Research Question....

[Drgong]

When was the last time a NFA Registered Machine gun used in a commission of a crime?

 

[Phil DeGraves]

As far as I know, it has only happened once and it was a police officer that committed it. I don't remember where I saw this. Two different sources, same info. One was while researching Miller.
And it was quite awhile ago.

 

[Drgong]

That would be the Patrolman Roger Waller case

 

[Eric F]

When was the last time a NFA Registered Machine gun used in a commission of a crime?

Dont know if this would count but 3 nfs registeres machine guns were stolen in Portsmouth VA about 3 to 5 years ago and one turned up in a gas station robery same city. The guy aparently droped in in the parking lot jumping into a get away car.

 

[Happiness Is A Warm Gun]

There is 1 confirmed (involving a police officer using a weapon registered to police department) and possibly a second.
http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcfullau.html

In 1995 there were over 240,000 machine guns registered with the BATF. (Zawitz, Marianne,Bureau of Justice Statistics, Guns Used in Crime) About half are owned by civilians and the other half by police departments and other governmental agencies (Gary Kleck, Targeting Guns: Firearms and Their Control, Walter de Gruyter, Inc., New York, 1997.)

Since 1934, there appear to have been at least two homicides committed with legally owned automatic weapons. One was a murder committed by a law enforcement officer (as opposed to a civilian). On September 15th, 1988, a 13-year veteran of the Dayton, Ohio police department, Patrolman Roger Waller, then 32, used his fully automatic MAC-11 .380 caliber submachine gun to kill a police informant, 52-year-old Lawrence Hileman. Patrolman Waller pleaded guilty in 1990, and he and an accomplice were sentenced to 18 years in prison. The 1986 'ban' on sales of new machine guns does not apply to purchases by law enforcement or government agencies.

The other homicide, possibly involving a legally owned machine gun, occurred on September 14, 1992, also in Ohio.

Dr. Shou Chao Ho killed Dr. Carmelito Olaes on Sept 14. 1992 in his front yard on Plum Creek Parkway in Brunswick Hills Township.... HO said he had owned a .380-caliber machine gun, the same caliber bullet that killed Olaes. He also said he had registered the guns with the BATFE when he purchased them.

Some books cite this as a legal machinegun and others do not. The article referenced does not clearly indicate either way. The gun was traced back to a legal FFL sale so likely had it been illegal it would have been a much bigger separate news story "local gun shop sells illegal machine-gun". Personally I think it was a legal NFA registered machine-gun but without some research we may never know for sure.

Even if we include the Ho case that is a grand total of 2 legal machineguns used in crime. The sheer iron is one of them invovles a post-86 weapon. Civilians are unable to purchase them but a LEO used a post-86 weapon to murder someone.

Even crime with illegal machineguns is extremely low (far lowering than virtually any other weapon firearm or not).

Again in Targeting Guns, Kleck writes, four police officers were killed in the line of duty by machine guns from 1983 to 1992. (713 law enforcement officers were killed during that period, 651 with guns.)

In 1980, when Miami's homicide rate was at an all-time high, less than 1% of all homicides involved machine guns. (Miami was supposedly a "machine gun Mecca" and drug trafficking capital of the U.S.) Although there are no national figures to compare to, machine gun deaths were probably lower elsewhere. Kleck cites several examples:

• Of 2,200 guns recovered by Minneapolis police (1987-1989), not one was fully automatic.
• A total of 420 weapons, including 375 guns, were seized during drug warrant executions and arrests by the Metropolitan Area Narcotics Squad (Will and Grundie counties in the Chicago metropolitan area, 1980-1989). None of the guns was a machine gun.
• 16 of 2,359 (0.7%) of the guns seized in the Detroit area (1991-1992) in connection with "the investigation of narcotics trafficking operations" were machine guns.

 

[Tirod]

I appreciate the stats. I wonder how many post-86 fully automatics are now in police hands since the gov't began transferring M16's to the local PD level.

I would not be surprised to find the number of full auto's in PD's has gone up substantially.

 

[Gunnerpalace]

The cop does not count as he is a cop, (by my ratings)

From what I read the Dr had a registered piece. This is the only other known murder.

There was a member on here who said that some guy in Texas had a suppressor and a M16 and took out a flock of deer with it ( all were legal).

So without more evidence it could be said no crimes were committed with NFA weapons at this point.

 

[TexasRifleman]

So without more evidence it could be said no crimes were committed with NFA weapons at this point.

That's how I always look at it, though the cop one could be argued I guess.

There are 2 other times that an NFA machinegun was used and the owner was charged but both of them were found not guilty or no billed in the first place.

One was the guy that worked for HK and used an AC-556 in self defense and the other guy was a gun store owner who used something, Uzi I think, to shoot at robbers.

If I remember right that gun store owner actually used full auto TWICE in self defense. Good shoot both times of course.

The guns were returned in these cases, not kept forever as some people will claim.