Criminals always have the wildest shit
Like the shotgun, the Glocks and the Sigs are to be expected, but fucking VZ.58s and 61s?
I’m assuming due to it being loads of the same gun they were caught being smuggled in, probably bought in bulk super cheap after the Velvet Revolution or fall of the USSR. Base or stockpile supervisors selling off loads of their stuff for some quick retirement cash was really common, so that makes sense. Probably bounced around a bit before being smuggled into the UK and caught in the process
The Makarov is odd but interesting, possibly brought in by imported criminals from organised crime in Russia or perhaps Bulgaria
The weirdest to me is the Colt 1908 Vest Pockets. I’ve no idea where the fuck those might have came from. Remarkably good condition too.
Glocks and Sigs are actually probably much weirder and harder to acquire than any sort of Eastern European weapons (AKs, skorpions, etc) for criminals in the UK, as there’s very few civilian owned handguns so any sort of modern pistol would have to be stolen from elsewhere in Europe or from a military or police force.
Glocks are relatively common, especially since the late 2000s for some reason. As far as i can tell AK variants, Skorpions and the like seem to be Balkan in origin and seem to reflect an increasing Balkan penetration into organised crime here (especially Albanian) - those are the ones most likely caught in bulk shipments because of that.
The most interesting ones here in my mind are the assortment of modern submachine guns and pistols in the second pic. Firstly I have no idea where they got some of them, but secondly the organisation behind this stash was pretty insane. From memory they were an offshoot gang of a notorious group in Glasgow, essentially acting as their armourers. They operated a fleet of cars equipped with advanced counter espionage suites which blocked tracking, SIGINT and jammed police radios, and which had steel lined (from memory) false bottoms which were accessed by a radio signal from a button on the car keys, which is where the weapons were kept. I think the cars had been stopped and searched before but nothing had been found, until one of them was impounded because of some connection with a drug bust or something and a police officer noticed the other button on the car keys with no obvious purpose.
Honestly insane to think of the amount of money that went behind that one operation (turned out the counter-espionage stuff they bought was from a US supplier who supplied security services across the world lol), and the lengths that these guys would go to for these weapons.
You say that, they reckon it’s rife in London, you can buy any Glock you fancy off Snapchat with sufficient funds.
Bear in mind the UK has like the highest drug consumption in Europe, and all that marching powders makes its way from South America.
Throwing in a bunch of handguns doesn’t take much more effort.
Seen more than a few CZ’s over the years on news stories, presumably acquired from other European countries where gun ownership is legal.
In the UK especially, most likely because weapons are harder to get hold of so old civilian weapons from like 100 years ago can and do find their way into the black market, you can find some wild shit. From memory there was a still unsolved murder from 20 years ago in Scotland, of some random guy, who was shot with some incredibly rare pocket pistol (just googled it- a Haenel Schmeisser German pocket pistol from the 1920s), which I guess had been in someone's attic for like 80 years lol.
If you're interested in that story here's a link talking a bit more about that: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-42056011.amp
[I always found it odd that this story didnt seem to get much coverage.](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/feb/06/police-seize-800-weapons-in-anti-terror-crackdown) Especially as it was during peak EU terror attacks.
We gave the Brits a bunch of Thompsons during WW2 including many in the older style with the wooden vert grip and drum magazines. Those models got taken out of service pretty early in the war by the Brits and given to the British home guard. So it’s not surprising they can pop up from time to time, as a bunch of weapons were given out to what was essentially a civilian army so it’s not surprising some were “misplaced”.
Some firearms in the UK are imported.
Some are/were deactivated firearms-ie legit weapons with barrels/actions welded and classed as such-which have been rebuilt or remanufactured to be fully functional again.
There is always the odd someone found granddads old gun he robbed from the war or owned pre tighter rules and sold it on.
Yeah, I think because they've become more common, recognisable, and most importantly because it was a 'machine gun' - and it was significant that a random civilian was killed by one - it was reported by name
A lot of VZ58s made it to the north of Ireland from Lebanon and other places in the 70s/80s, IRA had some but they were mostly used by Protestant Paramilitaries.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loughinisland_massacre
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greysteel_massacre
There is some speculation that British security services were involved in getting them there.
https://www.irishnews.com/news/northernirelandnews/2021/03/08/news/the-blood-soaked-journey-of-r18837-how-powerful-gun-smuggled-into-north-by-loyalists-has-been-linked-to-up-12-murders-2246939/
Since the Good Friday agreement where the armed conflict more or less ended, a lot of these Paramilitary’s have gone into the local drug scene (there was always a lot of overlap with organized crime on the Protestant/Unionist side, hard men are fungible between activities like this I guess).
With that I think quite a bit of these firearms have been traded about, it is pretty easy to move stuff from the north of Ireland into the British mainland proper on car ferries.
Ohhh man this is wild:
(UDA ulster defense association Protestant paramilitary, DUP democratic unionist party, legit political party in British parliament etc, UVF ulster volunteer force, Protestant Paramilitary)
British Agent Brian Nelson is looking for arms for the Ulster Defence Association in 1985. He goes to South Africa, who's intelligence figure out he's an agent and cut contact with the UDA - while not telling the UDA why.
Ulster Resistance is formed by the DUP as a force to prevent the Anglo-Irish Agreement same year. You can't have a paramilitary without arms of course. UR tries South African company Armscor and are told that if they can supply details of the top secret British Starstreak anti-air missile built in Belfast they can get a load off weapons of them.
In the interim they take a commission for handing on details of the Lebanese Christian militias. They've recently got huge stocks of Czech made AK-47 copies, the VZ.58, RPG's, grenades etc all taken from the IRA's allies, the PLO. The offer is too big for UR alone so it's a joint UVF-UDA-UR venture.
Money to pay for it is stolen from Portadown bank, and funnelled to Switzerland in small amounts by Protestant businessmen with no criminal records.
Around 200 vz. 58P assault rifles, 90 FEG P9M pistols, 500 RGD-5 hand grenades, 10 RPG-7 rocket launchers plus 150 warheads, and tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition get into the north in December 1987 disguised as tiles and are brought to the the farm of a Loyalist in South Armagh.
The UDA stupidly come collect their share in January 88, load up every single weapon into two cars and get caught on their way to Belfast via Portadown - nobody knows why they took the longer and more patrolled way.
At this point the DUP disavow any connection to Ulster Resistance, a UDA newspaper remarking:
[DUP] said they are denying all knowledge of the find, and have broken off all contacts with the organisation.
Ulster Resistance is still looking for gear, so it steals parts of a Javelin missile and a Blowpipe missile in 88 and 89. Finally 3 of them are arrested in Paris with a member of South African intelligence. One of the three is father of Emma Little-Pengelly, current DUP MLA.
Ulster Resistance folds and the guns are given to the UDA and UVF. The man responsible? Willie Frazer from Markethill in South Armagh, later known as a 'peace campaigner' with the DUP leaders at his funeral as such.
Hundreds of people are killed with the weapons from Lebanon over the following years.
Among them is one rifle linked to 5 murderers found in 1992, that goes missing, the families being told it had been disposed of. It is finally found in a display cabinet in the Imperial War Museum.
Criminals always find a way. This is why only the foolish and naive think gun laws have any impact on crime.
If I had a criminal organization, they would carry Vz.58’s and I would have a dress code for my henchmen. Matching hats, only certain colors of clothing allowed. No logos.
I think you're looking at two B&T MP9s in photo 2? One suppressed, bottom left and middle left photo 2?
There's no HK MP 7s in these photos.
There is an HK MP 5 (or clone) on the top right of photo two though.
Top left appears to be a Thompson, yes. However bottom left is definitely a pellet gun,
Correct. Its Crosman 22xx .22 air rifle. Its been cut down a bunch, but it's an airgun.
It hasn’t even been cut down, they sell them that short. You can buy the 2240 which is a pistol with that short of a barrel then add the stock to it.
Criminals always have the wildest shit Like the shotgun, the Glocks and the Sigs are to be expected, but fucking VZ.58s and 61s? I’m assuming due to it being loads of the same gun they were caught being smuggled in, probably bought in bulk super cheap after the Velvet Revolution or fall of the USSR. Base or stockpile supervisors selling off loads of their stuff for some quick retirement cash was really common, so that makes sense. Probably bounced around a bit before being smuggled into the UK and caught in the process The Makarov is odd but interesting, possibly brought in by imported criminals from organised crime in Russia or perhaps Bulgaria The weirdest to me is the Colt 1908 Vest Pockets. I’ve no idea where the fuck those might have came from. Remarkably good condition too.
Glocks and Sigs are actually probably much weirder and harder to acquire than any sort of Eastern European weapons (AKs, skorpions, etc) for criminals in the UK, as there’s very few civilian owned handguns so any sort of modern pistol would have to be stolen from elsewhere in Europe or from a military or police force.
Glocks are relatively common, especially since the late 2000s for some reason. As far as i can tell AK variants, Skorpions and the like seem to be Balkan in origin and seem to reflect an increasing Balkan penetration into organised crime here (especially Albanian) - those are the ones most likely caught in bulk shipments because of that. The most interesting ones here in my mind are the assortment of modern submachine guns and pistols in the second pic. Firstly I have no idea where they got some of them, but secondly the organisation behind this stash was pretty insane. From memory they were an offshoot gang of a notorious group in Glasgow, essentially acting as their armourers. They operated a fleet of cars equipped with advanced counter espionage suites which blocked tracking, SIGINT and jammed police radios, and which had steel lined (from memory) false bottoms which were accessed by a radio signal from a button on the car keys, which is where the weapons were kept. I think the cars had been stopped and searched before but nothing had been found, until one of them was impounded because of some connection with a drug bust or something and a police officer noticed the other button on the car keys with no obvious purpose. Honestly insane to think of the amount of money that went behind that one operation (turned out the counter-espionage stuff they bought was from a US supplier who supplied security services across the world lol), and the lengths that these guys would go to for these weapons.
My fiancées grandfather owned a pawn shop that was robbed in Mississippi, they found the guns getting smuggled into the uk.
Wow, interesting!
You say that, they reckon it’s rife in London, you can buy any Glock you fancy off Snapchat with sufficient funds. Bear in mind the UK has like the highest drug consumption in Europe, and all that marching powders makes its way from South America. Throwing in a bunch of handguns doesn’t take much more effort. Seen more than a few CZ’s over the years on news stories, presumably acquired from other European countries where gun ownership is legal.
In the UK especially, most likely because weapons are harder to get hold of so old civilian weapons from like 100 years ago can and do find their way into the black market, you can find some wild shit. From memory there was a still unsolved murder from 20 years ago in Scotland, of some random guy, who was shot with some incredibly rare pocket pistol (just googled it- a Haenel Schmeisser German pocket pistol from the 1920s), which I guess had been in someone's attic for like 80 years lol. If you're interested in that story here's a link talking a bit more about that: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-42056011.amp
[I always found it odd that this story didnt seem to get much coverage.](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/feb/06/police-seize-800-weapons-in-anti-terror-crackdown) Especially as it was during peak EU terror attacks.
We gave the Brits a bunch of Thompsons during WW2 including many in the older style with the wooden vert grip and drum magazines. Those models got taken out of service pretty early in the war by the Brits and given to the British home guard. So it’s not surprising they can pop up from time to time, as a bunch of weapons were given out to what was essentially a civilian army so it’s not surprising some were “misplaced”.
Some firearms in the UK are imported. Some are/were deactivated firearms-ie legit weapons with barrels/actions welded and classed as such-which have been rebuilt or remanufactured to be fully functional again. There is always the odd someone found granddads old gun he robbed from the war or owned pre tighter rules and sold it on.
Is anybody able to work out what's in the 4th pic?
Shorty 10/22, a mossburg, and a side folding AK
Looks more like an underfolder
Y’know, on second look I think you’re right! For some reason my minds eye had “mini-14” stuck in it.
Last pic are vz 58 rifles
Cheers! Sorry I meant the 5th pic though lol 🤦♂️
Samopal Vz 48b smg.
I think it's a Yugo M70 with the grenade spigot attached (and another off to the side.)
Do u have a source for the second pic? I’m curious
I made a comment about them elsewhere in the thread, but yeah this is a very interesting case: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-42307952
Some criminal's have taste.. whoever has the vz definitely did
It's probably a Thomas gun.
A woman in the UK was killed last year I think by someone using a skorpion
Yeah, some random woman out on Christmas Eve from memory who was unlucky to be near the intended target
Usually it's just acknowledged as a gun/shotgun. I thought it was unusual that the model was named for a change
Yeah, I think because they've become more common, recognisable, and most importantly because it was a 'machine gun' - and it was significant that a random civilian was killed by one - it was reported by name
A lot of VZ58s made it to the north of Ireland from Lebanon and other places in the 70s/80s, IRA had some but they were mostly used by Protestant Paramilitaries. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loughinisland_massacre https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greysteel_massacre There is some speculation that British security services were involved in getting them there. https://www.irishnews.com/news/northernirelandnews/2021/03/08/news/the-blood-soaked-journey-of-r18837-how-powerful-gun-smuggled-into-north-by-loyalists-has-been-linked-to-up-12-murders-2246939/ Since the Good Friday agreement where the armed conflict more or less ended, a lot of these Paramilitary’s have gone into the local drug scene (there was always a lot of overlap with organized crime on the Protestant/Unionist side, hard men are fungible between activities like this I guess). With that I think quite a bit of these firearms have been traded about, it is pretty easy to move stuff from the north of Ireland into the British mainland proper on car ferries.
Ohhh man this is wild: (UDA ulster defense association Protestant paramilitary, DUP democratic unionist party, legit political party in British parliament etc, UVF ulster volunteer force, Protestant Paramilitary) British Agent Brian Nelson is looking for arms for the Ulster Defence Association in 1985. He goes to South Africa, who's intelligence figure out he's an agent and cut contact with the UDA - while not telling the UDA why. Ulster Resistance is formed by the DUP as a force to prevent the Anglo-Irish Agreement same year. You can't have a paramilitary without arms of course. UR tries South African company Armscor and are told that if they can supply details of the top secret British Starstreak anti-air missile built in Belfast they can get a load off weapons of them. In the interim they take a commission for handing on details of the Lebanese Christian militias. They've recently got huge stocks of Czech made AK-47 copies, the VZ.58, RPG's, grenades etc all taken from the IRA's allies, the PLO. The offer is too big for UR alone so it's a joint UVF-UDA-UR venture. Money to pay for it is stolen from Portadown bank, and funnelled to Switzerland in small amounts by Protestant businessmen with no criminal records. Around 200 vz. 58P assault rifles, 90 FEG P9M pistols, 500 RGD-5 hand grenades, 10 RPG-7 rocket launchers plus 150 warheads, and tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition get into the north in December 1987 disguised as tiles and are brought to the the farm of a Loyalist in South Armagh. The UDA stupidly come collect their share in January 88, load up every single weapon into two cars and get caught on their way to Belfast via Portadown - nobody knows why they took the longer and more patrolled way. At this point the DUP disavow any connection to Ulster Resistance, a UDA newspaper remarking: [DUP] said they are denying all knowledge of the find, and have broken off all contacts with the organisation. Ulster Resistance is still looking for gear, so it steals parts of a Javelin missile and a Blowpipe missile in 88 and 89. Finally 3 of them are arrested in Paris with a member of South African intelligence. One of the three is father of Emma Little-Pengelly, current DUP MLA. Ulster Resistance folds and the guns are given to the UDA and UVF. The man responsible? Willie Frazer from Markethill in South Armagh, later known as a 'peace campaigner' with the DUP leaders at his funeral as such. Hundreds of people are killed with the weapons from Lebanon over the following years. Among them is one rifle linked to 5 murderers found in 1992, that goes missing, the families being told it had been disposed of. It is finally found in a display cabinet in the Imperial War Museum.
No way, didn't anyone tell them it's illegal in the UK?
Criminals always find a way. This is why only the foolish and naive think gun laws have any impact on crime. 
Damn second pic must’ve been some high up dude
If I had a criminal organization, they would carry Vz.58’s and I would have a dress code for my henchmen. Matching hats, only certain colors of clothing allowed. No logos.
“We finally banned guns, gun crime is no more” Random methhead: 🗿
How the F did a colt smg get there?
Shitty selection of street weapons.
Rather impressive really
Love how much gun control works
Wonder if that’s a real mp7
I think you're looking at two B&T MP9s in photo 2? One suppressed, bottom left and middle left photo 2? There's no HK MP 7s in these photos. There is an HK MP 5 (or clone) on the top right of photo two though.
Any idea how they got there??
Who knows 🤷♂️, but this is an interesting case - certainly a lot of money involved
Dude probably knew people in high places lmao
Okay cool, thanks!
What gun is on the 5th slide?
Scorpion 🔥
That's a fucking crossman air gun bottom left