mr or Ms Perfect since 1986.

They don't exist.

The kind of person they're looking for doesn't have illegal machine guns.  The perfect client doesn't break the law.

The thing about how our rights are supposed to work, and I cannot get lawyers to grasp the philosophy, is they also apply to the scummiest of the scum.

So, no, a scumbag should not be punished for breaking a law that's unconstitutional and they are the people who need to be protected from the government more than the beatified saintly law-abiding citizenry at large.

The Bill of Rights is for everyone, not just the best of us. 

International Milspec has beat me to production.

I can see several differences between the real E4A and what they've done; and I might just steal their changes for mine when I finally get around to making it.

Kevin shares US v Rock Island Armory.

The Central District of Illinois dismissed the charges and the government did not appeal.

Read the whole thing.

It's something.

It's not dicta.

The suits over SBR, SBS, and AOW have a precedent in this case.

Veddy intresting. 

Dear GOA:

Getting the tax on, some, NFA items knocked down to $0 while keeping the registration and enhanced background checks is a, mostly, good thing...

It is not a major victory for our rights.

It is NOT what you set out to accomplish.

You bragged about how you got the language for full removal of short barrel rifles & shotguns and suppressors into the Senate version of the bill before the parlimentarian squished that plan.

Now that we have crumbs rather than cake you're bragging like this was what you planned all along?

Gods it ticks me off the way you guys try to communicate. 

If I got busted selling an NFA item without a Form 4, or selling a non-transferable NFA item to a normal person:  I'd be in jail!

But Bradley Wendt, police chief of Adair, Iowa, is not in jail.

Is he?

Hey!  WAIT!  He is!  Or will be once he loses his appeal.

But something he says worries me.

"If I'm guilty of this, every cop in the nation's going to jail."

Exactly how widespread is cops selling NFA stuff without the proper taxes and licenses?

And, honestly, how can we get more of it because, clearly, the sales aren't feeding crime beyond the malum prohibitum violation of the NFA.

The only reason I wouldn't be getting an M134 from the trunk of my local LEO's car is I can't afford the $6,000 a minute rate of fire.  But I'd damn sure like a couple lowers with giggle switches.

I think that this conviction and the statement of the former police chief are evidence enough to end the stupidity of the NFA and let us have our liberty back.

I wondered how long it would take before Glock switches would change the semi-auto pistols into readily restored machine guns.

Cam Edwards speculates too.

AR15 News mentions Mr Edwards article in the attached video.

Though I think that "restored" requires that it had to have once been made as a machine gun and isn't any more.  Without Chevron to let them lawyerize the word "restored" to mean "converted" we might just skate.

I think that "once a machine gun always a machine gun" is very vulnerable now since they pulled that right out of their asses.

Bearing Arms and David Codrea are both concerned that "common use" is excluding a lot of guns because they were made illegal before they could be acquired in sufficient numbers to attain "common use" status.

Welcome to 2014, gentlemen.

US vs Kittson is starting in the 9th Circus.

Prolly going nowhere, but it'd be kinda neat if SCOTUS got it and nuked the Hughes Amendment.

Quote from where I found it:

A guy with a felony for attempted murder and manslaughter tried to sell a PPSh-41 to the ATF, and is now appealing to the most liberal circuit in the US.  So this is going to go nowhere.

Since the entire NFA hinges on the conceit that it's legal under Congress' taxing power, refusing to accept the payment of the tax on MG's means they can't ban them.

So they're left with accepting taxes to keep them restricted or seeing them become the same as any other firearm.

With Bruen floating around out there, this could be interesting.

Another "ackshually" firearms terminology moment spurred by Ian's recent video and Battleswarm's comments on it.

As Ian says; 'automatic' at one point meant self-loading.  The gun loaded the next round automatically.

Automatic becomes the term for when machine guns get developed because the gun does everything automatically and self-loaders become semi-automatic.

All is now well and good.  For all time.

But, wait, there's more!

Today we're calling automatic "fully automatic" but even that term isn't clear because there were a couple of machine guns with rate reducers and a selector that said "slow" and "full".  Full-auto on a BAR is the unreduced rate of fire.

And then there's burst modes.

Burst is it's own thing and isn't fully automatic in the same way that semi-automatic isn't.  It's just between full rate and self-loading.

LEGALLY burst modes are machine gun.

Just like "assault rifle" is a technical term for something, the legal terminology is creeping into the technical language. 

We should really fight that.

And we should learn to say "cyclic" correctly.  It's "sigh-click" not "sick-lick".

Larry Vickers has this indictment.

He's plead guilty to some other charges as well, notably:

Vickers also pleaded guilty to a conspiracy to violate U.S. sanctions against a foreign firearms manufacturer between July 2014 and March 2021, in the Southern District of Florida.

The firearms charges, prolly unconstitutional.

Sanctions violations?  Import sanctions are constitutional.

Even sanctions on gun parts or laser printer cartridges.

The roe at Arfcom over this keeps missing that point.

But some of the details that thread are revealing...

For someone who did what he did in the military for so long, you'd think he'd have internalized some fucking OPSEC and COMSEC.

There's emails between him and the sheriff's where they're talking about how they're doing an end-run on the laws openly.

At a time when ATF has been cracking down on this not-really-a-loophole in the FOPA restriction on new MG manufacture and transfers.

Yes, if you're the right kind of FFL/SOT, you can get brand new machineguns imported with an LEO letter.

Yes, if you're the right kind of FFL/SOT, you can make brand new machineguns with an LEO letter.

Yes, if you're the right kind of FFL/SOT, once they are done doing their testing and evaluation, you can keep the test article and play with it like you owned it.

But it's all about intent.

The agency writing the letter has to intend to test and evaluate the gun in question.

The FFL/SOT has to acquire the gun in question with the sole intention of providing it to the LEO agency for their testing and evaluation.

So when you write your buddy, the sheriff, and say, "write me a letter for a c.2022 Gigablaster, because I want one," and the sheriff does and you buy one with the intention of getting it to play with like you owned it and with no intention from you or the LEO to test or evaluate it for the LEO...

You broke the law.

An unconstitutional law, in my opinion, but it's still on the books and being actively enforced.

And you openly discussed it on an unsecure channel!

That was stupid.

I've made several weird historical worlds over the years.

Many, or most, have been in places where the open display of full-on military weapons is, if not encouraged, absolutely OK.

Hardly any player takes a sub-machine gun.

Never has a player taken a machine gun without external forces being applied to them.

Machine guns are heavy and expensive in GURPS, so players instinctively avoid them.  3e's shitty cumbersome rules for applying them to an area target mask their utility.

Plus, some machine guns don't even have a lot of shots before needing reloading.

But sub-machine guns kinda confused me for a while.

The rock-and-roll is offset by the lack of damage and, unless you applied all the buck-fever, bullet-shyness and flinch mods, 3e encouraged aimed single shot fire.

If you could make one die roll and get a 7d hit to the vitals, why waste most of the bullets for a couple of 3d-1 hits to the body?

Oh, and WW1 and WW2 era sub guns are as heavy or heavier than full-power bolt-actions.

Then, after a certain history point, a battle or assault rifle lets you have your cake and eat it too.

4e has replaced the beaten zone rules with suppressing fire.  It's much simpler and smoother running.

Unfortunately, I have a lack of 4e playing time to lure an unsuspecting player to hump the pig.

My post speculating that the fine and punishment for owning an illegal machine gun is almost cheaper than the punishment of owning one legitimately has some interesting comments.

Something that comes up a lot about machine guns is people lamenting their lack of accuracy.

I think this stems from a misunderstanding of what a machine gun is for.

Despite firing bullets, they're not, primarily, point effect weapons.

A rifle is a point effect weapon.

Machine guns are area effect weapons.

This requires more dispersion between shots than a rifle so that the beaten zone is big enough to fix the bad guys in place with their heads down while the maneuver portion of the unit moves up on them.

Any hits that occur during this are bonuses.

The Army confuses the matter by putting scopes on some of their MGs.

The Marines REALLY confuse the matter by issuing a rifle, including a scope, as an LMG. 

None of this is clarified by the legal definition of machine gun, which doesn't match the military definition at all.

An Uzi isn't a machine gun to an Army, but it is to ATF.

An M16 is a rifle to the Army, but a machine gun to the ATF.

 Morphy's has a transferable M249 up for auction.

Opening bid is $300,000.

Expected price is $600,000 to $1,000,000.

I can't help but think there's perverse incentives happening because of this.

The $250k max fine is still under the minimum bid... then there's the (up to) 10 year sentence.

First felony is free, they say.

When I speculate about this, I often wonder just how many unregistered machine guns are out there.

Not terribly long ago a search warrant for a completely unrelated to guns search found dozens of MG's at some guy's house.  And the evidence he was guilty of the crime they got the warrant for, but still.

He lived in the middle of nowhere and until the warrant, nobody appeared to be the wiser he was making MG's and shooting them on his property.

I want to say he was making M1919's, but I could be remembering wrong.

I've never been the target market for a machine gun.

I can barely afford to feed the semi-autos.

A giggle switch would lead to living in the dark.

Under a bridge.

In a refrigerator box.

With no guns at all.

Divorced.

And that's doing it by obeying the law!

If I was doing it illegally I'd have to hope the cops were faster than Harvey and got me into the police car before she cut my throat.

The pistol brace amnesty has expired and the numbers are in.

Around 250k people did the Form 1 to make an SBR out of their pistol with a brace.

Out of approximately 40 million of those braces in the wild.

That is epic noncompliance.

The kind of "fuck off government man" stuff the nation was founded on.

It will be interesting if the suits are successful and SCOTUS rules on it before someone lights the candle on more kinetic resistance than passive noncompliance.

I'd love to see a ruling that agrees with ATF that a brace makes a pistol a short barreled rifle BUT the Constitution doesn't give the government any power to regulate barrel length or overall length of any firearm because 2nd Amendment.