Two suspects charged in a July shooting turned themselves into South Bend police Monday while another man remains at large. They’re charged with possessing a machine gun, but not the kind you’ve seen in gangster movies.
For decades across the country, efforts to stem gun violence through background checks for gun buyers have been frustrated by how cheap and easy it is to illegally buy guns on the street. Now law enforcement faces a bigger problem. It’s become cheap and easy to turn those guns into far more deadly automatic or machine guns, which have been federally banned since 1934.
In that July shooting in South Bend, police are still looking for 21-year-old Deshon Gates, while 24-year-old Jacob Pittman turned himself in Monday night. They’re charged with possession of a machine gun, not guns that were manufactured as machine guns, but guns that were converted to automatic with a cheap and simple modification. A penny-sized plastic switch overrides the trigger bar, allowing rapid fire with one trigger pull. The switches are available illegally online for as low as $20, or they can be made with a 3D printer in minutes.
The four victims in the July shooting survived. South Bend Police Chief Scott Ruszkowski declined to say whether they were all intended targets because the case is still pending. But Ruszkowski said generally he worries the trend will lead to more bystanders being injured or killed.
Because handguns aren’t designed to handle the recoil from rapid fire, Ruszkowski says it’s next to impossible to accurately aim them during automatic fire.
"Now you have 20 or 30 rounds a second that's just going anywhere for whatever reason, no specific location, you're not going to be able to sit and analyze and ensure that what you're shooting at is going to be the thing that gets hit," Ruszkowski said.
St. Joseph County Prosecutor Ken Cotter agrees.
"You have to think, I'm going to shoot, I'm going to shoot, I'm going to shoot, you have to consciously make each thought to pull the trigger on a semi-automatic," Cotter said. "With this switch, or this machine gun, you're pulling the trigger once and it's spraying bullets until that magazine is empty. That's the scary part."
But Cotter says the good news is that the number of machine gun cases he’s received for charging from police declined last year. His office filed 10 cases in 2022, 13 cases in 2023 and nine cases last year.
"But that's 10 too many in 2022, 13 too many in 2023 and nine too many in 2024, because of the likelihood you're going to kill someone the more often automatic is being utilized," Cotter said.
Indiana is one of a handful of states that’s trying to tackle the problem through either litigation or legislation. The Indiana General Assembly in 2023 passed a law, signed by Gov. Eric Holcomb, that makes having a gun with the switch added a Level 5 felony, punishable by up to six years in prison.
But in the July shooting, court records show that Pittman, one of the two men facing machine gun charges, had already been convicted of the charge from a 2022 case. St. Joseph Superior Judge Jeffrey Sanford had placed Pittman on probation instead of sending him to prison.
Speaking generally rather than about that case specifically, Cotter said he’s confident that judges have a better understanding of the problem than they did a couple years ago.
"That may have been early enough that, frankly, our courts had to catch up on how dangerous it is," Cotter said. "I can tell you now our courts take them very seriously. It was new. We just didn't know much about those. Law enforcement was scrambling to catch up."
The switches are often called “Glock switches” and they even have “GLOCK” printed on them because they’re most often used on Glocks, but Glock doesn’t make them. New Jersey and Minnesota last month filed lawsuits against Glock, seeking to stop the company from making guns that can be modified with the switches. The city of Chicago in March filed a similar suit against Glock after police had recovered more than 1,000 modified guns over a two-year span.
Chief Ruszkowski says violent crime was down significantly last year compared to 2023. The department plans to release statistics soon.
But Ruszkowski says he’s still concerned about how these switches, along with people adding larger magazines to feed the rapid fire, are further escalating the gun culture among young men in the city.
"It's become, apparently, more of a status symbol," Ruszkowski said. "Who's got the biggest? Who's got the most? And it seems to be accepted.
"This is information coming to me from the people I know and I've dealt with my entire career on the streets, people I grew up with, people I still maintain contact with. Yes, it is absolutely become a status symbol. It's like new pair of tennis shoes or a new wardrobe. Now it's become firearm-related."
