Inexpensive add-on spawns  a new era of machine guns

Dr. James Miner, the chair of emergency medicine at Hennepin Healthcare in Minneapolis, which has the largest trauma center in Minnesota, said he first heard about switches in 2020 when he was trying to make sense of why gunshot victims were arriving at the hospital with numerous wounds and why more people seemed to be reporting being shot by stray bullets.

“It’s more common now for someone to say: ‘I was walking down the street and I heard the sound and all of a sudden my leg hurt, my chest hurt,’” he said. “Rather than: ‘I was held up or I was involved in a drug deal gone wrong.’”