#ImprovisedFirearms

A recent ‘gun turn in’ sponsored by Newport Police Department spurred on local gun collectors to make a small profit by turning in unwanted junk firearms and also grabbing up a few bargains themselves. Merely 22 minutes into the four hour event the organizers had expended all available gift cards and resorted to IOUs, obviously helping to draw more people attending to buyers offering fast cash outside. The payout was as follows:
$175 – Assault or assault-like rifle

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.

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.

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.

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 trend with around 75% of gun homicides in the capital being carried out using homemade weapons. Almost all examples are smooth bore, sometimes utilizing a sanitation pipe or automobile steering shaft as a barrel. As well as 12 gauge, many are notably chambered in the 8x50mm mannlicher /.315 bore and British .303, both very common cartridges in the region. The designs themselves are typically influenced by old British flare pistol patents, such as the Webley MKIII.

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 suitably being caught in the car park of a local hardware store (Edit – a reader has correctly identified them as being made from a $3 automatic center punch .. with very little modification!

I thought some of these examples were particularly … rustic.

As previously delved into, a seemingly endless variety of these are regularly emerging, some of factory quality, others of bedroom quality.

A development in improvised weaponry spearheaded by South America’s drug cartel armorers has been the blow-back operated open-bolt automatic rifle. The simple solution to the usual intricacies of a typical assault rifle’s locking, delay or gas operation is to essentially make a scaled-up submachine-gun with a very heavy bolt capable of operating at much higher pressures. Using a fixed firing pin and firing from the open-bolt position allows for relatively simple construction with minimal components. Police helicopters are rumored to be some of the intended targets.

The recent political upheaval in Egypt has fueled demand for cheap weapons for personal defense giving way to a variety of locally produced guns. Most commonly seen are patterns for simple homemade single shot shotguns and pistols circulating among those who have small workshops:

The new boss of the Firearms and Organized Crime Squad has revealed that at least 10% of firearms seized by police in NSW are homemade.

Two homebuilt pistols were seized among other firearms on Tuesday by police in Sydney. They appear to have plastic (or perhaps aluminum) lower receivers with angular magazine wells. Both examples appear very well made.

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 fire .38 spl, 12 gauge shotgun shells and even 40mm grenades.

Pictured is an interesting display at The Israel Defense Forces History Museum in Tel Aviv, featuring crude Sten gun copies among many other improvised firearms used around the time of the 1948 Arab–Israeli war. Also featured are some 12 gauge revolving drum shotguns which appear reasonably well crafted.

Australia’s garage-gun-fest continues with a fresh seizure of M11 submachine-gun copies reportedly produced by a jeweler, admittedly supplying up to 100 of the homemade weapons to local gangs.