It’s a late summer night in Lynn, Massachusetts. A group of people are heading out onto the quiet and deserted neighborhood street. Suddenly that silence is broken as machine gun fire erupts in the night.
The group instantly scatters; several struck by the automatic gunfire. Some bullets pierce through nearby homes and into second-story bedrooms.
The images and footage captured that night are later presented in federal court as officials connect the shooting to a leader of a Boston drug operation and discover the weapon is part of a growing trend that is threatening public safety.
That threat stems from a small device that attaches to a firearm to convert it into an automatic weapon.
“By automatic weapon, just to be clear, you pull the trigger and depending on how big your magazine is, 10, 30, 50 rounds come out automatically,” explained Joshua Levy; acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts.
Instead of a single round coming out, the conversion device also referred to as a switch or auto sear quickly turns any handgun or rifle into a machine gun.
“Every law enforcement officer who faces it quite frankly is potentially outgunned the second that they open their door. That is a scary thought,” said James Ferguson, the special agent in charge at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco. Firearms and Explosives (ATF) Boston Field Division.
Federal officials tell 7 Investigates that the conversion devices are streaming in from foreign manufactures and becoming easy to produce locally using 3D printers.
“They are not very expensive. The price has been dropping which is another concern,” Levy said.
Another problem is the device not only increases firepower capacity but the devices also make those shots harder to control.
“It’s a recipe for disaster out in the community,” Levy said.
The devices were used in a mass shooting in California in 2022 that left six dead. In Massachusetts, these makeshift machine guns were used in a shooting at a Caribbean festival in Dorchester that injured eight people.
Possession of one of these switches classifies as an illegal possession of a machine gun; a charge that can lead to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
For the first time in five years, Boston police charged four individuals with machine-gun related charges in 2023.
More than 100 loaded machine gun charges have been filed in Massachusetts’s Superior Court since 2018.
“You think about urban environments where you let go of an entire magazine in less than a second. That is a very scary thought because it is going to be that small child or that innocent victim that becomes the true victim of this increase,” Ferguson said.
Nationwide, ShotSpotter also reported an uptick in the amount of machine gunfire detected in its cities. Twenty-four times more alerts were tied to machine gunfire in 2022 than in 2019, according to ShotSpotter. The number of machine gun rounds fired similarly jumped from 3,600 in 2019 to 97,000 last year. The company said part of the increase is due to ShotSpotter expanding in more cities but a spokesperson said even where coverage has stayed the same, auto gunfire has increased each year.
Officials said while the supply of the switches are increasing; they are often tracking the devices back to people who are prohibited from owning guns and drug traffickers.
“To think of a prohibited person having access to a firearm is one thing. To have access to a fully automatic firearm is something entirely different,” Ferguson said.
The shooting in Lynn was later tied to Vincent Caruso who led a drug trafficking operation based in the North Shore. Caruso was a self-admitted gang member and flooded the streets with hundreds of thousands of pressed fentanyl pills, according to federal documents. In 2022, Caruso was sentenced to 20 years in prison on multiple charges including possession of firearms in furtherance of a drug trafficking crime.
Federal evidence reveals dozens of videos of Caruso flexing stacks of cash and weapons; including guns with machine gun conversion switches.
“As a gang member, it provides them that level of protection or security for themselves that in their mind makes them unstoppable,” Ferguson said.
Federal officials said many gang members are using the devices as status symbols and often boast about them on social media.
“They are making videos to display their power and intimidate communities and then they sometimes use them,” Levy said.
This summer Levy’s office charged nine members of the Asian Boyz gang with connections to drug trafficking and dealing machine gun conversion devices.
“If someone is out there with that kind of record of terrorizing communities we are much more likely to use these kinds of severe sanctions,” Levy said.
While charges are being applied, federal officials admit a lot more work is needed to prevent the influx of the devices.
“There is not an easy button for this,” Ferguson said, admitting it is becoming harder to regulate the production of the devices and thus, halt the influx.
Levy said he believes ShotSpotter plays a part of the solution as the machine gunfire captured by the technology can be used in court to prove a machine gun was used.
While at the federal level these devices can carry heavy penalties, state law does not include the devices in the definition of machine gun. The Massachusetts House passed a bill in October that, if enacted, would ban someone from converting a firearm into an automatic weapon.
The ATF said they aren’t tracking the number of machine gun conversion devices seized but there has been a “very significant increase in the recovery of crimes.”
“The availability of them has increased so much so that every single group that I oversee here in New England is currently working on cases involving these types of devices,” Ferguson said.
Part of the difficulty is a lack of awareness among law enforcement. Some officers may not know what these devices look like and they are becoming harder to conceal. ATF is increasing training with local law enforcement agencies so that more charges can be brought to criminals who possess these devices. Officials hope the penalties attached to possession and use of the switches will act as a deterrence to future buyers.
“If someone has been terrorizing a community. It’s very important that that person is held accountable so they stop terrorizing a community,” Levy said.
And it’s not just those using the devices that authorities are going after. Two Boston men were charged by a federal jury this spring for illegally selling machine gun conversion devices.
Federal officials are also working alongside the U.S. Postal Service to attempt to track where the conversion devices are shipping to and from.
“I think the biggest concern is that those that are trying to advert law enforcement or to arm themselves for gangs are not going to heed any warnings so the one warning I will say is we are actively pursuing them; looking to protect public safety and that means that is a priority for us and for this division,” Ferguson said.
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