This is sooooo funny. This idiot reporter Eric Larson wrote a whole bestselling book 'Lethal Passage' in 1994 about how much he hates Gordon Ingram and his MAC-10, MAC-11, and M11. He gives a surprisingly fair and accurate history of the gun. I've never seen someone this angry about the 2nd Amendment before.
You can read most of the book online for free. I have included an excerpt below.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/crime/larsgun.htm
The gun's direct lineage begins in the 1960s, when Gordon Ingram, an engineer and gunsmith, set out to design a submachine gun specifically for use by Latin American guerrillas. One of Ingram's friends, a Peruvian emigre hard at work illegally making submachine guns for anti-Castro exiles training in Costa Rica, told Ingram, in the words of Thomas Nelson, a respected machine-gun historian, that what his guerrilla clients most wanted in a combat weapon was "small size, to facilitate concealment; sound suppression, to deter detection; and low cost."
….Ingram succeeded in developing a combat weapon, his M-10, with an astonishing
rate of fire of more than 1,000 rounds per minute, or sixteen per second -- too fast to control, according to technical experts at the ATF, and thus of little
value for anything but mow-'em-down military use. Ingram and a partner, Mitchell L. WerBell III, a soldier of fortune who founded a paramilitary training
camp outside Atlanta, formed a new company, Military Armament Corporation, to bring the gun to market. They developed plans to build two models of Ingram's
gun: for military markets, the full-auto submachine gun, whose sales would be tightly controlled by the National Firearms Act, which requires that anyone
wishing to buy a machine gun first submit to an extensive background check; and for consumers, a semi-automatic version.
The gun's formal name became the MAC-10, although gun aficionados would soon come to know it simply as "the Ingram." It attracted minimal
interest from the U.S. military, but its speed and evil good looks captured the imagination of Hollywood. In 1974, in the movie McQ, John Wayne himself gave
the company a welcome burst of publicity, in the process turning the gun from an obscure novelty into a weapon coveted by gangs and drug rings across the
nation. Big Lon McQ, a Seattle police detective played by Wayne, visits the shop of a gun dealer he knows and is invited to "squeeze off a burst"
with a brand-new weapon. With obvious reverence the dealer calls it "the Ingram."
McQ blasts away, rupturing a trash can filled with water. The camera cuts to McQ's face, his expression one of bemused awe. McQ looks down at the gun. He
looks back at the pail.
"How about that?" the dealer says. "Those thirty-two slugs came out in a second and a half."
Ruggedly, slowly, McQ says, "Yeah."
"You ever see anything like it?" the dealer asks.
Just in case anyone in the audience had any doubt about where to buy this wondrous weapon, Warner Brothers provided a full-screen credit that read
"Special Weapon: Military Armament Corp."
This enthusiastic bit of advertising wasn't enough to save the company, however. It filed for Chapter 11 protection under federal bankruptcy laws in
mid-1975, without ever having produced a consumer Ingram. Its guns and other assets were sold at auction, mostly to a group of three investors who had formed
another Atlanta company, RPB Industries. They, too, planned to bring Ingram's weapons to full-scale production, but in 1978 sold out to yet another group
of investors, this one headed by Wayne Daniel, the son of a Georgia minister.
THE INGRAM GOES PUBLIC
nder its new managers RPB had more success selling the Ingram line to foreign governments, but domestically it faced a set of daunting business obstacles. One partner was convicted of bribing a prosecutor to drop a customer's drug charge. Two others, Robert Morgan and Jack Leibolt, were involved in the narcotics-smuggling operations of Pablo Escobar-Gaviria and the Medellin cartel. In 1980 Morgan was sentenced to thirty years in prison for smuggling two tons of marijuana into Florida. Leibolt, according to a sweeping 1989 indictment of Escobar, once piloted a plane for the cartel and, in September of 1979, supplied the group with six silencer equipped machine guns. (He pled guilty in August of 1990 to conspiracy to import cocaine.)
Despite all this, RPB succeeded in at last transforming the Ingram from a limited-circulation military weapon into a semi-automatic handgun for general use. "It became available everywhere," says Earl Taylor, a twenty one-year veteran of the ATF and now a vice-president of Norred and Associates, an Atlanta security concern that counts among its many assignments the protection of Colonel Oliver North. "All gun shops everywhere were selling it. Everywhere."
The gun proved easy to convert to fully automatic operation -- so easy that even inexperienced gun owners could make the change in a matter of minutes, using only a file. Demand for the gun soared nationwide, and black markets formed as middlemen, including one Georgia policeman, bought large quantities, converted the guns, and resold them to the drug underworld.
In October of 1981 Wayne Daniel married Sylvia Williams, a striking young woman from Alabama. The next month she became a member of RPB's board of directors. She would soon prove to be a feisty, outspoken opponent of the ATF.
Relations between the company and the ATF and other law-enforcement agencies deteriorated throughout 1981 and 1982. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the FBI began an intensive hunt for Jack Leibolt, who, according to minutes of an RPB board meeting, had gone "underground." Citing Leibolt's activities, the ATF threatened to pull RPB's firearms manufacturer's license. Moreover, the agency persuaded a federal judge that the RPB semi-automatic handgun, so easy to convert to fully automatic operation, was a machine gun and should be made subject to the strict registration provisions of the National Firearms Act.
To sever his ties to Leibolt, Wayne Daniel in October of 1982 liquidated the company. An auction house sold its assets for half a million dollars.
A reasonable person might expect that at this point the MAC-10 would have been allowed to disappear from America's arsenal and consigned to Thomas Nelson's history books. But RPB Industries rose quickly from the tomb, this time as S. W. Daniel, Inc., named for Sylvia Williams Daniel. After the ATF's ruling, the Daniels set out in earnest to develop a weapon that could be sold readily to the public. They succeeded -- introducing by 1983 the Cobray M-11/9 -- but nonetheless continued sending prototype after prototype to the ATF's technical branch in Washington, as if probing for holes in the law. Once, for example, they sent a prototype of what they claimed was a single-shot weapon. It was the same weapon that the judge had ruled was a machine gun, but with a plate over the bottom of the grip where the clip would otherwise be inserted. The ATF, however, found that the plate could be removed, and classified this weapon, too, as a machine gun.
The company also sold machine-gun "flats," stamped and notched pieces of steel that could be bent to form the frame, or "lower receiver," of a machine gun. Under federal law a machine-gun receiver is treated as if it were a complete firearm. The flats were legal -- provided that certain holes were left undrilled. The Daniels sold their flats legally. All a consumer had to do to commit an instant felony was to drill out a single hole -- but that was the consumer's problem.
Referring to Wayne Daniel, Earl Taylor says, "He'll come close to the edge of the envelope -- maybe not blatantly doing something illegal, but he's very anxious to test and see how far he can go in the weapons field."
This attitude, Taylor believes, was a marketing posture that made the Daniels' products all the more attractive to gun buyers. Wayne Daniel, he says, "can kind of feel the pulse of this gun culture out there and kind of say things and do things and market things that appeal to those people."
One episode in particular illustrates the lengths to which the company was willing to go. In January of 1983 the Daniels invited two men, Joseph Ledbetter and James Travis Motes, to their home to make the men a proposition. Ledbetter and Motes had installed air-conditioning in the RPB offices and electrical wiring in the S. W. Daniel headquarters. The Daniels suggested that they diversify into the business of making the outer tubes for silencers. S. W. Daniel would make the internal parts. The two companies would advertise in the same gun publications and travel to the same gun shows. By selling only parts, both would stay on the right side of federal law requiring registration of completed silencers. Indeed, no law barred the sale of silencer parts. In the eyes of the law, however, any consumer who merely took delivery of both internal parts and tubes would automatically possess a completed silencer -- a felony if the silencer was unregistered. But again, that was the consumer's worry.
Wayne Daniel went so far as to give Ledbetter and Motes a gauge to guide them in fashioning the tubes, and an advertising layout that S. W. Daniel had used earlier to sell a line of completed registered silencers to approved buyers through Shotgun News, a thick tabloid often referred to as the gun owner's bible.
Ledbetter and Motes founded L&M Guns and began selling their tubes through Shotgun News and at gun shows around the country. The Daniels, meanwhile, began advertising their internal-parts kits and displaying them at the same gun shows. On at least one occasion the two companies found themselves facing each other across an aisle.
The ATF began an investigation after a detective with the Mono County, California, sheriff's office discovered an unregistered silencer during a search. The investigation quickly gained momentum. At one point an ATF special agent, Peter Urrea, posed as the president of the Widow Makers Motorcycle Club and ordered silencer components from L&M Guns. He also said he had a criminal record. The components were sent, no questions asked.
The investigation widened to include machine-gun flats sold by S. W. Daniel and L&M. Urrea continued buying silencer parts and machine-gun kits from S. W. Daniel, L&M, and a third company, La Vista Armaments, of Louisville, Kentucky, and won a warrant to search S. W. Daniel headquarters. On July 19, 1984, ATF agents raided the company, seizing firearms, components, and, most important, customer lists and shipping records.
The ATF used the seized records to launch some 400 individual investigations relating to arms trafficking and illegal possession of restricted weapons. In June of 1985 ATF agents arrested the Daniels and, using an experimental tactic, charged them with conspiracy to sell illegal silencers. (By now the Daniels had divorced, but they had continued to have a close working relationship.) Later, in formal court arguments, they would claim that they were simply trying to fill a valid need for replacement parts for silencers owned by legitimate users.
The ATF's investigators found a rather different story. All in all, from November of 1983 to July of 1984, the government charged, S. W. Daniel had mailed some 6,000 silencer and machine-gun kits. Only four buyers had bothered to register the devices. When the ATF ran the customer lists through the FBI's National Crime Information Center databank, it found that more than fifty customers had prior criminal records or were believed to be involved in drug peddling and other forms of organized crime. Posing as IRA gunrunners, Mexican narcotics smugglers, and assorted ne'er-do-wells, undercover ATF agents were welcomed by international arms traffickers, narcotics smugglers, and assorted ne'er do-wells, among them a New York group that accepted an order for some $15.6 million worth of silencer-equipped machine guns, hand grenades, and rocket-propelled grenades. A confidential ATF report noted that the leaders of the group "were dealing directly with Sylvia and Wayne Daniel...for the purchase of the machine guns and silencer kits." Agents also arrested an Oregon man who had provided machine-gun lower receivers to the Order, the group that had assassinated Alan Berg.
"There are literally thousands of persons now in the United States and probably outside the United States who have a fully operable silencer which is not registered to them and which is possessed unlawfully," Brian C. Leighton, an assistant U.S. attorney assigned to the case, wrote in a pretrial statement. "It was incredibly easy for these people to receive the silencer; they merely had to order the internal-parts kit from SWD and order a tube from one of the many tube distributors -- all of whom advertised in Shotgun News." These were "assassin-type weapons," he said, and posed "a definite danger to the community."
As the case approached the trial phase, however, the government found itself compelled to admit that no law forbade the sale of the silencer components sold by S. W. Daniel. Indeed, federal law expressly excluded silencer parts from ATF regulation. The Daniels pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor. They were sentenced to six months' probation and forced to pay $900 in taxes and fines, but because they had escaped felony charges, they were allowed to retain their federal firearms license.
The investigation had not cowed the Daniels. On May 1, 1985, Wayne Daniel placed an ad in Shotgun News headed "Now It's Happening in AMERICA" featuring a large photograph of Hitler and Mussolini. The ad recounted the ATF's raid on S. W. Daniel and listed the names and home cities of the agents involved. "The uniforms of this new 'Gestapo' may not be taylored [sic] and bear the eagle and swastika on the sleeve, rather they choose to wear a business suit or sport jacket and slacks from the racks of a cut rate department store -- but their purpose is the same, they want total control and YOU, as an American citizen, DISARMED!"
The agents named in the ad, among them Earl Taylor, demanded that Daniel retract the advertisement. He refused. In a handwritten letter he said, "I am at a complete loss of words perhaps from bending over laughing."
The agents filed a private libel suit against Wayne Daniel and Snell Publishing, the publisher of Shotgun News. Taylor says, "It was, by God, to let them know that they couldn't do that to law-enforcement officers who were doing their mandated duty."
The court ruled in the agents' favor and ordered Wayne Daniel to pay each agent $1,000 in damages, but found Snell not liable.
….I'd have liked to ask the Daniels why they seemed hell-bent on skirting firearms laws, but neither returned the many calls I made recently to their Atlanta headquarters.
