A surge of illegal homemade machine guns has helped fuel gun violence in the US

WASHINGTON (AP) — Eleven-year-old Domonic Davis was not far from his mom’s Cincinnati home when a hail of gunfire sprayed out from a passing car. Nearly two dozen rounds hurtled through the night at a group of children in the blink of an eye.

Four other children and a woman were hurt in the November shooting that killed Domonic, who had just made his school basketball team.

“What happened? How does this happen to an 11-year-old? He was only a few doors down,” his father, Issac Davis, said.

The shooting remains under investigation. But federal investigators believe the 22 shots could be fired off with lightning speed because the weapon had been illegally converted to fire like a machine gun.

Communities around the U.S. have seen shootings carried out with weapons converted to fully automatic in recent years, fueled by a staggering increase in small pieces of metal or plastic made with a 3D printer or ordered online. Laws against machine guns date back to the bloody violence of Prohibition-era gangsters. But the proliferation of devices known by nicknames such as Glock switches, auto sears and chips has allowed people to transform legal semi-automatic weapons into even more dangerous guns, helping fuel gun violence, police and federal authorities said.

“Police officers are facing down fully automatic weapon fire in amounts that haven’t existed in this country since the days of Al Capone in the Tommy gun,” said Steve Dettelbach, director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, or ATF. “It’s a huge problem.”

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