It’s a tiny little box that turns your Glock handgun into a machine gun, and it comes directly to your mailbox courtesy of the internet and factories in China. As it turns out, everyone from neo-Nazis to jihadis in Syria love the thing. The feds? Not so much. U.S. law enforcement has been cracking down on the devices but the cases keep coming. So what’s a Glock conversion kit and who’s buying them?
Welcome to Rabbit Hole, a breaking-news analysis that helps you get smart on the one story everyone’s obsessing over—for Beast Inside members only.
From China with love: Court filings from a number of criminal cases show that the feds launched a formal investigation into the conversion switches, which turn handguns into firearms that meet the legal definition of a machine gun, back in February. In charges filed in New York, Missouri, and Illinois, agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Customs and Border Protection, Homeland Security Investigations, and the Postal Inspection Service have intercepted packages of the switches they say were purchased through Chinese e-commerce apps. The task force “focused on the importation of switch parts from China that are being used to modify Glock firearms into machineguns,” according to the court documents. Glock doesn’t make machine gun conversion kits, but illicit manufacturers slap the devices with counterfeit Glock logos in order to give them an official appearance.
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The guns converted by the kits aren’t rifles but handguns. By snapping the small, matchbox-sized conversion kits onto the back of a Glock handgun, gun owners can zip through a single magazine in one, relatively short trigger pull. According to federal law, a machine gun is any firearm that can shoot “automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.” In some cases, like the arrest of two suspected gang members in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 2018, defendants have allegedly paired the kits with high capacity magazines capable of holding up to 21 rounds of ammunition.
I did Nazi that coming: CNN first reported on the joint federal investigation into charges brought against conversion kit customers in the Midwest. Some of the defendants charged with purchasing the devices appear to be otherwise law-abiding gun enthusiasts who allegedly let their zeal for playing with automatic weapons overcome their common sense. But there’s an altogether more disturbing set of alleged customers for the Glock kits: American Nazis.
Federal prosecutors in Alaska charged Michael Lee Graves in May with illegal possession of a machine gun when they intercepted a Glock conversion kit. Graves first came to the attention of federal investigators not because of his gun purchases, but from a tip that claimed he was a potentially violent white supremacist. In April, someone dropped an “online tip” to the FBI that Graves “was posting racially motivated extremist views on his social media accounts,” had a stash of guns, and the tipster feared he “may commit an act of violence.”
When federal agents looked into Graves, they found his Twitter account, @angerydoggo3, littered with disturbing white nationalist and neo-Nazi content, complete with an avatar of white nationalist icon Pepe the Frog. The tweets, according to detention paperwork, were “Threatening twitter statements the defendant posted, endorsing violence against Muslims [and people] belonging to the Jewish faith,” which “can be read as a call to action.”
“Nazis are the fucking best. WE are the fucking best,” Graves wrote in one tweet. “I mean I’m up for killing more k***s amirite, lets beat h!tlers kill count bruvs,” he wrote in February using an anti-Semitic slur. In another ominous screed, Graves referenced “a synagogue to shoot up” in response to a deleted tweet.
As the FBI sifted through his tweets, the ATF and HSI tipped off their counterparts that Graves had a package en route to his Anchorage, Alaska home. The package was labeled as “metal” but when customs officials opened it, they found a Chinese-made Glock machine gun conversion kit. Federal agents let the package continue to Graves’s home and arrested him once he took possession of it. Agents also seized silencers Graves allegedly made and marked with “1488,” a white supremacist and neo-Nazi code for a Hitler speech about the future of the white race.
Graves has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial in Alaska.
Pennsylvania: Graves is not the only white nationalist charged with owning the devices. Federal prosecutors charged John Jacob Hasay, a Navy veteran and the son of a Pennsylvania magisterial court judge, with illegal possession of a machine gun for owning a Glock handgun with a conversion kit. Court documents show law enforcement became aware of Hasay because of his participation in a Facebook group where he posted “anti-Semitic and racist comments and jokes.” In a detention motion, prosecutors argued that Hasay should stay in jail throughout his trial because he had a “written promise to commit a hate crime, ready access to illegally modified firearms and black-market firearm component dealers, and recurring advancements of Nazi and white supremacist related ideologies.”
Hasay pleaded guilty to one count of illegal possession of a machine gun in January and was sentenced to two years in prison in April.
Jihadis: Glock conversion kits have also found a market on the other side of the violent extremist spectrum, far outside the reach of U.S. law enforcement. The Daily Beast uncovered evidence that the kits are for sale in encrypted online arms markets used by Syrian jihadists. In mid June, militants in an Idlib-based online marketplace offered a conversion kit complete with the counterfeit Glock logo, along with other tactical firearms equipment.
Islamist militants in Syria’s Idlib province have long used encrypted social media apps like Telegram to set up online arms markets. The black markets offer everything from Pentagon-issued assault rifles and homemade drone bombers to suicide belts and thermal sniper sights.
Rambo vs reality: Just because they’re machine guns doesn’t mean they’re necessarily the most accurate weapons available to bad guys. Automatic fire looks great in the movies but it’s not the best way to put rounds on target in a combat scenario. The Daily Beast reached out to a law enforcement firearms expert in Canada familiar with the devices, who said it’s unlikely you’re going to win any marksmanship awards when firing a converted Glock.
“They are nigh impossible to control. It truly is a spray and pray because they will climb so rapidly,” the source told The Daily Beast. “You may get three to five rounds on your target before it’s off and climbing.”
Canada’s firearms Frankenstein: In Canada, officials have also seen Glock machine gun kits smuggled into the country and sold over the internet for years now. In some of the earliest cases, Canadian criminals would strip down imported foreign conversion switches and take the individual pieces to different fabrication shops to reproduce them. The move helped them crank out their own kits without tipping off any of the machine shops about what they were making. More recently, a joint U.S.-Canadian investigation in 2014 led to the arrest of Bradley Michael Friesen, a Canadian man dubbed the “Dr. Frankenstein of gun making” who sold imported kits on the internet in both America and Canada.
Now, with the help of e-commerce sites, illicit conversion kit manufacturers abroad can cut out middlemen like Friesen and sell them directly to customers, disguised as legal kits for airsoft BB guns. “Now what we’re seeing is Chinese and Russian companies selling them and they’re also identifying them as ‘for airsoft’,” the source told The Daily Beast.
