7 ms·

The Cartel Gunsmiths

34 points by epsylon 11y ago

ctdonath 11y ago
FWIW: the "Ghost Gunner" is hardly a general purpose CNC machine. It's made specifically to finish an "80% lower".
- Infernal 11y ago
  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.
- Animats 11y ago
  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 https://grabcad.com/library/ar15-lower-solidworks-native-1
  - hga 11y ago
    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/ 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.
    - Animats 11y ago
      In Germany, serial numbers are stamped on frame, slide, and barrel. Glock puts serial numbers on barrels. Browning does on some models.
      - hga 11y ago
        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....
        Zancarius 11y ago
        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).
  - slr555 11y ago
    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.
hga 11y ago
“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).
- yohoho22 11y ago
  > 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? > 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.... 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.
  - hga 11y ago
    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.
damoncali 11y ago
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.
- ianstallings 11y ago
  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!
- apr 11y ago
  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.
  - JupiterMoon 11y ago
    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.
    - chokolad 11y ago
      M16 can shoot full auto, AR-15 can not.
  - hga 11y ago
    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 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102 And it was bought at $20.67/oz, and quickly repriced at $35/oz.
akavel 11y ago
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 http://motherboard.vice.com/read/cartel-cctv [2]: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/radio-silence http://motherboard.vice.com/read/radio-silence [3]: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/inside-the-cartels-global-meth-ring-from-guangdong-to-gulfport http://motherboard.vice.com/read/inside-the-cartels-global-m...
vernie 11y ago
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.
- hga 11y ago
  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-parts/index.htm?avs%7CMake_3=M16 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.
- Zak 11y ago
  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.
rasz_pl 11y ago
Nice propaganda, how about mentioning brilliant operation Fast and furious?
slr555 11y ago
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?
IndianAstronaut 11y ago
Another similar gunsmithing story from Vice. http://www.vice.com/video/the-gun-markets-of-pakistan http://www.vice.com/video/the-gun-markets-of-pakistan

34 points by epsylon 11y ago

ctdonath 11y ago

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

Infernal 11y ago
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.
Animats 11y ago
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 https://grabcad.com/library/ar15-lower-solidworks-native-1
- hga 11y ago
  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/ 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.
  - Animats 11y ago
    In Germany, serial numbers are stamped on frame, slide, and barrel. Glock puts serial numbers on barrels. Browning does on some models.
    - hga 11y ago
      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....
      - Zancarius 11y ago
        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).
- slr555 11y ago
  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.

hga 11y ago

“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).

yohoho22 11y ago
> 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? > 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.... 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.
- hga 11y ago
  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.

damoncali 11y ago

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.

ianstallings 11y ago
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!
apr 11y ago
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.
- JupiterMoon 11y ago
  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.
  - chokolad 11y ago
    M16 can shoot full auto, AR-15 can not.
- hga 11y ago
  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 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102 And it was bought at $20.67/oz, and quickly repriced at $35/oz.

akavel 11y ago

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 http://motherboard.vice.com/read/cartel-cctv [2]: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/radio-silence http://motherboard.vice.com/read/radio-silence [3]: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/inside-the-cartels-global-meth-ring-from-guangdong-to-gulfport http://motherboard.vice.com/read/inside-the-cartels-global-m...

vernie 11y ago

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.

hga 11y ago
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-parts/index.htm?avs%7CMake_3=M16 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.
Zak 11y ago
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.

rasz_pl 11y ago

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

slr555 11y ago

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?

IndianAstronaut 11y ago

Another similar gunsmithing story from Vice. http://www.vice.com/video/the-gun-markets-of-pakistan http://www.vice.com/video/the-gun-markets-of-pakistan