Police are seeing more firepower on our streets tied to tiny devices known as switches, giggle switches or machine gun conversion devices. It's a troubling trend being used to quickly turn handguns into machine guns.
A switch is about the size of a nickel, and it rapidly increase its rate of gunfire with just one pull of the trigger.
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Worcester Police Gang Unit Sgt. Stephen Roche hasn't seen anything like it in his decades of policing.
"When I first came on and we had a shooting, we'd go. There'd be one casing on the ground, maybe two. We go now and like we're seeing some of these officers recovered eighteen or twenty rounds at a single scene," said Roche.
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He said the biggest concerns are how dangerous they are, how inaccurate they are and the amount of damage they can do with one pull of the trigger.
In Worcester, the number of shootings has increased across the city. One woman who didn't want to be identified told the NBC10 Investigators, "I was sleeping and all of a sudden, we heard a big bang, and the bullet went through our window, ricocheted off our wall and into our bed."
Right now, switches are one of the biggest worries. When one is attached to a gun, it becomes capable of firing about 1,200 rounds a minute. That's 20 bullets a second.
Worcester Police Det. John Denio explained, "If you shoot a gun and you're aiming, that's difficult in itself but these become so powerful that you shoot them and it's going up right away and those rounds are going up and continue to fly."
ATF Boston Special Agent Matthew O'Shaughnessy showed us the potentially deadly power firsthand at the range.
He shot his semi-automatic Glock and hit dead center but when the conversion switched, it was challenging to keep his shots on target.
Jim Ferguson, special agent in charge of the ATF Boston, said the devices are status symbols in the gang world.
He also told us the number of cases in Massachusetts are increasing at an alarming rate with many of the devices being made with 3D printers.
"What used to take people a lot of time, effort and money and resources, 3D printers have changed that game and people can manufacture these on their kitchen counter," said Ferguson.
Two Boston men were recently convicted after manufacturing 3D conversion devices and selling them for only about $140 a piece.
Last September, five people were injured in a hail of gunfire on Ames Street in Dorchester. Fifteen-year-old Juliana Howard was critically injured, shot four times, once in the head. Her 11-year-old brother, Johan, was shot in the leg. Their father, John Howard, told us the way the gunshots rang out was scary and said it was described as "brrrrrt and done, rapid fire."
He said the whole incident happened in a matter of seconds. Eight people were also injured in a shooting near Boston's Caribbean Festival on Aug. 26, 2023, when violence broke out between two groups.
The Worcester Police Department's ShotSpotter system that's activated by gunfire calculated 98 shootings during the past two years, where 10 or more bullets were fired. A total of 1,322 rounds rang out throughout the city.
"These things shouldn't be out there because every missed round is going somewhere," said Roche.
A bullet riddled home on Pilgram Avenue was searched in connection with a shooting. According to court records, federal agents found switches stashed in a shoebox in a bedroom and another attached to a gun. More evidence of the troubling trend.
"Unfortunately, we're likely going to see a significant rise in the injuries and death toll," said Ferguson.
People have been charged with possession of a machine gun in some of the federal cases but at the state level, the switch must be physically attached to the gun to be criminally charged. The Senate's gun safety bill would ban these devices in Massachusetts.
