#Improguns

Continuing from Part 1 of December’s Underground Arms Watch edition, below are some of the good and not so good criminally manufactured and modified weapons recently seized off the streets.

Continuing from Part 1 of Underground Arms Watch, below are several more notable examples of criminally produced firearms seized worldwide by police and security services in recent months.

Occasionally police operations across the world churn up weapons produced solely for the criminal market. Some of these are improvised while others are semi-professionally produced in illicit workshops. Documented here are a handful of interesting examples uncovered in recent months.

A specialty of local illegal gunsmiths in Indonesia for the last few years has been building these all-encompassing portable solutions for all conceivable encounters. Carrying them has become somewhat a trend with street criminals, the availability of ammunition likely down to the willingness of army personnel to be very accommodating when given the chance to be persuaded. For the discerning customer who wants the best bang for his buck, why advise settling for anything of the lesser, non-bottlenecked variety?

Here is an interesting design which has been seized by authorities on a number of occasions in the Brazilian state of Espirito Santo, first documented in August 2017. It is an eight-shot pump-actuated revolving shotgun chambered in 12 gauge and represents the cutting edge in Favela Firepower.

Our unofficial series of articles showing illegal guns seized in Brazil by LE agencies will continue today with emphasis on the country’s Rio Grande do Sul (RS) state. You’ll see that most of the illustrated weapons resulted from the work of the  Civil Police’s DENARC – Departamento Estadual de Investigações do Narcotráfico, but Brigada Militar, the local Military Police, also contributed to the effort.

This ordinary looking axe wouldn’t look out of place carried in any rural setting. Sliding down the metal collar below the head however reveals a .22 caliber break barrel single shot mechanism cleverly concealed inside the bored out wooden handle.

Here’s a very neat little takedown gun seized by police in Italy which is entirely handmade, fits in a backpack and is chambered for either .22lr or .22 hornet. Intended varmint may or may not have included local magistrates.

Pictured is an interesting improvised 9mm firearm being sold within criminal circles in Brazil. The entire trigger group / lower is from a standard paintball marker, allowing for a more useful semi-automatic (open-bolt) operation. A clever feature is the use of standard 9mm holed hexagonal brass bar stock as a crude smooth-bore barrel.

A 60 year old man in Japan was recently arrested for building homemade guns of his own design. According to him it was his hobby for the last 40 years. He used scrap anvils as a source of hardened steel and crafted his own ammunition using toy caps and casted lead bullets.

Pictured is a type of muzzle-loading improvised firearm sometimes encountered in Russia. The barrel usually consists of a length of steel or copper pipe, either capped off or hammered and folded shut at it’s breech end. A hole is drilled on top over which toy caps are placed and held by a strip of tape. It’s hammer consists of a bent length of metal bar attached to it’s handle which is allowed to snap down onto the toy caps with the aid of an elastic band or tension spring. Sometimes a trigger in the form of a simple hook is added, or more often the user simply pulls the hammer back and releases with their thumb.

It doesn’t help that a large number of submachine guns churned out in the garages of Mexican drug cartel ‘engineering departments’ point the finger at the USA as their country of origin.

Pictured is a homemade submachine seized by police during a raid which also uncovered a suspected meth lab. The weapon itself is very obviously based on a design described in the infamous Expedient Homemade Firearms series of manuals published by British author P.A Luty. Such homemade weapons have been widely encountered, accounting for at least 10% of firearms seized by NSW police.

It seems someone was inspired to make a quick $400 for charity at a local police gun ‘give back’ in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

The below are machine pistols of a design that were being produced and distributed by criminal networks in Sweden. Apparently specifications for many of the parts were simply sent off to various machine shops and ordered as ‘boat components’. All examples are smooth bore, chambered in 9mm luger and full auto only.