Domonic Davis, 11, was not far from his mother’s home in Cincinnati when a volley of gunfire erupted from a passing car. In the blink of an eye, nearly two dozen bullets flew toward a group of children in the night.
Domonique had just joined the school’s basketball team when the November shooting killed him and injured four other children and a woman.
“What happened? How could this happen to an 11-year-old kid? He was just a few doors away,” said his father, Isaac Davis.
The shooting remains under investigation. But federal investigators believe the 22 shots could have been fired at lightning speed because the weapon was illegally modified to fire like a machine gun.
Shootings with fully automatic weapons have occurred in communities across the United States in recent years due to an alarming increase in the number of small pieces of metal or plastic manufactured using 3D printers or ordered online.
Laws against machine guns date back to the bloody violence of gangs during the Prohibition era. But police and federal authorities say the proliferation of devices with monikers such as Glock switches, click switches, soldering irons and chips is fueling gun violence by allowing people to convert legal semi-automatic weapons into more dangerous firearms.
Steve Dettelbach, director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said: “The amount of fully automatic weapon fire American police have faced since the days of Al Capone and Tommy Guns has It’s unprecedented.” ATF. “this is a big problem.”
The agency reported that the latest available data showed a 570% increase in the number of converted devices collected by police departments between 2017 and 2021.
Guns with conversion devices have been used in several mass shootings, including one that killed four people at a Sweet 16 birthday party in Alabama last year and another in 2022 in a Sacramento, Calif., bar district. A shooting that killed six people. Officer William Jeffrey was shot and killed with a modified gun while serving an arrest warrant in 2021. In cities like Indianapolis, police are seizing such items on a weekly basis.
The devices, which can be retrofitted with legal semi-automatic weapons, can be manufactured on a 3D printer in about 35 minutes, or ordered online from overseas for less than $30. They are also quick to install.
Once in place, they modify the gun’s mechanics. Instead of firing a round each time the shooter pulls the trigger, semi-automatic weapons with a conversion device begin firing immediately after the trigger is pulled until the shooter lets go or the weapon runs out of ammunition.
“You see them in alarming numbers, especially in street violence,” said David Pucino, deputy chief counsel at the Giffords Law Center.
In demonstrations by ATF agents, semi-automatic pistols equipped with conversion devices fired almost indistinguishably from automatic weapons. According to the ATF, conversion devices with different designs can fit a range of different firearms, allowing the firearm to fire at 800 rounds per minute or more.
“It takes two or three seconds to put some of these devices into a firearm to instantly turn the firearm into a machine gun,” Dettlebach said.
Between 2012 and 2016, U.S. police departments discovered 814 conversion devices and sent them to the ATF. That number grew to more than 5,400 between 2017 and 2021, according to the agency’s latest data.
Police Chief Brian O’Hara said they took root in Minneapolis in 2021 and contributed to record-breaking gun violence that year. In addition to spraying bullets at dizzying velocities, the switch makes it more difficult for the shooter to control the gun, so more people may be accidentally hit.
“This thing shakes when it’s fired, so we end up with multiple victims, people with limb injuries in the same shooting because the person can’t control the weapon,” O’Hara said.
O’Hara said switch usage in the city has dropped since September 2022 when a man was arrested for selling switches ordered from Russia and Taiwan or made himself. But “it’s still a very, very real issue,” he said. “This has a very profound impact on families, neighborhoods and communities.”
While these devices are considered illegal machine guns under federal law, many states have no specific laws against them. In Indiana, police spotted them in the state capital so often — multiple times a week — that the state changed its law to make sure conversions were included.
“We must update our laws regarding machine guns to address today’s issues,” Indianapolis Police Chief Chris Bailey said.
Giffords said only 15 states have enacted their own laws banning the possession, sale or manufacture of automatic-fire weapons. Indiana is one of many states with exceptions. Five states have no state machine gun regulations at all.
But long before charges could be brought, police had to find the switching device. They’re typically about the size of a quarter and can easily be ignored by the untrained eye once installed, Dettlebach said.
He recalled visiting a Texas police department after the ATF held a training on converting equipment. The chief then searched the evidence room for weapons and discovered several weapons with previously undiscovered conversion devices.
“These items are not always as dangerous as they seem,” he said. “If you see some of these, they’re pieces of plastic and metal, and sometimes it’s hard to even identify them when they’re actually in or in the gun because they’re so fused together.”
Davis said they are also increasingly appearing online, on social media and in rap lyrics. “Everyone’s talking about the switch,” he said. “This is a terrible trend.”
It’s hard for Davis to talk about losing her son. Domonique often went with his father on Fridays to get a haircut at the barbershop where Isaac Davis worked. The shooting also happened on a Friday, making the weekend especially difficult.
Davis hopes to start a foundation called “For Every Eleven” to combat gun violence and honor his son.
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