ATF Destroys 2,000 Machine Guns

Federal officials Wednesday destroyed 2,000 machine guns that were imported from China and seized from an El Monte warehouse.

The weapons arrived at the warehouse of a federally license firearms dealer last year as part of a shipment of 5,000 semiautomatic rifles, said John E. D’Angelo, a special agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

Agents discovered the weapons were easily convertible to automatic weapons and the importer agreed to give them up last March, D’Angelo said. Since then the Norinco Mac 90s, a weapon that resembles the AK-47, has been stored in a downtown Los Angeles federal building, he said.

ATF officials decided it was impossible for the weapons to be modified to ensure that they could not be converted to automatic use, D’Angelo said.

So the weapons were taken to a wrecking yard in Orange County where they were placed in old cars. The cars were then crushed into metal blocks for recycling, D’Angelo said.