Small Gun Makers Are Testing The Limits Of Gun Control Laws

and to carry them in public. But the Court has also been careful to say this Second Amendment right to bear arms is not absolute. The federal government and the states can require background checks in gun licenses, and they can play certain restrictions on who can buy guns and where they can be carried. States can also limit or outlaw certain weapons for public safety. It's that last part

that we're talking about today. Several states do ban the sale of some kinds of guns, like a R fifteen style rifles that often are used in the mass shootings that occur almost daily in the US at least five hundred eighty nine mass shootings so far this year alone, and courts have largely upheld state laws limiting which guns can be sold. Now comes a new way gun manufacturers are testing the limits of these laws. Later on you'll meet Rob Pinkett's who you heard at the very top.

He's a gun rights advocate who's also bringing his first gun to market. But first to explain the rapid rise of small gun makers, I'm joined by Jason Grotto, an investigative reporter for Bloomberg in Chicago. Jason, thanks for being here. Thanks so much for having me, Jason, you and your reporting partner Mike Smith have written a really interesting story about gun manufacturers and an increasingly popular way to make

and buy guns. When we think about the gun control debate, a lot of it centers around should there be more regulation of who can buy? Should there be background checks if you buy a gun on the internet or at a gun show. But you're writing about something completely different, which is not about buying a gun, but about buying a gun in different pieces and putting it together yourself. Yeah,

that's correct. So one of the thrusts of the story that we've done is the sort of do it yourself phenomenon within the gun industry and a lot of its centers around a R fifteen style rifles, which are you know, some consider them depending on which side of the debate you're on, Some will call them assault rifles, others would call them modern sporting rifles. But these are guns that are component based. Core of the gun is what's called the lower receiver. This is the piece sort of in

the middle that houses the trigger, the firing pin. It's where the pistol grip or other type of grip will be inserted into, and it's threaded. It has threaded pieces that receive other parts of the guns, such as the barrel where the bullet comes out of, and the stock, which is sort of the shoulder piece that leans up against your shoulder for when you fire it. And so these guns are made to be modular that you can mix and match pieces. It's not like you have to

buy it as it would come from a manufacturer. That's correct, you can buy it whole, but they come apart very easily, and there are technologies inside the gun that make it incredibly accurate and easy to shoot. So, for example, inside the stock going into the receiver, the upper what they would call the upper part of the receiver um is something called the buffer weight, which kind of keeps the guns steady when you fire it, so you don't have that kind of kick that you might associate with like

a shotgun or something. So there's all kinds of things that play here that make these guns, you know, incredibly popular, and because their component based. One of the things that we found is that smaller manufacturers have really gotten into this game, and the air fifteen has become a very

popular firearm. Of course, we hear about it quite a bit because it is sometimes used in mass shootings, and among people who buy them, they're popular because they're relatively inexpensive there as you say, very accurate and um, you know, somewhat easy to use, and they're abundantly available. That's right. If you look at the federal statistics on gun manufacturing whole completed rifles, the number of those has fallen thirty six percent since two thousand, but the number of lower

receivers has grown four thousand percent. So this market has really exploded. And you're exactly right that one of the things driving it is this sort of ability to soup up your firearms. So it's it's not unlike you know, guys souping up their motorcycle um only now they're souping up, you know, these firearms. So there's from the enthusiast perspective why people would want to buy these, why the market

is exploding for them. But from a law enforcement perspective, this kind of do it yourself popularity has all kinds of challenges, doesn't it It can. I think the biggest issue in terms of public safety, I guess you would call it is how lethal these types of weapons are. So some of the folks who advocate for stricter gun laws would say, well, you can't have a Formula one

race car on the highway. You can still have a driver's life since you can still get a car, but you can't drive, you know, a race car on the highway. So if you look at mass shootings, one of the things you'll find is, you know, handguns are involved in most mass shootings and most shootings in general, and there are a lot more handguns out in circulation than assault rifles,

so called the sault rifles. However, if you look at data on mass shootings from every town, I should say here that Michael Bloomberg, the majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News founded and helps fund every Town for Gun Safety, which advocates for universal background checks.

You know, if you look at the data from every Town, what you see is that assault rifles and high capacity magazines that go with them, they account for eighteen percent of the mass shootings in the US since two thousand and nine, but thirty percent of the deaths and seventy five percent of the wounded. So what is the argument in favor of it given all that set effects. So the folks in the industry and gun enthusiasts would say, and they do say, literally, you cannot legislate away evil,

that there is evil in the world. And uh, that comes amid the Second Amendment, which they read in a certain way that says you cannot curtail our right to own firearms. And that's really the debate is how far does the Second Amendment go and what right does government have to limit something that is in sort of the

core constitutional provisions. Jason and your story, you write that the ability to buy a gun in its individual parts and assemble it yourself has enabled people in some states to get around state laws which prohibit people from buying weapons like this. Yeah, so take a state like Massachusetts. In Massachusetts, they have a so called ban on assault weapons, and they literally list the weapons that you cannot I you cannot buy an A R fifteen, you cannot buy

an A K forty seven. But what they say is you can't buy them whole. What you can do is you can buy a lower receiver. It has a serial number, and before you purchase it, you have to go through a background check. And so it's the same as buying a gun under federal law. That lower receiver, the part of the rifle that accepts all the other parts is a fire is the firearm. It's the only thing that they really track, and that's because without it the heart

of the gun. Without that, you can't do anything. That is the critical component. And so the part that they think should be regulated under federal statute. Yes, in other countries they regulate the barrels or other parts of the gun, but here in the US we regulate the lower receiver. They do not regulate the barrel or the stock, and that's not tracked at all. So you need to go

through a background check to get the lower receiver. But then you can buy all the other parts and no one would ever know and there's no tracking of that at all, and so that's exactly what people do and that's then completely legal to do. Yep. And then is that gun legal in Massachusetts for someone to own it? Is? In your story, you write about a small manufacturer of the kinds of weapons we're talking about here, and he originally was going to become a licensed gun dealer but

then took a different turn. Why do you do that? Yeah, So that's kind of the through line of our story. As a company called dark Storm Industries, which is based on Long Island, and their original purpose was to have a gun shop. And two weeks before they started, however, the state of New York passed what's called the New York Safe Act, which restricts, you know, what kind of assault rifles you can have you can sell, and that was what this company was planning on doing. They were

planning on selling those kinds of rifles. And so what they started doing was two things. First, they started manuf facturing lower receivers and then they also began designing rifles that they would say complies with the laws of New York State. One of the things that the state did is it said you cannot have a semi automatic rifle that has a detachable magazine. And by magazine, I mean it's the piece of the guns. Some people call it a clip. It's where the bullets go and you stick

it into the lower receiver in the rifle. And some of those magazines can hold, you know, thirty, forty, even a hundred rounds bullets in it. And so what the state wanted to do is they wanted to limit the number of rounds you could put inside one of these so called the salt rifles. And they did that by saying the magazine has to be fixed and it can

have no more than ten rounds in it. What these owners of this company did is dark Storm, is they patented a design where they created a it's an A R fifth seen it looks exactly like an A R fifteen, and they used a small little screw and they fixed the magazine in there, and now you can have an A R fifteen. And that has really upset Assemblyman who

co sponsored the New York Safe Act. They look at that as a blatant violation of nothing else of the spirit of the law, and supposedly are now requesting that the Attorney General look into this to see if they can get some kind of injunction on selling these, and they're looking to potentially rewrite the law to close off what someone call a loophole, a design loophole that allowed them to sell these kinds of rifles in New York. They could also argue the company that they're just complying

with the law. They found a way to meet the standard of the law, and so they are legal to sell. That's exactly right. During the nineties, we had a crime epidemic and the federal government banned assault rifles. You could not buy one in the entire United States that law.

And in two thousand and four, and people that want to restrict the type of weapons you can have to cut down on the gun violence, which is really high in the United States relative to other developed countries, they say, we need another law like that that you cannot do this in the piecemeal fashion that's being done right now across the country with different laws, that we need a federal law that tackles this, you know what they would call a problem across the country. My conversation with Jason

Grotto continues after the break. So, the founders of dark Storm, they found that it was actually easier to become a gun manufacturer than it was to become a licensed gun dealer. So there's a couple of ironies there. The first one is the fee to get a manufacturer's license is just

a hundred and fifty dollars. If you've never committed a felony and can pass a background check, you're going to get a license as long as you have a place to operate out of advances in machine technology means you don't really even need to know much about making a gun. You don't have to have any prior experience. The other irony is that technology coupled with the restrictions opened up a market for dark Storm. Because what we found is and what they told us, the big gun maker's cult

Smith and Wesson, you know, Glock. They're not going to retool their whole manufacturing operation in order to sell guns in New York. It's just not that big of a market. But dark Storm, because they made a gun that specifically complied with New York's restrictions, they had a market that was tied up. And then what they did is they went and made a gun for Massachusetts, and they made one for Connecticut. Each one that I'm complying with the

individual state law exactly. And so these smaller manufacturers they can operate at a smaller scale and be very profitable. Exactly. They're very nimble. So if they're all federally licensed, that means they're complying with federal regulations and means that the Bureau of Alcohol to back of firearms and explosives, the a t F has oversight of them. So does the a t F kind of looking on their operations, regulate what they're doing and make sure these things are being

manufacturing sold the right way. Well, so there you're hitting on another rub in this whole space, and that is the a t F lacks the resources necessary to meet its own goals in overseeing these companies. So, for example, dark Storm has never had a compliance inspection in the ten years plus that it's been in operation. So a t F has never come by and said, hey, we want to look at your Nope, they've never done it.

And in fact, the data is hard to come by, but it's pretty clear from what data there is out there that they just don't have the manpower. In fact, they had a report that came out in May that said they would need to double their staffing levels for inspectors in order to inspect every gun licensee once every three years, not once every year, once every three years. Is there any effort to increase the A t F s budgets so they're able to do their job more effectively?

So I have seen um in this year's appropriation ask um that there is some request for additional staff, but not nearly what they would need to really inspect these folks once every three years. And again some people would say that's not adequate. What percentage of manufacturers is the A T F able to inspect? Well, so in COVID being a wrinkle, they only inspected seven percent. And how many gun manufacturers are there now in the unit? Well,

today there are eighteen thousand licensed gun manufacturers. And so there's another phenomenon happening because of the component based craze where dealers are now getting manufacturing licenses. With the manufacturing license, you have the flexibility to both own a gun shop and sell retail and build your own guns from scratch or assemble guns from parts and resell them. So if you have a dealer's license, all you can do is sell guns or sell lower receivers. You can't help people

build them or build them and sell them resale. But with a manufacturing license you can do all of the above. And that's one of the other ironies here is that as the federal government through the a t F, tries to clamp down on this through regulations, and as states try to do it through their piecemeal legislation, what they keep seem to be doing is opening up little niche markets for folks in the gun industry, you know, that want to push the envelope or provide products for their

customers that wouldn't be there without those regulations. So it's a cat and mouse game. Jason Grotto, thanks very much for taking the time to explain all of this to us. Thank you for having me. I appreciate your interest. I wanted to hear from a small gunmaker, which is how I recently wound up at a gun range outside Denver. And just a note, you'll hear the sound of gunfire in this part of the episode. All right, now, the hips, bend the knees and body weight forward shoders in front

of the hips. Both eyes have been on the target. Extend right now, keep both eyes open, focused on that target, and touch the trigger. And then that's Rob Pinks. He's a gun safety instructor, a former law enforcement officer, and a staunch defender of gun rights. He's teaching me how to fire a new gun his company, called a Vidity Arm, is getting ready to bring to market. I'm a total novice and not doing much harm to the paper target in front of me. Hey, you got finger off the trigger.

Come back to the ready position, all right, breathe, All right, So there's a little bit high, but when you drove the gun out, you were a little bit like Pincas believes gun owners and sellers have a responsibility to make sure the weapons in their possession are handled safely, but that the government should get out of the way when

it comes to deciding who can own what. He has a federal gun manufacturing license and he follows the law, but he says background checks are an infringement on his rights. If you asked me to put it to a vote tomorrow,

I say no background checks. However, I fill out of three whenever I want to do a traditional purchase from a dealer, because like most gun owners, I'm complying with laws that I think are unfair, unrealistic, and probably unjust under our system, there are people who you believe should not own guns. Does it bother you at all that people like that are very easily able to purchase guns?

It bothers me? Does it concern you not to a level at which you cross the threshold where I think you're right or my right to purchase a gun should be impeded? So that so I do not think that the fact that someone that I believe at that point in time should not have immediate access to a gun should mean that no one should have a media access to a gun, because that's what you're saying. If if you have to go through a background check, no one has immediate access to just go pick up a gun.

I can't loan a friend again. I can't tell a friend again. I can't give a friend again because somebody out there on earth right now I believe shouldn't have a mediacs again. You know whose responsibility that is the

person transferring them the gun. What if the person is just buying it essentially from a stranger, and they're not a mental health professional, they don't know where the background isn't they don't have a responsibility to find that out, So they don't have a legal obligation, or they don't have the responsibility. I believe they have the responsibility. I don't think they should have a legal obligation. The gun he plans to sell isn't an a R fifteen style

rifle like the ones we heard about earlier. It's a small handgun. There's nothing unusual about its appearance. To my eye, it looks fairly similar to another pistol. He's brought along to the range, a glock that he pulls from a concealed holster in the waist band of his jeans. So we'll be using two guns today. The first is a production prototype of the Avidity Arms PD ten. This is

the gun that we're bringing a market this year. It's been a long project with some COVID interruptions and other interruptions, but that is the single stack nine millimeters. It holds ten rounds in the magazine in one round um in the barrel of the gun, so your capacity when you're One of its notable features isn't the gun itself, but how he intends to sell it more with Rob pinkis after the break. There are a lot of handguns the market. Rob Pink has plans to sell his new gun in

a way that's unconventional. Customers can buy the complete gun from him, but he also wants to make plans available for free to anyone who wants to make their own version of the gun's plastic frame on a three D printer. The rest of the gun's metal parts they can buy from him. The major manufacturers have not embraced opportunities to let people utilize their technology, their designs, their their parts.

They're engineering with guns that they manufacture at homes. In other words, you know, these major manufacturers will sell you a stripped frame or lower receiver quite often, and then you can buy parts and construct or assemble a gun. But it's still they did the work on the frame, and obviously there's a huge number of people that enjoy doing that work that considered a little bit of an

art form, especially in the three D printing world. If we're able to provide the files so that people can three D print a frame that is based on my design, but then they're going to put their initials on it, they're going to print it in whatever color they want. They might adjust the palm swell a little bit um or the length of pull of the gun a little bit.

Now that it's a distance between the front of the trigger and the back of the grip, they might increase that a little bit or even decrease that a little bit. As long as it is within the design tolerances and the parts will still fit, then they can actually customize. He says he won't make much money this way since the frame is often the most expensive part, So then why is he getting away the plans for the three D printers. That's a relatively small community, and absolutely we

would be essentially losing money on that proposition. But I believe it's incredibly important to show support from the traditional manufacturing side of the firearms industry to the private gunmakers and and hopefully it encourages other much larger gunmakers to support them as well. If a gun maker sells a customer a complete gun or just its frame or lower receiver, federal law requires it to have a serial number, and

the buyer has to complete a background check. Serial numbers are one of the tools that law enforcement uses to attract the origin of guns used in crimes. For this reason, in a handful of states, it's against the law of three D print your own gun, or you have to apply for a serial number if you do, I asked Pincas if there's a reason not to put a serial number on these guns. Some states Massachusetts, California, Connecticut allowed, but federally there is no requirement or even mechanism for it,

So there's a logistical problem with it. There's also, I think, obviously, the civil rights issue of of the the infringement, the restriction, the the idea that I have to report to the government. One of the questions I get asked sometimes is how am I going to feel if a school gets shot up with one of my guns. I'm gonna feel bad. But if I haven't accepted that possibility, I have no

business selling guns. And if you haven't accepted the possibility that when you're working in a gun shop and you're selling a gun across the counter, that that person could kill themselves, kill their kids, kill sixteen kids in a school down the street, you have no business selling that

gun across the counter. And if we take that seriously and we preach that in our community, I think people will be a little bit more careful about who they're selling they gun across the counter to whether the government's

involved or not. I was just speaking to a reporter on a story that Bloomberg did about the proliferation of small gun manufacturers, and one of the points of that story was that um individual states have varying restrictions on kinds of guns, in particular a R fifteen style rifles, and the larger manufacturers sometimes don't accommodate for those different state variations, and so these smaller manufacturers have started to manufacture guns that in the narrowest sense, meet the restrictions

of these states. Is that something that you're part of, Like, how how does that play into this kind of growing small manufacturers which are really aimed at trying to uh comply with state Yeah. I think that's the issue is is there's a lot of talk around this, and at the end of the day, what you're describing is the gun industry's attempt to comply with rules which in most cases we think are unjust convoluted and unfair, uh and

probably unconstitutional. As as more and more of these laws are tested, we're saying more and more than ruled unconstitutional but screen court, and that's good. In the meantime, it is good that these companies are trying to solve these problems. For people that want to have certain capabilities with firearms, whether it's for defense, for recreation, for hunting, for whatever it may be inside of these more restricted areas. So sometimes we see major manufacturers adjust their product line UM

in response. For example, UM reduced capacity magazines. So you've got a standard capacity. A state says they're going to restrict the level of ownership magazines one can have in that state. So the major manufacturers will adjust that and they'll have a version with a reduced capacity. UM handguns, you know, rifles that happens a lot here in Colorado, were restricted at the state level from having magazine new

magazines over fifteen rounds. So any new gun that's manufactured in the community that gets sold in Colorado, that manufacturer has to ship it to Colorado for sale through dealers with magazine capacity fifteen or less, even if it might hold eight being sold in Kansas, you know, prior across the border. UM. As far as my company goes, uh,

we're selling our first product. Their first firearm product is a semi automatic handgun with a magazine capacity of ten rounds, which is incidental to the whatever the laws may be, it's that's the size we talked about the ergonomics really

being the driving design factor. Uh, if we had a customer base in a state where a restriction at some point shows up and he said, you can only have five rounds, I would tell them, honestly, there's probably more efficient designs if you if you can only have five rounds in your gun, this gun probably isn't your gun. But if you want this gun, we'll sell you one,

and we absolutely would provide a five round magazine. The increasing popularity of making guns at home that are beyond the scope of gun regulations has caught the attention of several states. California is trying to regulate machines that are sometimes sold with gun kits. Those allow buyers to make handgun frames or lower receivers at home from a solid

block of aluminum. In Delaware, a federal judge blocked a new state law to prohibit certain build a home guns, and in New York, a Democratic lawmaker is drafting legislation that would outlaw modifications that companies make to ban guns that allow them to be sold. We'll keep an eye on this story and report back to you when we know more. Thanks to Rob Pinkis and Jason Grotto for joining me today. You can read Jason's and Michael Smith's story about small gun makers on Bloomberg dot com. Thank

for listening to us here at The Big Take. It's the daily podcast from Bloomberg and I Heart Radio. For more shows from my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app podcast or wherever you listen. Read today's story and subscribe to our daily newsletter at Bloomberg dot com slash Big Take, and we'd love to hear from you. Email us with questions or comments to Big Take at Bloomberg dot net. The supervising producer of The Big Take is Vicky Burgalina. Our senior producer is Katherine Fink. Our

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