'Switches' are turning handguns into machine guns on Ontario streets
cbc.ca
cbc.ca
Yes, they are actually. These are glock full auto switches, which if you've ever seen a glock and you know how it works, you know how easy it is. Glock designed the handgun specifically to allow this, and they even manufacture switches themselves.
I don't know why they're going out of their way to not inform people of what exactly is happening. People are buying or building a very easy to make gun, buying or building a very easy to make part and adding it to the gun. It's not something anyone can easily stop anywhere, but the last paragraph really gives you a clue. Canadian law enforcement understands that the phenomenon of growing violence in street crime is a cultural problem and pretty new in Canada at least in it's current form and in recent decades.
It really isn't, though. The way these work is exploiting the fact that the backplate on the gun can be modified such that the out of battery safety (inside the gun) functions as an auto trip.
Which, coincidentally, is why US (and to a point, Canadian) regulatory agencies do their best to consider guns with safeties like this machine guns. They shouldn't; horse has already left the barn with that one especially considering full automatic fire is de facto legal and (even when in cases when it isn't legal) is trivial to achieve with guns that aren't Glocks, and this is something gun laws in the entire rest of the world have tacitly acknowledged for decades.
>People are buying
Not anymore, they aren't; the purchase, sale, or transfer of handguns is banned in Canada. Not that that's stopping the gangs, but those bans have never been about stopping crime anyway.
>I don't know why they're going out of their way to not inform people of what exactly is happening.
Who the criminals are, and the route the guns take to even get there in the first place, is extremely politically inconvenient for the Canadian government as it relates to blatant policy missteps that now affect Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal.
Genuinely curious European here: what in your view was their purpose?
We have a licensing scheme that takes roughly 6 months to issue you a license, and special transport rules for handguns and short rifles. We don't have gangs from the East smuggling in machine guns; and most crime guns come from an intentionally-porous border.
However, guns are a cultural flashpoint in most of the New World in ways they just aren't in most European countries. Part of this is an export of US politics, where sub-polities who want to ban guns are in a constant and bitter culture war with those that do not; Canadians copy a lot of US politics along whatever fault lines they happen to be on (currently, it's largest cities vs. everyone else). It's also a filter bubble problem, where the polities and voters that don't see guns as an issue are several thousand kilometers away from those that do (100km is a daily commute for us, but it can be the other side of the country for you), so you're not going to be exposed to 'normal' people on the other side.
>what in your view was their purpose?
Revenge. The sitting government did not like the fact that people from several thousand kilometers away came and protested certain edicts pertaining to a novel cold virus; those people are most likely to own guns.
This was simply a "fuck you". There are no problems with the crime rate here; other than that which the sitting government has encouraged with their policies, but European countries all have that problem too and for the same reason. Which makes people want guns -> government doesn't like that -> government limits that ability, naturally.
It certainly would, as it's not true.
Still wrong. In the UK, for example, it's virtually impossible to own a handgun of any sort. The info is easily available online.
Good luck fitting a switch to a handgun dating before 1919, which in theory can be held - although you'd struggle to get a license because you can only hold antique handguns if ammunition isn't readily available for them in the UK, you are a bona-fide collector and central government don't object - they have to individually approve all such licenses.
As you seem to be struggling, I'll simplify it as much as I can for you. The situation that's causing concern in Canada can't happen in the UK because it's illegal to own that sort of weapon in the first place.
That means our laws are stricter than those in Canada.
That means Canada's laws are weaker than those of at least one European country.
That means you are wrong.
That's an important caveat. The crime and gangs problem were both larger in the 70's than it is today.
My non expert guess is the people using these 'pray and spray' in something I suspect is very hard to control. This would serve to make a heap of wild shots plus make them run out of bullets very quickly for any kind of follow up or ongoing fight. But at the same time send a heap of bullets fast.
I wonder if it becomes one of those events that on the surface looks far worse but statistically is not. Or more unintended bystander deaths?
To be clear. I don't know the answer or are promoting one, but it has the feeling of something that might have a counter initiative answer.
If you go full auto, I suspect the shooter would find their muzzle going higher and higher so after the first couple shots they are shooting way high. So if they have 15 bullets in the magazine 3 are good and 12 are way off target type deal. Whereas if they were pulling the trigger at each shot they might aim the '12 air shots' more effectively.
Pure speculation but as I said has the feel of one of those things that may be counter intuitive to what you would initially expect.
It’s possible to fire full auto with reasonable accuracy and no brace. The amount of training it would take, though, that shooter is likely to be just as effective firing semi automatic.
Handguns really aren't that great at killing a target- you're trading off power for the ability to even get the gun into the fight (without detection, in this case).
So ideally, you shoot them a bunch of times. Shotguns do this quite effectively; a better view of one is that it's 8 handguns duct-taped together and firing all at once (that's effectively what happens- for anti-personnel use, 8 9mm-sized pellets come out the end when you pull the trigger). But shotguns are large and don't lend themselves to getting tucked into your pants.
Thus, why not have the individual pellets come out one at a time from a pistol that you can conceal? Pistols can theoretically spit them out really fast, so why not just have that happen as long as you have the trigger held down- you have the equivalent of about 4 shotgun shells at your disposal with a standard 33-round magazine, so if you're spending 1/4th of your magazine per target you're (on paper) just as effective as you would have been using a shotgun in that scenario.
The problem comes from not knowing how to use one, and the consequences of not knowing how to shoot compound when you use a pistol like this. Pistols are relatively difficult to use (which is why things that make them easier and more intuitive to aim make gang gunfights deadlier- this is part of why the TEC-9 is on every AWB list in existence) in the best of times, which is part of why gang gunfights look more like a bunch of Harry Potter cosplayers waving their magic wands casting 'gun' than anything anyone else would consider proper marksmanship, and that's before you add the part that makes the gun veer off in a random direction and waste half your ammo into the apartment complex that was behind the guy.
If you're going to be a gangster the least you could do is actually shoot straight. Fortunately, the city of Toronto banned all the ranges (as an anti-crime measure, lmao), so even if they did want to figure out how to shoot straight that's not an option they have.
>Or more unintended bystander deaths?
All else being equal, people randomly spraying bullets will cause more of this (and more property damage). And it's more difficult for the police to deal with; I'd be quite a bit more afraid to deal with gangland crime (aka 'all of Toronto') when getting magdumped might actually get through that vest or get me shot in the face.
Are there Glock magazines that hold 60 rounds? The highest capacity I see in a very quick online search is around 30. Standard capacity is 10-17 rounds. Can the barrel and the mechanism withstand the heat of 60 rounds fired that fast? Glocks are already at least anecdotally prone to jamming.
And, I'd guess that a person making such a modification understands exactly what it will enable.
The largest reliable magazine for a Glock that is still halfway concealable holds 33 rounds.
The largest reliable magazine for a Glock holds 50 rounds, but it's a drum and you can't conceal that very well.
Larger magazines may exist, but they are not both reliable and concealable.
>Glocks are already at least anecdotally prone to jamming.
This is 100% caused by mags that don't say Glock or Magpul on it. These guns are fantastically reliable.
I'd actually expect the 15-round magazines to be more common, given that's the size of magazine the Glock 19 comes with, and they don't stick out of the gun. But then again I'm not convinced any of these guys are carrying more than one magazine anyway (and if they were, they'd be too busy fumbling around in the dark getting the magazine out of their pockets- it's not like gangsters even know magazine holders even exist).
However, if you're using OEM Glock mags, it's not going to jam (don't buy SGM or Promag, not only are they garbage but they aren't even that much cheaper- which, to be fair, gangsters probably think all 'stendos are the same and would thus run into that problem more), and you literally cannot hold enough rounds on your person to make the gun overheat, especially if you're not wearing a competition-style belt designed to hold a bunch of mags. But then again, if your Glawk Fowtay Problem Solva can't solve the problem in 300 rounds you are probably doing something wrong.
(pardon the AI voiceover but it's good enough)