> You are converting a weapon to make it do something that it was not intended to do...
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.
>Glock designed the handgun specifically to allow this, and they even manufacture switches themselves.
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.
Obviously not supporting having these switches, but wondering if it makes shooting more dangerous or less.
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.
How would “Send a heap of bullets fast” be less dangerous than “send less bullets”? When a bullet gets out of the gun it has a chance to hurt someone (including innocent people). A bullet that remains in the gun hurts no-one…
It depends if you mean the person being shot at or bystanders. I imagine in most scenarios where people are using switches they have little to no firearm training in general and especially not any with switches engaged (it's not like you can use them at the range.) Their shots are probably more dangerous for bystanders and less dangerous for the specific person being targeted when compared to someone shooting a standard pistol that has training or plenty of range time.
I guess it depends why they are shooting. Is it to injure or kill as many people in an area, or shoot a particular individual at some considerable distance. I think the GP post is looking at from the perspective of the gun owner? Even from their perspective it may not make sense to modify the weapon. Obviously, not shooting at all and injuring anyone is the best, in general.
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.
> The person firing this weapon has no control, nor do they understand that one to two seconds with their finger on that trigger can release between 30 and 60 rounds potentially.
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.
I still take issue with mr Snider scaremongering like this- in the unlikely scenario that someone would actually be running around with a 60 round mag glock it would likely jam or overheat anyway.
An NYPD officer? Scaremongering? Perish the thought.
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.
And there will continue to be handguns and auto sears coming across the USA-Canada border until there exists the political will to crack down on smuggling via the cross-border native reserves.
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.
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