Communities around the U.S. have seen shootings carried out with weapons converted to fully automatic in recent years, fueled by a staggering increase in small pieces of metal or plastic made with a 3D printer or ordered online. Laws against machine guns date back to the bloody violence of Prohibition-era gangsters. But the proliferation of devices known by nicknames such as Glock switches, auto sears and chips has allowed people to transform legal semi-automatic weapons into even more dangerous guns, helping fuel gun violence, police and federal authorities said.
The (ATF) reported a 570% increase in the number of conversion devices collected by police departments between 2017 and 2021, the most recent data available.
The devices that can convert legal semi-automatic weapons can be made on a 3D printer in about 35 minutes or ordered from overseas online for less than $30. They’re also quick to install.
“It takes two or three seconds to put in some of these devices into a firearm to make that firearm into a machine gun instantly,” Dettelbach said.
Totally correct and a pretty good solution, I wish more gun owners were as responsible as you sound, and I wish we could take more steps towards a reality in which they are. Realistically, I don’t really want to eliminate guns altogether, I like guns perfectly fine, they’re great plinking devices, they’re great for controlling the populations of invasive species, they’re mechanically, and sometimes historically, fascinating devices. What I prefer more is just a world in which those are the roles that guns take, rather than guns having like, such a fucked up pretense of reality, a pretense of utility, in self-defense. Rather than being an economic engine of political fearmongering. Mostly, I find this type of shit to be incredibly annoying, because my small town is constantly flooded with people who wholeheartedly believe the militarized self-defense chaff around this stuff, but have also never been to any large city in america, and are totally incurious about what the root causes of crime might be. Their concern for the world stops at the end of their fingertips, anything out of reach for them. Anything that doesn’t directly intersect or connect to them, is something they don’t give a shit about at all. It’s myopic, it’s selfish, it’s a mentality that is not conducive to a good society, much less, a society at all. That’s it, that’s my little spiel on that.
I didn’t think much about gun rentals at ranges, that’s a pretty good point. It is still probably the case that waiting periods, I suspect, would cut down on suicides for the same reason I stated previously, right, making guns harder to access for the suicidal will cut down on, not necessarily even suicide attempts, but suicide lethality. Being able to walk into any walmart in the 40’s and blow your brains out with a shotgun for probably less than 20 bucks is kind of, a very convenient method of suicide. It’s like the suicide booth from futurama, almost. Still, the point is taken well, and it’s probably a better point for more stringent precautions at rental ranges to prevent such outcomes. I don’t really know what those would end up looking like. I’d imagine a lot of those generally would end up falling into the middle and latter categories anyways, of suicide, and I would assume they’d be more due to things like ptsd and stuff like that.
I’d also imagine a lot of that is just from NICS being kind of an underfunded thing, but a more thoroughly automated and more publicly accessible database would be a pretty good solution to that, I would think. I’d also think that, more than being totally publicly accessible, it would probably need to be accessible more to local law enforcement and local government, and maybe between private parties if it were verified by credentials, more for protection of personal privacy. Sort of in the same way that buying a used car works out, in lots of states. God damn if that isn’t super inconvenient when you buy a car from the 1970’s with the original title, though. Certainly there’s quite a lot of room for improvement with NICS, but yeah, it’s very hard to kind of, push in any direction, in that respect, because it’s hard to move away from the propaganda about whatever you might pass being a violation of personal freedom and privacy and yadda yadda ya.
A lot of ranges now have a rule that non-members cannot rent a gun unless they are with someone else or brought a gun of their own specifically because of suicides.
My local range still had an incident where a guy brought his new neighbor to the range for some “guy bonding” just so he could shoot himself. Someone who puts that much effort into it is probably pretty committed, but also fuck him for using his neighbor like that and putting everyone at the range through the trauma of someone shooting themselves in the head. Dude survived, though.
As for privacy, I think there’s a solution. Someone should be able to run a background check on themselves in NICS and when it’s approved it can generate a kind of “redemption” code that they can share with others for 30 days (the maximum time a NICS check is good for). Then the seller can run that code and name in combination to verify they’re an approved buyer.
It’s like 2FA for background checks.
What frustrates me endlessly is that so many people who understand the industry refuse to acknowledge its dangers, while so many of the most powerful anti-gun people simply don’t know anything about the firearms they’re trying to regulate. So we end up with either nothing changing at all, or idiotic laws that are actively harmful.
In California, all newly-designed handguns are required to have a feature that literally doesn’t exist. The guns are supposed to stamp their serial numbers on the primers. No new gun has been added to the California approved handgun list in over a decade because if it, which is why some guns that have been redesigned to improve safety and prevent accidental discharge are illegal, where the old pistols that may fire when rattled are still being sold new.
New Jersey had a law mandating that once a major gun manufacturer released a handgun that had electronic smart features to prevent unauthorized people from firing the gun that any gun without that feature would be illegal to sell. So, New Jersey basically prevented those guns from being developed by telling manufacturers their sales would tank on every other model if they ever tried.
On the other side, Texas started permitless carry. I live in Texas and that shit is idiotic. I keep my handgun license current because people should be trained if they’re gonna carry. When I took my first LCH class, there was a woman who couldn’t hit the silhouette target frame (2’x4’) at 3 yards. She obviously failed the test, but now she’s allowed to carry without a license. That’s incredibly stupid.