Dangerous, illegal gun modifications are on the rise in Columbus. What’s the solution?

Reality Check is a Ledger-Enquirer series digging deeper into key issues and focusing on accountability. Have a suggestion for a future story? Email mynews@ledger-enquirer.com .

When Chris Collins was killed at a block party in the early morning hours of Easter Sunday, the shooting lasted seconds. At the court hearing in his murder case, Columbus Police investigators testified those few seconds were all it took for his killer to shoot him 11 times.

Collins’ homicide, one of 24 in Columbus so far this year, according to the county coroner, was committed with a gun that had been illegally modified to shoot automatically. Cpl. Chris Snipes, who has worked a year and a half in CPD’s Violent Crimes Unit, told the Ledger-Enquirer that these modifications are increasingly common in Columbus.

Snipes said the most common gun modification the department sees is a switch, a small attachment on the butt of a gun that transforms it from semi-automatic to fully automatic.

With a semi-automatic gun, the user pulls the trigger once and discharges a single bullet.

“(Switches) convert the device that resets the trigger and allows you to hold the trigger down,” Snipes said. “That results in multiple rounds being fired at a time.”

Switches, also called auto-sears, make guns shoot much faster. They also make them much harder to use.

“When a weapon is modified like that, it becomes very difficult to control,” Snipes said. “The person firing the weapon has the likelihood of sending projectiles in all kinds of different directions, so the intended target may not be the only one who is struck by gunfire.”

A rise in illegal gun modifications

Switches can make guns harder to use, but one of the reasons their use is rising is because they’re getting easier to make.

“Especially with the auto-sears that are used to modify rifles, you can get plans to 3D-print them,” Snipes said. “You can buy them fairly regularly if you know the right people.”

The rise in popularity of illegal gun modifications has been especially marked in gang members throughout the city, according to Snipes.

“Columbus, being the second largest city in Georgia, has a gang problem like any other big city, and those gangs will follow trends that might start in bigger cities or more well-defined gangs,” he said. “They will mimic those things... if I have a switch, then my partner might want to have a switch and my opposition might want to have a switch. It just proliferates that way.”

Records received from the Muscogee County Sheriff’s Office show the number of fully automatic firearms seized by the department more than doubled between 2021 and 2023, when the office logged 410 weapons. Police have taken hundreds of modified guns off the streets of Columbus, but Snipes said efforts to stop their spread can begin within families.

“If you care for the people in your family, if you notice that they’re starting to associate with an undesirable crowd... you should tell somebody,” he said. “You should help keep them safe.”