Just how difficult is it to manufacture automatic weaponry from scratch?
 

Note: I am NOT talking about converting semiautomatic-only firearms to fully automatic ones. I am only concerned with building fully-automatic weaponry from scratch.

If the "AK-47 is the most illegally manufactured assault rifle in the world," then just how difficult is it to manufacture them? Where are these illicit manufacturing facilities located? Just how low-tech can you get before you can't actually make them?

I remember reading how "crisis guns" like the British Sten or the Russian PPS-43 were manufactured with a minimum of high technology, but if they were so easy to make, I'm surprised that more people who want this kind of firepower (such as criminal gangs or insurgent groups) aren't making their own versions of weapons like these. Is it more difficult to make weapons like these than their reputations claim?

Supposedly, resistance groups in Axis territory made their own versions of the Sten in WWII. There are plenty of people now who handload their own cartridges or even manufacture their own bullets, so it can't be too difficult.

The question should have been, how expensive is it to manufacture your own automatic weapon. Or even creating a production line...
In certain regions of the world, it is possible to purchase automatic assault rifles for less than 400 US dollars per unit. Why bother manufacturing your own if they are already so inexpensive?
Manufacturing "something" is not extremely difficult. If you have all the equipment/machinery which will most definitely cost millions of dollars. I'm talking about creating moldings and serious metalworking.
Also, I don't believe the Kalashnikov AK-47 is the most "illegally" manufactured weapon in the world. But it sure is the best known.
Slightly off topic perhaps but I'd like to share this trivia with you from the movie Lord of War. Instead of using prop AK's for a particular scene the production crew decided to rent real weapons from an armsdealer.. It just cost a lot less.

Well if you have an automotive body shop you have everything you need to make a stamped reciver SMG. Might not look very good but it will funtion. I've handled the fire control group for a Uru Mekanika and the only thing that wasn't stamped or pressed steel was the plastic covering on the rear pistol grip.


I know in my own fiction one of the antagonists made a small run of a few dozen Ingram SMG's in .380ACP. It's an easy design to copy and in mexico the .380 round is legal as it's not a "military caliber".

First of all, what does "illegally manufactured" mean? When Izmash OKB claimed years ago that the AK was "illegally manufactured", they were referring to all of the former Soviet Bloc factories that are producing AKs without paying licensing or royalty fees. You seem to be talking about civilians who manufacture AKs illegally in their home machine shops.

For weapons that are almost all metal and wood (the AK being the best example), its not too difficult to replicate them from scratch. Throughout the Northwest Frontier province and Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan, there are gunsmiths who manufacture AKs and sell them from their homes or shops. I've seen pics of some of them, and they're very close copies of Russian and Chinese AKs. But these gunsmiths take a while to manufacture them (in the article I read, I think one guy said that with his family's help, he could make about 10-12 AKs per month, and he'd sell each for about $100 USD), and they're usually of vastly inferior quality compared to the originals. And obviously, these guys aren't going to be able to duplicate weapons such as H&Ks or ARs that use plastic (well, maybe they could build an equivalent in wood or metal).

Anyway, that's just in Pakistan, where any tools more complex than a lathe are going to be difficult to find (let alone power). In more developed countries, including the U.S., anyone can go to Home Depot and order a milling machine and dremel. I don't see why it would be all that difficult to set up a machine shop that could turn out illegally manufactured full-auto AKs and other weapons, provided it was done by a competent gunsmith. If you ever look at some of the "assault weapons" makers in the U.S. (the companies that are building new AR-15, AK, and H&K clones for the civilian market), most of them aren't gigantic corporations with huge robotic factories making their products. They're mostly just small mom-and-pop operations with 10-15 people who build guns that get shipped out to FFLs nationally. If somebody really wanted to to set up a similar-but-illegal operation that built full-autos instead of semis, it seems perfectly feasible.

Yep, by "illegal" I should have written "without a license, or a government's approval/sanction." And I wasn't talking about "assault weapons" (a nebulous term that is too ill-defined), but rather about fully-automatic guns.

The wikipedia article on the M-16 claims that one could make a version out of wood and steel that would function identically to the more conventional models using composites in its construction, just with more weight. I don't know how true that actually is, but I'd definitely like to see what the result would look like (and how well it would perform).

That's why I find it hard to believe that people with a sufficient grudge against authority don't turn to making their own guns if it is perfectly feasible and has been done before under duress (witness the Sten and the PPS-43). Properly done, it could be more reliable than relying on gunrunners or the like. I wonder if it would be possible for people in an area where guns are tightly controlled to start making their own to fuel an insurgency/organized crime/armed rebellion. I could see that happening if, for example, the authorities ever manage to definitively shut down the flow of smuggled guns to the drug cartels in Mexico, or if the fires of rebellion take hold in a country where guns are tightly controlled (such as China).

Right now chemicals that could be used in illicit drug manufacturing are carefully controlled (such as the ingredients for crystal methamphetamine), as are chemicals that could be used in clandestine manufacturing of explosives (especially fertilizer). But I'm not sure the machines you could make guns with are that tightly controlled.

Yes, there are homemade AR clones that have wooden lower receivers, and wood furniture. However, I'd expect they're going to be way, WAY less reliable than the mil-spec versions (which aren't exactly all that reliable to begin with).

You can also cast AR lowers rather than forge them, which is much easier to do, but those lowers also tend to be poor quality (a few major AR makers in the U.S. used to build weapons with cast lowers, and they faced a huge backlash).

The reason this isn't done more often is because it would be redundant. Full-auto is highly overrated and unnecessary in anything smaller than a belt-fed machine gun (which is why every professional Western military force teaches its infantrymen to fire their rifles on semi). And as long as semi-auto AR-15s and AKs are readily available at FFLs in the U.S., there's no reason for criminals and domestic terrorists to go to the trouble of making their own versions. Criminals are mostly apolitical and indifferent to the gun control debate; they're not going to try and manufacture automatic weapons just as a big "fuck you" to the gun controllers.

But my point is that IF the Obama Administration were to ban production and sale of all semi-auto assault weapons tomorrow (politically impossible) AND confiscate all of the existing weapons in private hands (physically impossible), I think it would be quite feasible for criminal entrepreneurs to set up underground gun shops and capitalize upon the unfulfilled demand for AKs and ARs. And they'd probably go ahead and make them full-auto, since the law wouldn't distinguish between either type of "assault weapon". If it can be done in countries like Pakistan, it could definitely be done (better) in North America.

First of all, nobody's going to shut down the flow of smuggled guns into Mexico. At the local and state level, the Mexican government, police, and military have been heavily corrupted and/or infiltrated by the cartels. Regardless of what the Obama Administration does to close down the flow of guns from Texas to Mexico, the cartels are powerful and wealthy enough that they'll always have sources of arms.

As for China, the PLA has been fighting against armed Uighur separatist groups in Xinjiang Province for decades now.

Blowback designs are easier to manufacture, just like the Holmes SMG.

True, and there are already a zillion books that you can get at American gun shows or even off Amazon that provide instructions for building cheap, stamped sheet-metal SMGs with open-bolt actions.

If the knowledge is really widespread, then why hasn't someone tried to manufacture the "AK-47" of SMGs ideal to the purposes of criminal/terrorist groups? Something cheap and easy to clandestinely manufacture and easily rechambered to fit local ammunition (as well as easily concealable) would be well suited for them, especially if arms traffickers prove unreliable.

While I will admit that accurate semiautomatic fire is best used with rifles, SMGs have nearly always included fully-automatic fire capability for CQB purposes. Fully-automatic weaponry really excels if you're trying to pull a Baruch Goldstein or a Hotel Mumbai as well. Being under fully automatic fire you can't really escape or hide from is uniquely terrifying to people who haven't been trained to keep their cool in such a situation.

Didn't I answer this question already? What would be the point of trying to manufacture full-auto AKs when there are 100 million of them in the world and they can be illegally purchased/imported with such ease? It would be redundant.

I said the "AK-47 of SMGs," in other words a fully-automatic SMG with the reliability and ease of construction of an AK-47. Something like that would be ideal for those with a predilection for indiscriminate carnage and mayhem since it would be more concealable than an AK-47 and could in theory be easier to get ammo for. It's probably a lot easier to get straw buyers to buy individually small amounts of pistol ammo that is then used for illicit, untraceable SMGs (since they never had serial numbers in the first place) than to buy rifle ammunition without raising lots of red flags.

From what I've seen, the "wrong people" will try to exploit gaps in law enforcement methods when they can. After using metal detectors on airplane passengers before they boarded became more common, the shoe bomber came along, succeeded by the underwear bomber after airports required potential passengers to take off their footwear. Once many stores started rejecting 50 and 100 dollar bills, I remember hearing that counterfeits of 20 dollar bills started to become more widespread--at least until paper currency authenticators started becoming more common. I guess the correct circumstances haven't arrived yet, though.

I'd call these hypothetical home-brew SMGs "Saturday Night Sundances" myself (based off the term "Saturday Night Special" used for junk guns), but the Sundance comes from "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" when you want to go out guns blazing.

If you just want "indiscriminate carnage and mayhem," I would think improvised explosives would be cheaper and easier way to go. And any plan to open fire on a crowd of people is basically a suicide mission anyway, and again, improvised explosives are the way to go if that's how you want to go out. Insurgents in Iraq HAD access to automatic weapons, and still chose to go that way.

And why even bother with pistol ammo? (I can't imagine a place that would have restrictions on semi-auto rifles, but not in pistol ammo.) Wouldn't it be easier just to make an automatic nail gun? It's like something the A-team would whip up in a rousing montage. And all you'd need would be a hardware store.

But, if you just wanted to do it as (an illegal) project, I guess all you'd need would be access to a machine shop.

If I understood what the OP was asking correctly, then this topic about "Khyber Pass Guns" should be of relevance to this discussion.

http://forum.imfdb.org/showthread.php?t=1168

Yeah, but it would have insanely low stopping power. It wouldn't have the same kind of force behind it as a bullet does, and there most likely wouldn't be much cavitization. I bet they'd have awesome penetration if you could get enough power behind them, though

As Funkychinaman pointed out, anyone who wants to carry out "indiscriminate carnage" is better off using explosives than firearms. And if we're talking about manufacturing, it's much easier to manufacture explosives than guns.

But I'm not sure why this would matter to criminals because most criminals do not aspire to carry out "indiscriminate carnage". Terrorists are another story, of course.

What place in the world are we talking about here?

If it's the U.S., you are clearly wrong. ANY time of rifle ammo raises far fewer flags than pistol ammo. When was the last time you even bought ammo (do you own any firearms)? I have to show my driver's license to the cashier at Dick's every time I buy 9x19mm. Whereas I've never had to show my license when buying .223 or 7.62x39mm.

If you are talking about the rest of world, I would venture that there is more 7.62x39mm floating around than almost any other caliber, just as there are more AKs than any other type of small arm.

Not when they can; when they need to. Very big difference.

Right now, there just isn't much of a need for anyone in the U.S. (assuming that's what we're talking about) to manufacture firearms - whether full-auto AKs or SMGs - because full-auto doesn't have too many practical uses and semi-auto clones of the latest military/LE weapons are readily available in the U.S.

Yep, that's the thread I was looking for. I remember I tried to find it in response to this topic, but couldn't. Thanks for retrieving it.

BTW, I also read that Aum Shinrikyo (the Japanese nationalist group which carried out the 1995 Tokyo subway attacks) actually purchased the tooling necessary to manufacture AKs, and successfully imported it from Russia into Japan. They wanted to arm their entire membership with AKs, but for reasons that I don't remember, they weren't able to manufacture very many of the weapons.