The "no crimes with NFA registered machine guns" sounds like the Adam Winkler talking point for applying the NFA registry (and ultimately a variation of the Hughes Amendment) to other classes of guns, especially handguns.
US Department of Justice,
National Institute of Justice,
Bureau of Justice Statistics,
Firearms Use by Offenders survey.
Survey of state and federal prison inmates who possessed or used a firearm in their last offense, 190,383 state inmates and 12,936 federal inmates considered a representaive and random selected national sample.
About a fifth of prison inmates possessed or used a firearm in their last offense.
Of state inmates who had carried a firearm during the commission of their crime, 6.8% reported having a military-style semiautomatic and 2.4% reported having a fully automatic firearm, with some carrying both.
Federal inmates who had carried a firearm during the commission of their crime, 9.3% reported having a military-style semiautomatic, or 3.8% reported having a fully automatic (machine gun), with some carrying both. (Federal inmates are more likely to have GCA or NFA sentence enhancement than state inmates.)
My Point:
While it is true that there is no use of NFA registered machine guns (fully automatic) in crime, 2.4% of state inmates and 3.8% of federal inmates carried or used a machine gun (fully automatic) in their last offense. That proves to me that restriction on the law abiding do not affect criminals, who by definition do not obey laws.
Since no NFA registered machine guns show up in crime, it does appear that there are machine guns not registered with the NFA in circulation and being used in crime. Criminal sources of machine guns include:
theft from police arsenal (John Dillinger, et al.);
theft from US Army arsenal (Ma Barker & Sons, et al.);
theft from National Guard arsenals (Bonnie & Clyde, et al.);
theft from factory, shipment, warehousing;
undeclared war trophies brought back by GIs;
smuggling (the Drew Thornton/Dixie Mafia brought in machine guns with cocaine and sold them in the back row of the Tazewell VA flea market (Drew became the model of a whole season of Justified), et al.);
underground manufacture (CSAL made machine guns for the white supremacist underground, talk show host Alan Berg was murdered by The Order using a CSAL MAC-10; just the tip of an iceberg).
[sarcasm]There's been no crimes with NFA registered machine guns so that justifies the 1986 Hughes Amendment freeze on the MG registry and extending NFA style controls to handguns, rifles and shotguns.[/sarcasm]
Excuse me while I go to the bathroom to puke.
Code:
Percent of prison inmates carrying
a firearm during current offense
Type of firearm State Federal
Handgun 83.2% 86.7%
Rifle 7.3 8.9
Shotgun 13.1 13.7
Single shot 53.9% 49.2%
Conventional
semiautomatic 43.2 51.8
Military-style
semiautomatic 6.8 9.3
Fully automatic 2.4 3.8
Note: Inmates could report carrying more than one type of firearm.
BJS def of "single shot" is a manually operated gun that fires one shot when the trigger is pulled (revolver, bolt- lever- pump-action, etc.)
Conventional semiautomatic is a sporting semi-auto gun that does not look military.