Homemade Machine Guns in the ATF's Gun Vault, 1991

My name is Steve Higgins, I'm director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. What we have here is a vault and I'll take you inside, give you some idea of the types of guns. We have probably the most complete library of all kinds of guns that have been manufactured. It's almost like a reference library that people can use. We use for our purposes, other people can visit and use these weapons. What we've done, what the focus of our program is that we try to use the firearms laws to target those armed, violent criminals who are committing a disproportionate number of crimes in our community. So we've really used our resources in that matter. As you can see as you look through the walls here is that there lots and lots of guns, lots of different kinds of guns. To give you some idea, there are in existence now, somewhere in the neighbourhood - in this country - of about 200 million weapons. Ed Owen - Chief of Firearms Technology Branch What we're seeing in this office, we see a tremendous number of homemade machine guns, homemade silencers. This is a typical homemade machine gun. It's a very simple blowback-operated 9mm firearm. Now when I use the terminology "homemade," this may well have been built in an illicit factory, but it is not something built by a legitimate industry. We also see quite a few machine guns reconstructed from weapons that have been destroyed by military powers in others parts of the world. One of the things we see a lot of today are the British 9mm Sten Gun, which is an extremely simple firearm. They receive a portion which is, a piece of tubing would be removed, and the rest of the parts imported as surplus. For someone with a little bit of basic machining skills, it is a fairly simple matter to build a machine gun from the existing parts. These would be examples of certain sorts of shotguns. Most of these had the buttstocks removed, just for storage. Shotguns are one of the most prevalent kinds of firearms in the United States. They are very simple to modifiy. When they are modified, they very easy to conceal under a coat. This is a M-11 38-caliber machine gun with a sound supressor. Matted inside the briefcase is a trigger that will lever the concealed bottom of the case. To fire it, you'd have the case closed, and tuck it up under your arm, pull the trigger. Excluding the military and the police, there are more than 200 million guns in the U.S. Approximately 70 million are handguns. The number of youths killed with firearms nearly doubled between 1984 and 1989. The total number of guns in the U.S. has almost doubled since 1970. The majority of U.S. guns are not registered or traceable. Americans have more handguns than hairdryers. Mediaburn - Independent Video Archive Subtitles by the Amara.org community