As governments increasingly attempt to make guns and gun ownership illegal, the less they succeed in doing so. It does not mean that fewer criminals are armed. Overall crime does not drop when controls are implemented. One of the reasons is that guns are fairly easy to construct and the materials to make them are virtually impossible for an industrial society to control.
An unintended consequence of this is that submachine guns or machine pistols may be relatively easily substituted for ordinary handguns. Their simple mechanisms make them easy to put together.
The above machine pistol, based on the MAC design is homemade, as is the silencer/suppressor. Both are illegal for the nearly everyone to possess in Canada. Yet that’s where the pistol was taken in a drug raid.
In total, (Saskatoon) police said they seized approximately 1,400 fentanyl pills, 700 grams of meth and 520 grams of crack cocaine.
They also seized seven handguns, five of which were loaded and one of which had a silencer, and roughly $70,000 in cash.
An identical version was seized a year ago in Alberta.
More illegal silencers were seized in this raid in Alberta in 2015.
They seem quite similar to homemade MAC machine pistols and suppressors that were made in Australia. The person who made those admitted to making up to a hundred of them. As some of them went for a reported $15,000 Australian, that would be a cool $1.5 million for a couple of years’ work.
I suspect the underground market will eventually drive the prices down. As advanced manufacturing techniques such as CNC machinating and 3D printers drop in prices, the barrier to production will also drop.
©2016 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice is included.
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