It’s a handgun like any other, unless you count the plastic prop that has been used to modify it. The street name for this little addition is a “Glock switch” or “auto-sear.”
Its official name is “machine-gun conversion device,” which gives a pretty clear picture of what this sliver of plastic does.
By any name, switches are deadly, as ATF agents demonstrated for a reporter with the Richmond Times-Dispatch. They turn killing tools into weapons of war and drive up numbers of senseless woundings and killings across Virginia.
At the Richmond Police Department’s training facility, ATF officers fired both modified and unmodified Glock pistols at practice targets.
A timer illustrates the change in rate of fire. A normal, semi-automatic pistol can fire 10 rounds in 2.61 seconds; as fast as the shooter can flex their trigger finger.
A converted gun sprints through a 10-bullet magazine in 0.41 seconds. The recoil causes the gun to climb, so while a first bullet might be accurate, the remaining nine fire wildly.
“Let’s be real,” said the officer, whose name ATF asked be withheld. “It’s spray-and-pray.”
Agent: ‘Switches have become status symbols’
In 2022, Richmond police seized 12 pistols modified with Glock switches. Last year, police took 18. Richmond Police Chief Rick Edwards rarely misses an opportunity to remind the city.
“They turn the most popular and common firearm in America, the one I’m carrying right now, and turn it into a machine gun,” Edwards said in his January crime briefing.
ATF Special Agent M. Darrell Logwood says guns pop up on social media platforms like Instagram. On livestreams, gun owners flaunt their jerry-rigged guns. They carry an implied threat, Logwood said.
“Switches have become status symbols,” he said. “I’ve seen posts online where people are saying, don’t come at me, I’ve got a switch.”
That’s how Richmond police found Ke’Rell Mileak Boone in May 2022. Boone is serving 21 months in federal prison for waving a converted Glock in an Instagram live video filmed from Richmond’s Whitcomb Court neighborhood.
The gun had an extended magazine. In one prolonged pull of the trigger, it could have fired off 33 bullets.
As far as police know, it was not ever fired, and Boone was charged only for possessing it. But the gun was traced to an armed robbery that occurred two weeks before Boone’s arrest.
Boone was prosecuted locally and then again by the Department of Justice, where lawyers asked the judge to consider the “simultaneously deadly and innocuous nature of a semiautomatic firearm converted into a fully automatic one.”
Court records do not indicate how Boone got his switch. That same month, Richmond police arrested Zantias Tyler, who managed the YouTube channel “Hood Gunsmith,” according to court records.
Tyler was making his own switches as well as ordering higher-end metal switches from a company in China before selling them via mail, authorities said. He was sentenced to three years in prison.
Last February, police arrested Dai’Quan Lane, who admitted to being en route to sell a converted pistol for $750. Lane was also spotted on social media and is now serving two years in prison.
Devices take minutes to make
Logwood, the ATF officer, says switches are disturbingly easy to make. With a 3-D printer from Amazon and an easily downloadable schematic, a layman can print a switch in a matter of minutes.
In 2020, Fairfax police arrested 20-year-old Davud Sungur, an ROTC student at George Mason University, for doing exactly that. Police, who raided Sungur’s home after he sold guns to undercover detectives, found a $300 3-D printer, charging documents show.
Sungur was offering the detectives machine-gun conversion devices as a free add-on if the officers bought one of his homemade AR-15s for $2,000.
Sungur’s defense attorney asked a federal judge for leniency.
In court records, his lawyer wrote that selling guns allowed Sungur to become “the big man on campus.”
“Davud became excited about what he was doing from his own interest in firearms as a long-time hobbyist and the support he received by dealing in the dark side of the Second Amendment community buried in the underbelly of the internet,” said defense attorney Peter D. Greenspun.
What disturbs Logwood is just how easy it is to get into the business.
“The amount of plastic product that it takes to print that? It’s pennies,” said Logwood, gesturing to a switch the size of a thumbnail.
On the streets, he thinks a switch can fetch as much as $150. Sungur sold his for $50.
Police sometimes do not even realize they have picked up a modified gun, Logwood said, since the conversion component is hidden behind a gun’s back panel, or slide.
“There are plenty of law enforcement officers who would not recognize one,” he said. “They would find this and not even know it.”
Machine guns were banned by Congress in 1934. Their return comes as the internet, technology and dated gun laws allow for switches to flourish.
Laws have moved, albeit slowly. Switches have been illegal under federal law for years, but states took longer to catch up. It was only in the 2024 legislative session that switches became illegal to possess in Virginia.
The law updated an older law that only made it illegal to possess what are known as “trigger-activation devices.”
Now, both are illegal, and commonwealth’s attorneys will be able to charge and try cases as soon as July 1, when the law takes effect.
In Richmond on Tuesday, two ATF officers take apart an AR-15 to show how it can be converted into an automatic weapon. At the Richmond Police Department’s training facility, ATF officers fired both modified and unmodified Glock pistols at practice targets.
A 3-D-printed gun shell rests on a table during an ATF demonstration. In 2022, Richmond police seized 12 pistols modified with Glock switches. Last year, police took 18.
An ATF officer shows the difference in accuracy between shots that were fired from a gun without a converter, left, and shots that were fired from a gun with a converter. This is because there is less time to handle the recoil.
An ATF officer shows what a metal machine gun converter looks like. Machine guns were banned by Congress in 1934. Their return comes as the internet, technology and dated gun laws allow for switches to flourish.