A Marietta man was indicted last week after he brought an altered gun onto Georgia Tech’s campus that would have allowed the user to fire more than 1,000 rounds per minute, federal prosecutors said.
To help local and federal prosecutors handling similar cases involving guns altered to become fully automatic, law enforcement officials with Atlanta Police and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives held a demonstration on Friday at the Atlanta Police firing range.
The prevalence of these guns and conversion devices is rising. A recent ATF report found a sharp increase of the devices, called auto sears or switches, that can turn a handgun or rifle into machine gun. According to the report, ATF recovered 5,454 conversion devices from 2017 through 2021, an increase of 570% compared to 814 similar parts recovered from 2012 to 2016.
“These are devices that look small but the danger they can do on a city street or in a city park is devastating. They turn a standard weapon and turn it into a machine gun,” Atlanta Police Chief Darin Schierbaum said.
A 2022 mass shooting in downtown Sacramento left six people dead and twelve others injured. A handgun used in the shooting had been converted to a fully automatic gun using a conversion device, LA Times reported. Officials estimated at least 100 rounds were fired.
Shortly after the shooting, about 40 members of Congress sent a letter to at-the-time ATF acting director Marvin Richardson asking the agency to act on the increasing number of conversion devices.
Credit: Ben Hendren For The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Credit: Ben Hendren For The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Benjamin Gibbons, ATF Special Agent in Charge of Atlanta Field Division, said they wanted to give prosecutors a chance to have a better understanding about what they are prosecuting.
“These are devices that are added to handguns and rifles, that enable these semi-automatic weapons to be fully automatic,” Gibbons said. “This is a public safety issue. It can cause harm, not only to law enforcement officers but members of the community.”
Fred Milanowski, ATF Special Agent in Charge of the Houston Field Office, told the Houston Chronicle in an interview last year that across the country, the number of guns modified with conversion devices or switches that had been seized by law enforcement increased from 300 in 2020 to more than 1,500 in 2021.
Gibbons said there are two ways people are getting access to the devices: purchasing from overseas vendors (primarily Russia and China) and 3-D printers. The cost can range for as little as $50 to as high as $800.
It doesn’t matter how people acquire these devices, prosecutors said.
“Simply possessing one of these devices, it’s a federal crime,” said Ryan Buchanan, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia.
Buchanan said his office is committed to prosecuting cases in which people are found in possession of these devices and guns. If convicted of possessing a switch device, a person can be sentenced to up to 10 years in federal prison.
During a recent drug arrest on Peachtree Street, Schierbaum said officers found the suspect in possession of a number of switch devices in his bag. One of the charges against Atlanta rapper Young Thug in the RICO indictment alleges the rapper, along with two co-defendants, were in possession of a Glock with a switch device.
“It is a rapid dispersion of death and destruction. It’s round after round, very quickly,” Schierbaum said.
The prevalence of the devices is not limited to Georgia.
In May, U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Tennessee Kevin Ritz announced 26 individuals would be prosecuted for crimes involving machine gun conversion devices, also known as switches or auto sears. An 18-year-old Indianapolis man was arrested earlier this month after police found him with three handguns and possession of a machine gun conversion, WRTV News reported.
The Preventing Illegal Weapons Trafficking Act of 2023, a bill introduced by Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar in April, if passed, would direct the Attorney General, the Secretary of Homeland Security and the Secretary of the Treasury to “develop and implement a strategy to prevent or intercept the importation or trafficking of machine gun conversion devices”.
“It’s not just in Atlanta. Go look in the surrounding counties, we are seeing individuals being killed in gas stations, in parks and often times, weapons modified in this manner are at play in those homicides,” Schierbaum said.
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