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. ‘Numerous weapons found by OPP, border services during search’ [Read More…]
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. Mock M4 A 9mm SMG seized in Espírito Santo, Brazil. Cosmetically It has likely [Read More…]
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 [Read More…]
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 [Read More…]
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 [Read More…]
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 [Read More…]
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. The story behind [Read More…]
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 [Read More…]
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 [Read More…]
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 [Read More…]
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. You’d think that these people would know that there are [Read More…]
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 [Read More…]
It seems someone was inspired to make a quick $400 for charity at a local police gun ‘give back’ in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Rather than the taxpayer, it was Warren Buffet’s sister Dorris who footed the bill, reportedly in order to circumvent [Read More…]
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 [Read More…]
Some glorious individual decided to take a duffel bag full of improvised slam-fire shotguns (of legal length) to a local gun buyback which was offering $50 for each gun handed in. Unfortunately on this occasion the officer manning the table was apparently [Read More…]
A number of factories raided by police near the Uttar Pradesh/Haryana boarder in India appear to have been producing copies of the Jaco Western pistol, a popular DIY design published in 1972 and sold via mail order in the USA. Many more Indian homemade pistols can be [Read More…]
Homemade firearms have long featured strongly in Indian criminology. Known locally as Kattas or tamanchas, these crude handmade pistols account for up to 30% of firearms related crime. According to the National Crime Records Bureau, their use is continuing an upward [Read More…]
Police in Sydney, Australia have arrested a suspected manufacturer and supplier of pen guns, an increasingly popular weapon among Australia’s world famous gasoline marauding biker gangs. The examples seized are extremely minimal in design, the suspected culprit [Read More…]
I thought some of these examples were particularly … rustic. The last example appears to be trying to channel a S&W Model 3 top-break.
As previously delved into, a seemingly endless variety of these are regularly emerging, some of factory quality, others of bedroom quality. A very crudely made model recently trending in numbers, sometimes fitted with a barrel made from a section of brass hex [Read More…]
Homemade firearms are widely seized across china, a large number used illegally for pest control and hunting. Notable is the frequency at which handmade semi automatic pistols are encountered, many loosely based on the Type-64 copy of the Walther PPK as well as the [Read More…]
Not quite – though as this recent article points out, there do appear to be increasing numbers of staplers converted into fairly advanced zip guns being confiscated worldwide. The common double action stapler is highly modular, regularly seen trivially adapted to [Read More…]
This homebuilt automatic rifle was voluntarily surrendered during a weapons amnesty in Bogota, Colombia. The large diameter, fully encapsulating receiver suggests it is of a straight blow-back design utilizing a very large and heavy open-bolt (likely telescoping the [Read More…]
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