It was in November that 11-year-old Domonic Davis was killed in the blink of an eye by shots fired from a passing car at a group of children he was among.
Four other children and a woman were hurt in the November shooting that took Dominic's life.
"What happened? How does this happen to an 11-year-old? He was only a few doors down," his father, Isaac Davis, said.
No arrests have been made in the shooting, but federal investigators believe that the 22 shots that rang out that night were fired off so quickly because the weapon that was used has been converted to fire on full-auto, like a machine gun, which is illegal.
Authorities believe there has been an uptick of shootings involving pistols converted to fire on fully automatic, which is fueled by small pieces of plastic and metal made by 3D printers or ordered online.
Laws governing machine guns date back to the Prohibition era of gangsters, an era that brought about the much-hated drive-by shooting.
The devices, commonly known as Glock switches, auto sears, and chips, have allowed individuals to convert legal semi-automatic weapons into virtual machine guns.
"Police officers are facing down fully automatic weapon fire in amounts that haven't existed in this country since the days of Al Capone and the Tommy gun," said Steve Dettelbach, director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, or ATF. "It's a huge problem."
The ATF reports a 570% increase in the number of converted weapons collected by police departments between 2017 and 2021, according to the most recent available data.
Several mass shootings have been carried out by individuals using converted weapons in recent years. A shooting at a Sweet Sixteen Party in Alabama last year that killed four people, a shooting that left six people dead in Sacramento, CA in 2022, and the death of Houston police officer William Jeffrey in 2021, were all carried out with guns that were illegally converted.
So-called Glock Switches can be created using a 3D printer in less than 35 minutes, or online for less than $30 and are reportedly easy to install.
Instead of firing one round each time the trigger is squeezed, as a semiautomatic weapon would normally operate, a converted device starts firing as soon as the trigger goes down and doesn't stop until the shooter lets go or the weapon runs out of ammunition.
"You're seeing them a lot in stunning numbers, particularly in street violence," said David Pucino, deputy chief counsel at Giffords Law Center.
The AP reports that police departments across America found 814 converted devices between 2012 and 2016 that were subsequently sent to the ATF. That number ballooned to 5,400 between 2017 and 2021, according to the ATF.
While the device makes handguns into illegal machine guns under federal law, states don't have specific laws against them.
"We have to update the laws regarding machine guns to deal with the problems of today," Indianapolis police Chief Chris Bailey said. devices. Often about the size of a quarter, they can easily go unnoticed by the untrained eye after being installed, said Dettelbach.
He recalled visiting a Texas police department after the ATF hosted a training on conversion devices. Afterwards, the chief searched the weapons in the evidence room and found several with previously undetected conversion devices.
"These items don't always look as dangerous as they are," he said. "If you see some of them, they're pieces of plastic and metal, and sometimes it's even hard to recognize them when they're actually on or in the firearm because they blend in."
They're also increasingly a fixture online, in social media and rap lyrics, Davis said. "Everyone is talking about switches," he said. "It's a scary trend."
