Nytimes chinese mother kills children9/21/2023 Since the 1930s, federal laws have tightly restricted ownership of machine guns outside of the military and police departments. “Rather than: ‘I was held up or I was involved in a drug deal gone wrong.’” “It’s more common now for someone to say: ‘I was walking down the street and I heard the sound and all of a sudden my leg hurt, my chest hurt,’” he said. James Miner, the chair of emergency medicine at Hennepin Healthcare in Minneapolis, which has the largest trauma center in Minnesota, said he first heard about switches in 2020 when he was trying to make sense of why gunshot victims were arriving at the hospital with numerous wounds and why more people seemed to be reporting being shot by stray bullets. In recent months, shootings using modified weapons have been caught on camera in Milwaukee, prompting the city’s mayor to compare the scene with a war zone.ĭr. One of the gunmen in a 2022 gang shootout in Sacramento, California, that left six dead and injured 12 people carried a gun fitted with a switch, according to police. In 2021, a man with a gun modified with a switch fired at two police officers in Houston, killing one and injuring the other. Carlos Guevara, a vice president at Glock, said the company has collaborated with law enforcement officials to target illegal sellers and users of switches but has determined the design of the pistol cannot be altered in that way. However, such content is protected under the First Amendment and remains widely available online.įederal law enforcement officials have contacted Glock, the company that produces a weapon that has come to define an entire class of easily available 9 mm handguns, in search of ways to modify the weapon to make it harder to attach switches. Social media platforms like YouTube ban content that shows people how to make illegal weapons. Many are sold and owned by people younger than 18, who generally face more lenient treatment in the courts. But investigators say they face formidable obstacles, including the sheer number in circulation and the ease with which they can be produced and installed at home, using readily available instruction videos on the internet. Switches have become a major priority for federal law enforcement officials. “The gang wars and street fighting that used to be with knives, and then pistols, is now to a great extent being waged with automatic weapons,” said Andrew M. The proliferation of switches also has coincided with broader accessibility of so-called ghost guns, untraceable firearms that can be made with components purchased online or made with 3D printers. Law enforcement officials say the devices are turning up with greater frequency at crime scenes, often wielded by teens who have come to see them as a status symbol that provides a competitive advantage. Switches come in various forms, but most are small Lego-like plastic blocks, about 1 inch square, that can be easily manufactured on a 3D printer and go for around $200. Homicides in Kansas City are approaching record highs this year, even as the number of nonfatal shootings in the city has decreased. Lucas, a Democrat, said he believes that the rising popularity of switches, especially among young people, is a major reason fewer gun violence victims are surviving in his city. “This is almost like the gun version of the fentanyl crisis,” Mayor Quinton Lucas of Kansas City, Missouri, said in an interview. That was a 49% increase from the year before. Audio sensors monitored by a public safety technology company, SoundThinking, recorded 75,544 rounds of suspected automatic gunfire in 2022 in portions of 127 cities covered by its microphones, according to data compiled at the request of The New York Times. The growing use of switches, which are also known as auto sears, is evident in real-time audio tracking of gunshots around the country, data shows. These makeshift machine guns - able to inflict indiscriminate carnage in seconds - are helping fuel the national epidemic of gun violence, making shootings increasingly lethal, creating added risks for bystanders and leaving survivors more grievously wounded, according to law enforcement authorities and medical workers. His friend, a 12-year-old girl, was struck once in the leg. By the time the assailant in Las Vegas sped away, Caison, a soft-spoken teenager who loves video games, lay on the pavement with five gunshot wounds.
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