The Chinese Communist Party has been putting automatic weapons on American streets. The effects are devastating.
From 2019 until 2022, criminal use of fully automatic weapons in American cities exploded by a shocking 1400%, according to published reports. Criminal gangs can now pack firepower reserved for the army. But how is this possible when machine guns have been banned in the United States since the 1930s and access even to antique machine guns is tightly restricted by the federal government?
The answer is something called an “auto-sear switch,” also known as a “Glock switch.”
These small, illegal bits of metal are flooding American cities and finding their way into the hands of criminal gangs in places like Chicago and Los Angeles. Installed on an ordinary Glock handgun, they allow it to spray automatically with one trigger pull. Criminal gangs will then add drum magazines to these guns to obtain firepower that police cannot match.
Shotspotter, a technology used in 130 American cities to sonically triangulate the location of a firing gun in real time, detected 5,600 such incidents in 2022 alone of automatic gunfire. This did not just happen; there is a reason.
China has been producing and selling Glock switches through websites like Alibaba since 2018. They market them to criminals. They can be delivered through the mail or, more recently, via illegal immigrant “mules” who cross America’s southern border with Mexico and deliver bundles of them to middlemen. Though these devices are confiscated when found in Chinese shipments to the US, their small size and the sheer volume of devices produced in China gets them through.
As Schweizer writes in Blood Money, it is all part of Chinese strategic belief summed up in the adage: “Watch a fire from across the river.”
Schweizer points out that neither Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell nor President Biden has done anything to stop this. China has financial leverage over both of them. In McConnell’s case, his wife Elaine Chao’s family owns a shipping company that transports billions worth of goods from China and owes its very existence to the Chinese communist’s government’s good will. In Biden’s case, as we know very well, it is also a family connection.
