The Communist Chinese government has been flooding the United States with illicit gun parts as part of a “Disintegration Warfare” strategy it is employing against America aimed at tearing the country apart from the inside, according to a blockbuster new book by Breitbart News Senior Contributor Peter Schweizer.
In Blood Money: Why the Powerful Turn a Blind Eye While China Kills Americans, Schweizer reveals how Chinese companies, which are heavily regulated by the Chinese government, are flooding the U.S. with auto sear switches, a small metal device also known as “Glock switches” that can convert handguns into machine guns. They are illegal for most gun-owners in the U.S., but are being shipped in boxes by the “thousands” from China, Schweizer reveals.
As with fentanyl, the Chinese government is sending the auto sear switches to sow chaos and death inside the U.S. as part of a “Disintegration Warfare” strategy, according to Schweizer.
The “Disintegration Warfare” strategy, Schweizer writes, “focuses on—in the Chinese leaders’ words—going after the United States’ ‘soft underbelly’ in terms of politics, economics, and the spirit and psychology of [its] people.” It is based on the ancient Chinese strategist and general Sun Tzu’s teachings on how to win a war without fighting. The strategy is aimed at undermining a rival country’s “national will, values, and cohesion.”
In Blood Money, Schweizer uses leaked U.S. federal law enforcement documents to reveal how China is trying to arm felons and criminal gangs across the U.S. with these auto sear switches.
The devices, which are about the size of a penny, started arriving in the U.S. in large quantities in 2018. They are illegal in the U.S. except for use by law enforcement personnel and a select group of others who must obtain a federal license requiring an extensive criminal background check. Thus, criminals in the U.S. purchase them illegally from China via Chinese websites that are in English and target Americans, Schweizer writes.
Accordingly, between 2019 and 2021, there was a rise of 4,200 percent in incidents involving machine gun fire in 130 American cities, Schweizer reveals. Although some of the illegal auto switches are made on 3D printers in the U.S., “the vast majority on the street” are from China and are of much higher quality that those made on 3D printers, Schweizer writes.
Image of a Glock switch from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives website
A Glock switch device for a Glock hand gun is displayed by the ATF Boston Bureau. The device can convert the Glock into a machine gun after the “switch” is installed. (John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
As U.S. law enforcement has become better at identifying these switches coming from China, Chinese producers have switched tactics and increasingly are shipping them to Mexico and smuggling them across the border into the U.S., where they eventually end up in the hangs of gangs, felons, and drug dealers. And drug cartels in Mexico are also starting to manufacture the devices themselves, using machines provided by Chinese companies, Schweizer reveals. He writes:
This is a strikingly similar replay of the Chinese government’s strategy with fentanyl: when US authorities successfully began blocking shipments sent from China via mail or parcel, Chinese sellers switched to a land bridge in Mexico to continue supplying these devices to criminals in the United States. This is “delivery saturation around the United States,” warned the Department of Homeland Security in an internal memo obtained by the author, with a map showing that distribution is concentrated in major cities including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Detroit, Miami, Washington, New York, and Philadelphia.
Not surprisingly, the number of switches seized by law enforcement officials investigating crimes jumped by a startling “570% during a period of 2017 to 2021, compared to the previous five years,” according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).
Police tape cordons off the area after a mass shooting incident in Baltimore, Maryland. (Baltimore Police Department via AP)
Schweizer writes:
In just the first quarter of 2023, officials seized 106 illegal suppressors at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport alone. In December 2022, US officials in Michigan indicted seven men for procuring switches from China. “These devices are an emerging threat to our communities, our children, our law enforcement officers, and anyone who stands in the path of their indiscriminate spray,” said US attorney Mark Totten. In 2022, the ATF announced a 500 percent increase in the confiscation of auto sear switches around the country. Cities such as St. Louis continued to devolve into war zones. In 2021, the ATF reported 66 incidents of full auto gunfire. The next year, there
were 339. Well over a third occurred in St. Louis County.
Chinese companies are also importing firearm suppressors, also known as “silencers,” to the United States, according to Schweizer.
He details how beginning in 2019, a “huge influx” of illegal suppressors began being shipped to the U.S. from China. He writes:
As with firearms, felons cannot legally own them. But these clandestinely imported Chinese suppressors enabled criminal gangs and drug cartels in America to get around those requirements and buy them in large quantities. And over the next three years, federal officials traced an astonishing 42,888 suppressors arriving from China. Those were only the devices they traced. How many more got through?
The suppressors have also been sold on English websites hosted on Chinese servers and mislabeled when they are shipped to the U.S.
The Daily Mail, which reported on the Glock switches revelations in Blood Money, noted recent criminal cases involving the illegal devices, including the fatal shooting of 53-year-old accountant Paul Kutz from Poughkeepsie, New York, whose masked assailant sprayed him with 30 bullets using a handgun modified with a Glock switch.
The Daily Mail also quotes East Baton Rouge, Louisiana, district attorney Hillar Moore who says, “We’re seeing Glock switches used all over the place whether it’s murder, attempted murder, witness intimidation… shooting up in a neighborhood or shooting up houses.” In the last two years, Hillar’s office has seen over 80 criminal cases involving Glock switches, the Daily Mail reports.
East Baton Rouge District Attorney Hillar Moore speaks to the press outside the district courthouse in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on July 12, 2013. (AP Photo/Catherine Threlkeld)
Schweizer, who is the president of the Government Accountability Institute, writes that American politicians are doing little to counter these practices.
“No American president appears to have brought this up with Beijing in his consultations with President Xi,” he writes. “President Biden has pressed for gun restrictions on ordinary Americans but has never publicly discussed this problem, where criminal elements are gaining access to machine guns courtesy of Chinese manufacturers’ illegal shipments.”
Schweizer says members of Congress have been silent, too. Although Kentucky is home to two of the top business cargo airports in the country where many of the devices are shipped, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) “has been silent on the subject,” he writes. “Holding China to account, exposing and denouncing its conduct, should be expected, but he has so far done none of those things.”
President Joe Biden greets Chinese Communist Party Leader Xi Jinping in Woodside, California, on November 15, 2023. (BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)
Schweizer also noted that when Democrat Sens. Amy Klobuchar (MN) and Cory Booker (NJ) wrote Attorney General Merrick Garland in 2021 to express concern about the switches, they mentioned China’s role as a supplier but did not call for any actions towards Beijing in response. Similarly, when eleven senators who introduced a bill to tighten restrictions on owning switches, they also did not propose any action against China.
While American politicians pursue restrictions on American gun manufacturers, they fail to take China to task, Schweizer asserts. “US political leaders are more focused on going after American gun manufacturers producing a legal product for millions of Americans than cracking down on Chinese companies catering to and further weaponizing criminal gangs in the United States,” he writes.
Schweizer concludes that, as with drug warfare, China is attempting to incite civil unrest in the U.S. similar to its own “Century of Humiliation,” in which Beijing faults Western powers for sowing division in China in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
“In the same way that it flipped the Opium Wars of the nineteenth century and created the Fentanyl Wars of the twenty-first century, Beijing now works to create a Century of Humiliation and weaken the United States by fomenting division by putting weapon-enhancing technologies into the hands of felons and criminal gangs, but also fueling social division on US streets,” Schweizer writes.
Blood Money: Why the Powerful Turn a Blind Eye While China Kills Americans is set to publish on February 27.
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