Small Shop Guns in Israel: The Carlo Submachine Gun

Guns are not difficult to make.  Submachine guns are some of the easiest to construct with simple tools.  Add a $100 electric welder from Harbor Freight and they become a project for a few weekends.  Once the templates and jigs are produced for a small shop, they can be turned out with a few hours of labor.
Brazil has many simple homemade submachine guns showing up on its street The number found in Israel is rising.  From haaretz.com:

A thin strand connects the three most recent shootings in Jerusalem. Similar to other incidents characterizing the current wave of terror, the terrorists didn’t know each other, there was no guiding hand, and there was no coordination. However, all of the attackers used the same weapon – a “Carlo,” as it’s known on the street.

I cringe at the next sentence, but we are used to seeing just as bad in the United States.

It’s a homemade imitation of the Swedish-made Carl Gustav recoilless rifle, which was used primarily in the 1950s and ’60s

The author obviously confused the Carl Gustav recoilless rifle with the Carl Gustav M/45 9mm submachine gun.  The recoilless rifle is about 41 inches long, fires a single 84mm projectile, and weighs about 20 lbs.  It has an excellent reputation, but it is not so easily reproduced in small shops, and the ammunition is far harder to come by.

The black market prices for the guns and ammunition are fascinating.  They rather remind me of the prices that are commonly quoted for drugs in the U.S.; often highly inflated.

However, over the years, as the illegal market for standard weapons became more and more expensive – Kalashnikov and Tavor rifles can cost between 60,000 to 80,000 shekels ($15,400-$20,500) – the Carlo was improved and became more widespread. Today, almost anyone can pick up the weapon from a starting price of around 3,000 shekels, up to northward of 17,000 shekels for an especially high-quality version. 

 Here is an image of a real Carl Gustav 9mm M/45.  You can see the similarities, and all the things the crude manufacture left off as superfluous.  Things like the stock, sights, and barrel shroud.  

There is a mention of 3,500 shekels for 45 cartridges.   That is $900 for 45 cartridges, or $20 a 9mm cartridge!  That seems to be where the real money is.

Ammunition is not hard to make in small shops.  There are plenty of sources available on the Internets about the manufacture of ammunition.  The hard part for submachine guns is smokeless powder.  Bullets are very simple, cases a bit harder, primers a weekend project. It is easier to make primers than smokeless powder. Smokeless powder takes precursor chemicals and procedures that are not high school chemistry; consistency is important and difficult.  But black powder is easy, as many high school students have found out.  

Perhaps, if you are going to smuggle in smokeless powder, you just smuggle in 9mm cartridges.  They are one of the most common cartridges in the world.  For suicide type attacks, only a handful are needed. 

In the United States, we do not see as many of these homemade submachine guns, though they show up with some regularity.  There are so many other weapons available that there is little incentive to manufacture submachine guns.

A 12 gauge shotgun with buckshot provides the same functionality in the United States as a submachine gun.  It has the added advantage of being a good choice for hunting birds and deer with appropriate ammunition.  Both guns and ammunition are easily and cheaply available.

These small shop/homemade submachine guns serve to show the futility of banning guns and of the unintended consequences that result from such bans.  

©2016 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice is included. Link to Gun Watch