Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office demonstrates illegal gun switches
The Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office has demonstrated how switches can be used to turn some weapons into illegal machine guns.
Today, at the D.T. Marshall Firearms Training Center, these automatic conversion devices were shown, which is what law enforcement officers say they often encounter on the streets.
The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms demonstrated several converted weapons to show the dangers of these simple plastic switches. Investigators say they can be made at home in an hour and installed in 60 seconds to switch a semi-automatic handgun into an illegal machine gun.
“If the agent today did not have total control over that weapon when he was down range, you can only imagine what it’s like in the hands of a 17-year-old or an 18-year-old,” Huey Hossmack, the executive director of the Alabama Sheriffs Association, said. “All across this state, we’ve had children that have been shot in their beds. We’ve had grandmothers that have been shot in their homes. We’ve had innocent bystanders that have attended concerts and festivals and who have all been shot by these types of weapons.”
“If you went down and you’ve seen the targets after the weapons were fired and you see no bullet holes in the target, you can’t control it,” Montgomery County Sheriff Derrick Cunningham said. “Can you imagine if that’s in your community? Every single day, we hear every single day in our neighborhoods and now we are coming to the legislature asking for assistance to prevent this from coming back into our neighborhoods.”
A state bill has been pre-filed for next year’s legislative session. It would make it illegal to possess a pistol that has been converted using one of these trigger activators.
It is already against the law at the federal level.
