How a tiny device undermines gun bans entirely

Julie Jacobson

There are those who seem to genuinely believe that gun bans actually work. They center much of their personalities around it, or so it seems. They think that if you ban a certain type of gun, you don’t have to worry about that type of gun anymore.

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That’s what’s driving the desire to ban so-called ghost guns right now, as a matter of fact.

The problem is guns, like water, follow the path of least resistance. I’ve written about this previously. Right now, what you see isn’t necessarily what you’ll see after a gun ban.

Take machine guns.

They’ve been heavily restricted since 1934 and, in essence, banned since 1986. You can sort of get your hands on them still, but you need a whole lot of money to do so legally.

And yet, we have this guy.

More details have been released about the arrest of one of Mobile’s most wanted, including how a glock was modified to function as a machine gun.

Trenteon King was arrested Friday, April 29 after an off-duty Chickasaw police officer spotted him walking out with stolen items at Walmart off Rangeline Road. King was detained by the officer who found King with a firearm.

An Alchohol, Tobacco Firearms and Explosives agent determined that King possessed an unregistered firearm, a machine gun made from a modified Glock.

If that sounds familiar, it should. One of the alleged shooters in Sacramento also had such a weapon.

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Meanwhile, the ATF is apparently seeing a lot more of these.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is investigating more incidents involving a quarter-sized device that transforms a semi-automatic weapon into what’s qualified as a machine gun.

The switches aren’t new, but they’ve been on the rise recently.

“We are seeing them trickle from West to East,” said French. “We started seeing a great majority of them in Memphis and the western parts of Tennessee all over the past year and a half. Within the past year though, we’ve seen a tremendous increase.”

There are over 80 open investigations for the ATF Nashville Division, with 100 recovered so far. There are 1,500 ATF investigations involving the devices nationwide. Some of those cases come from Alabama.

Now, understand that 100 such weapons in an area like Nashville is a lot, all things considered, and 1,500 nationwide investigations isn’t a drop in the bucket. Of course, we’re still missing a lot of context, which I’m never comfortable with, but what we do have is interesting.

Especially since this isn’t something you or I can pick up.

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See, full-auto weapons are basically banned for folks like you or me. We can’t get our hands on them. We also can’t lawfully get a switch to drop in our Glocks and then go rock-and-roll. It’s not something we can do, even if we’re willing to accept and jump through all the relevant hoops.

As a result, we’re getting outgunned because of the machine gun ban.

We simply can’t meet the threat that seems to be presented before us. If full-auto weapons are so deadly that they’re basically forbidden for you or me to have, how are law-abiding citizens not put at risk via this gun ban?

What’s more, how will more gun bans make it any better?

The short answer is that they won’t, which is why it’s time to stop pushing them as the solution for every ill.

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