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

[MT2008]

Originally Posted by Spartan198

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

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.