As noted in an earlier post today, machine guns are the most heavily restricted type of firearm in the nation. You have to jump through various hoops just to get a crack at spending thousands of dollars on one of a dwindling number of weapons one can lawfully own. It’s basically everything the typical anti-Second Amendment zealot says they want for all firearms…and then some.

And yet, it doesn’t seem to be doing a whole heck of a lot. After all, I talked about machine guns earlier today and here I am doing it again. You know this is going to be a different story.

Is there really an issue with machine guns? Apparently so.

The St. Paul Division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, which covers Minnesota, South Dakota, North Dakota and western Wisconsin, has been embedded with police in Minneapolis and St. Paul this year because of a proliferation of gun violence, including illegal guns converted into automatic weapons.

ATF Special Agent in Charge of the St. Paul Division William McCrary told 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS nearly half of his agents are now intensely working with the Minneapolis and St. Paul police departments.

“We’re seeing a large increase in the number of firearms that we recover that have been illegally converted to fire fully automatic,” McCrary said. “Usually, these are handguns but sometimes it is happening with other types of guns as well.”

Minneapolis Police records show, through the first nine months of 2021, more than 900 rounds of automatic gunfire have been detected using ShotSpotter technology, which is up from just 42 rounds of automatic gunfire through the first nine months of 2020.

Of course, that’s ShotSpotter, which has…issues.

Still, that does suggest there’s something going on in Minneapolis. Part of that is that police are so skittish to do anything, criminals are emboldened to see how much they can get away with. Yet they could do that with semi-automatic weapons just as easily.

These weapons being converted to full-auto, however, is troubling. For one thing, your regular street cop isn’t going to be able to match that rate of fire. Neither will a private citizen who may need to defend their life.

And people wonder why we talk about how only the law-abiding follow gun laws. “That’s a stupid argument. If we applied that to everything else, we’d have no laws at all, hur due.”

No, it’s not. Those other laws generally stop people from infringing on the rights of another. Gun control laws stop me from being able to purchase something because someone else did something bad. Meanwhile, other people will ignore those laws and my compliance with the rules puts me at a disadvantage. Sorry, but that’s why we make that argument.

After all, look at this. The bad guys are converting firearms into freaking machine guns, despite every law on the books meant to stop them from doing just that.

Meanwhile, the law-abiding people of Minneapolis are powerless to combat this increase in firepower.

And that sentence really is the endgame for any gun control laws you care to name.