“All the guns here are from the US, everybody knows it. If the US wants to stop this, they could easily do it one month!” He pleads: “We are asking the US to give us a chance to live, just give us a chance.”

For a country that does not manufacture weapons, a UN report in January found every type of gun was flooding Port-au-Prince: high-powered rifles such as AK47s, 9mm pistols, sniper rifles and machine guns.

The weapons are fuelling the staggering surge in Haiti’s gang-related violence.

There is no exact number for how many trafficked firearms are currently in Haiti.

The UN report said some estimates put it at half a million legal and illegal weapons here as of 2020.

It reported that guns and ammunition were being smuggled in from land, air and sea from US states such as Florida, Texas and Georgia.

  • taanegl@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Also known as the Mexican gambit. Who gave the CIA access to pentagon’s stock pile anyway?

    • nondescripthandle@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      7 months ago

      Yeah if they’re getting machine guns its not from civilians. Civs can’t have any manufactured post 1984 and because of that stipulation they go for 20k at least.

      • Որբունի@jlai.lu
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        7 months ago

        They are getting smuggled. Full-auto guns are only difficult to do legally in the US. Pretty sure smugglers don’t care about the law.

        • nondescripthandle@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          7 months ago

          Where do the smugglers obtain machine guns? Because something tells me they’re not smuggling individual guns worth 20k to Haiti. The only people with access to newer machine guns would be the government weather its military or clandestine agencies. So your smugglers are government connected.

          • catloaf@lemm.ee
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            7 months ago

            Depends, are we talking full auto AR “machine guns” or actual machine guns like the FN Minimi or bigger?

            Because full auto conversions for semi-auto rifles are easy to do. Actual machine guns are harder to come by, but still obtainable if you can get the right FFL and SOT license and either make your own or order them from manufacturers for “resale”.

            • nondescripthandle@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              7 months ago

              Depends on scale for me. Like if there are a high number of automatic ARs going to Haiti I’d start wondering who has the capacity to alter that many guns quickly and traffic them. If its like one or two rifles a reporter heard firing very rapidly then who knows how it got there or when it was modified.

            • Buelldozer@lemmy.today
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              7 months ago

              or actual machine guns like the FN Minimi or bigger?

              The UN Report lists all of the above PLUS “Belt Fed Machine Guns”. Where da fuk are those coming from?

                • Buelldozer@lemmy.today
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                  7 months ago

                  Haiti doesn’t have an Army and it’s not possible to steal THAT much inventory from the US Military without getting caught. It is possible for something to “fall off the back of the truck” occasionally but that kind of opportunity is extremely limited.

                  Those AK47s are the same way, they can’t be purchased here…at least not in Full Auto form and the weapon that guy in the first picture is holding ALSO isn’t available for over the counter purchase in the United States. They may be “coming” from the US in that they are being shipped from Florida to Haiti but the United States itself almost certainly isn’t the original source.

                  • catloaf@lemm.ee
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                    7 months ago

                    Haiti doesn’t have an army now. They had several military branches, and paramilitary groups too, up until 1995. Those groups were definitely armed. Where do you think the guns went when they were disbanded?

                    I don’t know where “here” is for you, but you can definitely buy AKs like that in most parts of the US.

                    Edit: actually I’m not sure what that rifle even is. It looks like an AK, but has an AR stock and it doesn’t look like an AK magazine… But the ejection port is only big enough for pistol rounds like 9mm. Given that, and the variety of guns in the other picture, I think they’re just getting whatever they can, wherever and whenever they can, so we’re not talking crates full of ARs coming over from the US very recently.

            • kepa@sh.itjust.works
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              7 months ago

              I have to say there is no such thing as a full automatic rifle. There are Automatics or Semi- Automatics! Just read it to often and started twitching lol!

        • Kusimulkku@lemm.ee
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          7 months ago

          Are they easily available illegally, especially in the amounts that they’d get sold and shipped to Haiti?

          • Որբունի@jlai.lu
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            7 months ago

            A lot of semiautomatic mechanisms can be converted to select fire with very little tooling or investment, you don’t need legally detained “machine guns” per the NFA definition to smuggle guns, anything cheap and untraceable enough will do.