The Cartel Gunsmiths | Hacker News Reader

The Cartel Gunsmiths

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34 pointsepsylon39 comments

“You could surmise that [the parts] are coming from the US, since most of the weapons that come down here illegally are from the US,”

Perhaps, since the largest US source is M16s (and maybe M4s now) donated to the Mexican government and then stolen (second is Communist bloc stuff bought on the open market, it's much less expensive than making your own like this). There's not much utility in tracing any of these guns, except of course to propagandize for gun control in the US (see Fast and Furious for the most egregious example).

Which makes me wonder why this cartel felt a need to make their own AR-15s or M16s (the article didn't mention if these were 3 round burst or full auto, did it)? If they can get their hands on rocket propelled grenades....

Then again, this whole expose might be a lie (again, see Fast and Furious).

> Which makes me wonder why this cartel felt a need to make their own AR-15s or M16s (the article didn't mention if these were 3 round burst or full auto, did it)? If they can get their hands on rocket propelled grenades....

The use case for a rocket launcher is a bit different than the use case for a rifle. There is probably some overlap, but there are definitely situations where one is a far better choice than the other.

Your missing the point. If the cartels can get RPGs from the Mexican military, they can get rifles from them also.

Oh. That makes a lot more sense now.

Sorry about my lack of clarity.

My question is, what's behind their "make vs. buy" decision. They pretty much have to buy or steal RPGs if they want them, you really don't want to mess around with primary and secondary explosives unless you absolutely have to (or so I gather, I've steered clear of them, I like my hands intact), but if they can procure RPGs, they can much more easily procure rifles. Don't know what the cost for a AR-15 pattern rifles is, but I heard some time ago the price for an illicit AK-47 pattern rifle is around $100.

Lack of access to Mexican military supplies (their fighting with the Los Zetas might suggest that) plus logistics might be part of the answer, the latter as in they'd probably rather smuggle more drugs into the country than some rifles, especially if demand for marijuana exported to the US is low (everything else is much smaller size and weight). This picture https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e8/Matazets-inte... shows them armed with AR-15 pattern rifles and the guy in the front right has a LAW, which is a US Vietnam era one shot rocket launcher (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M72_LAW).

You can buy most of AR15 entirely legally, save for a small machining job on a lower receiver blank: exactly what they were doing. Much easier than raiding army arsenals.

Nope, they were not turning 80% receivers into 100%, they were starting with aluminum billets according to this article (see this page for a 0% receiver you can buy ^_^: http://www.80percentarms.com/products/0-billet-ar-15-lower-r...).

But in either case, why build when you can, in theory, buy?

Each has different levels of difficultly, and in this case, if true, it was probably harder than buying or stealing. But a different set of risks....

I mean, I've heard of Afgans doing this by hand from scratch, but I've never heard of this level of organization making rifles, heck, most nation states don't.

Well once you have a CNC mill the only difference between machining the full LR and finishing a blank is in run time.

As to why, I obviously don't know. But the LRs being the only regulated, and at the same time trivially machinable parts probably have to do something with it.

Per the article and what I understand, there's moderately skilled work required in sourcing and perhaps adjusting the right CAM data for a complete billet -> lower receiver machining job. Plus a lot more machining involved; as I understand it, a drill press can finish an 80% receiver. But I suppose such skilled people can be persuaded to do this sort of work for a cartel.

The difference between programming the 20% finishing and machining the whole part is not that large. Moreover, the finishing would require manual set up and zeroing out each semi-finished piece.

Aluminium is cheap material and machines really well, there's not much downside to machining the whole piece. Plus, you save the expense of buying hundreds of pre-fab LR blanks.

> the largest US source is M16s (and maybe M4s now) donated to the Mexican government and then stolen

Source for this claim?

>second is Communist bloc stuff bought on the open market

What market is that?

>There's not much utility in tracing any of these guns, except of course to propagandize for gun control in the US (see Fast and Furious for the most egregious example).

Are you actually claiming that "Fast and Furious" was an attempt to manufacture fodder for US domestic gun control efforts?

Yeah, makes one wonder, doesn't it?

>Then again, this whole expose might be a lie (again, see Fast and Furious).

Maybe this whole post I'm replying to is the product of someone who is profoundly fucked in the head.

Funny how utter garbage like you've produced here fares just fine on this site where the posters typically trip all over one another to be the most skeptical and supposedly clear-eyed. I guess you paranoid, mentally unbalanced gun creeps just freak them out enough that they simply stay away.

The only other theory about Fast and Furious that makes sense is that the ATF decided to supply one or more cartels with guns, either as a matter of national policy or internal ATF corruption, and the gun control propaganda was gravy. It certainly wasn't a law enforcement operation, seeing as it violated an ATF cardinal rule about giving guns to criminals.

Wow, an additional gem of an unnerving punchline (at least for me) is close to the end of the article:

"(...) That’s why Mexican cartels are building citywide CCTV networks[1], forcing kidnapped engineers to build secret radio networks[2], and shipping stolen iron ore to China in exchange for bulk meth precursor chemicals[3]. It’s not a question of whether cartels beyond Jalisco can’t get their hands on computerized mills to make their own guns, but how far up they’re willing to scale."

[1]: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/cartel-cctv

[2]: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/radio-silence

[3]: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/inside-the-cartels-global-m...

Filing serial number off is generally unsuccessful as a means of rendering a firearm untraceable. Law enforcement can use a variety of methods to reveal the serial number due to the changes that the original stamping makes in the metal underneath the actual surface impression. While in theory using an impact tool or a milling type tool could work to remove the underlying metal there is a risk that the integrity of the part (in this case the lower receiver) could be compromised.

I would take exception to the author's statement that the lower receiver is the primary firing mechanism. While it does contain the trigger and sear the upper receiver contains the full bolt assembly, firing pin, and gas system (or piston if you feel like getting fancy).

My biggest question is that if they are creating lowers from billet and other parts as well, why they just don't equip these weapons with auto sears and make them full auto. Go big or go home, right?

FWIW: the "Ghost Gunner" is hardly a general purpose CNC machine. It's made specifically to finish an "80% lower".

The "Ghost Gunner" really is a small, general purpose CNC mill. The gimmick here, if you will, is that it comes with the code and the bits to do a certain job - but there is nothing specialized about the mill itself, besides maybe being under-engineered to meet a price point.

There's nothing stopping you from attaching other bits and feeding it other code, and milling some other object out of a block of aluminum with it - in that sense it is general purpose.

This cartel group didn't bother with the "Ghost Gunner", which is a joke. They got a real Hardinge 3-axis CNC mill and made parts from solid aluminum blocks. Hardinge is an old-line US machine tool builder, in business for over a century.

There's stuff in the article about "where did they get the G-code" to cut the part. Any good CNC machinist, given measuring tools and a part, can model a part like that. It helps if you have SolidWorks or Autodesk Inventor.

Or you can just look up "lower receiver 3D model" and download the model from GrabCAD.[1]

Maybe gun serialization should include barrels. Good rifled barrels are hard to make, and require special purpose machinery.

[1] https://grabcad.com/library/ar15-lower-solidworks-native-1

The best rifle barrels are probably hammer forged, and indeed that requires $$$ machinery and tooling, but I'm under the impression that button rifled barrels aren't that hard to make.

But certainly a lot more than AR-15 pattern lower receivers, which are not highly stressed by firing (here's a 3D printed plastic AR-10 pattern lower receiver! http://3dprint.com/54163/printedfirearm-ar10-piece/), you need good steel, a big lathe at minimum and I'm pretty sure heat treating is a good idea.

Any proposal to serialize barrels would be shot down, so to speak, in the US now and for the foreseeable future.

In Germany, serial numbers are stamped on frame, slide, and barrel. Glock puts serial numbers on barrels. Browning does on some models.

Certainly, for manufacturing purposes, you frequently want to do that, especially for guns like the Glock where all three of those are relatively easily swapped. But making it a legal requirement would be another thing altogether; heck, in the US gun serial numbers preceded legal requirements by more than a century, it's only been required since 1968 as far as I know.

Hmmm, there's also the other sort of legal requirement, dealing with lawsuits. Glock doesn't want to have liability for a FrankenGlock kaboom....

Kind of off-topic, but one avenue where serial numbers stamped on all major bits have been useful is to collectors. I've seen a few that Forgotten Weapons covered that went for a pretty penny at auction because everything had matching serial numbers...

But that's a really good point about liability since there's so many after-market replacement barrels for Glocks. Heck, I've been tempted at times to get one just for the standard rifling (and I don't shoot lead).

Many firearms, Glocks by way of example have serialized barrels. The issue is, sticking with the Glock example, that the polymer lower carries the serial plate and is considered to be "the firearm" since barrels are interchangeable and their sale is not regulated. It is straightforward to get a replacement barrel. Barrels do not have an infinite service life and barrel replacement is not uncommon.

What are the differences between an M-16 LR and an AR-15 LR? Is there anything that's keeping them from manufacturing select-fire M-16 LRs? Are the other parts of an AR-15 (e.g. barrel, stock, UR) incompatible with an M-16 LR? I don't understand why they would machine semi-auto AR-15 LRs if they have all the tools necessary to build their full-auto/burst counterparts.

As I understand it, the critical difference is that they'd have to source or make (out of steel, and likely with heat treating) more parts, like the full auto sear, and make an additional cut and hole in the lower receiver. Here are some of them: http://www.brownells.com/rifle-parts/triggers-parts/sear-par... (There are many, many not so big differences, especially as these have evolved over they years, and then there's the newer M4 carbine variant, which I'm told also has some important general reliability improvements.)

Of course, buying these, especially in large quantities, would likely attract the wrong sorts of attention. One motivation they might have for making their own lower receivers from billets is to stay off the radar; normal AR-15 parts and ubiquitous, seeing as we started using it as a service rifle in 1962-5, and we civilian in the US own probably around 6 million.

It's just the extra hole to accommodate the M16's full-auto sear. Anyone finishing an 80% AR15 lower could easily drill that third hole, but in the US the resulting firearm would be considered "readily convertible" to fully-automatic and therefore only legal to manufacture or possess under a limited set of circumstances.

Buying a bunch of M16 trigger parts, while legal in the US might attract unwanted attention, but I think a cartel with machine tools could easily manufacture these parts themselves, or a full-auto sear of a different design.

If they're not making select-fire rifles, and it wouldn't surprise me if they're not, it's because using a fully-automatic rifle effectively requires a lot of training and discipline. Most people under most circumstances would use a rifle more effectively without having the option of full-auto; even the US military has questioned its value for the average soldier, using some models with 3-round burst instead.

Another similar gunsmithing story from Vice.

http://www.vice.com/video/the-gun-markets-of-pakistan

How bizarre. Brand new M16 lowers are like $75 retail. I can't imagine the motive for making them, unless they're just hobbyists who happen to be drug lords.

Just a clarification for people reading this who might be unfamiliar with legal details. What you meant was probably AR15 lowers, not M16. I doubt you could buy M16 anywhere in the US sans the black market. You could make one out of an AR15 lower but that would be illegal.

Pardon my ignorance. When it comes to wanting to kill/scare people as the cartels do what is the difference between an AR15 vs. an M16? Either way you point it at me I'm going to shit myself and do what you say.

M16 can shoot full auto, AR-15 can not.

There are a fair number of legal M16 and full auto AR-15s in civilian hands, it wasn't until 1986 that civilian sales of newly manufactured full auto firearms was banned, resulting in an inventory estimated at 200,000.

Here are 18 for sale: http://www.gunbroker.com/Machine-Guns/BI.aspx?Sort=5 (on the first page), ranging in price from $10K to $35K for an unfired Colt AR-15. Plus of course the $200 Federal transfer "tax".

Scare quotes because when it was established in 1934, per the BLS it was a prohibitive $3.7K, or if you don't trust the government's inflation statistics (I don't) 6 oz of gold, which is currently $7.5K.

BTW, if you think government-citizen relations are bad today, well, 15 months before the National Firearms Act was passed, FDR signed an executive order confiscating the gold held by us: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102 And it was bought at $20.67/oz, and quickly repriced at $35/oz.

While it is true that there are legal M16 series rifles out there, I would be stunned if you could find an unfired full auto M16 variant for 10K. Full auto M16's in decent shape will fetch 20K plus. Additionally, I think it was only in the last few years that a legally owned NFA full auto was used in a crime. For decades there was not a single crime committed with a legally owned full auto post NFA.

Ooops, I wasn't clear, the lower prices were for guns that I'm sure have been fired, the $35K was for an unfired Colt.

As for crimes, only two, with one by a police officer.

> I doubt you could buy M16 anywhere in the US sans the black market.

You can, but they're NFA weapons, and require the tax stamp, extra background check, and all that. They're also rather expensive ($15,000ish or more depending on the vintage)--pocket change for cartels, of course, but when you're looking at the limited quantity/availability and high price, it's more cost-effective to make, buy, or steal something sourced cheaper. Plus, nearly all are presently owned by collectors who aren't as likely to let them go except to other collectors unless it goes to auction for whatever reason.

Neither term is terribly precise. I mean "AR15/M16 platform". They're all basically the same from the perspective of organized crime.

Well, full-auto, for which we generically say "M16", has a certain cachet....

It is true that in the military, much shooting is done in semi-auto mode. That said there is a huge difference in the volume of fire that can be generated in full auto vs. semi-auto. Companies like Surefire are now building 100 round magazines that are far more reliable than the Beta mags which weren't much more than a gimmick.

Well maybe they surmised that any way they can avoid law enforcement would be worth the effort. These guys are very smart and they know that clear links between US guns and Mexican cartels might mean a political obligation in Washington DC to send resources to fight them further.

Also, they arm a lot of people. They really do have small armies of soldiers ready to kill, if the videos of them in action prove anything.

More likely though someone just got this $25k milling machine really cheap and decided what the hell. They got busted and they were going to sell to the cartel. News Translation: The Cartel is Making Guns!

Nice propaganda, how about mentioning brilliant operation Fast and furious?

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