By Nicolas Florquin and Benjamin King

Criminals purchase weapons unable to fire live ammunition legally and at low costs across Europe, converting them into lethal firearms with little to no training or expertise. The Small Arms Survey report From Legal to Lethal: Converted Firearms in Europe provides a detailed examination on the topic. Users of converted firearms include petty criminals, organized crime groups, and terrorist actors. Certain conversion techniques require some level of technical skills, but converters also make use of online, open-source tutorials to convert weapons relatively easily. While Europe has faced a range of converted weapons over the past decades, two main types of readily convertible firearms have entered into the illicit arms market in recent years: Slovak-origin acoustic expansion weapons (AEWs)—as used by Amedy Coulibaly in the Montrouge and Hypercacher Paris attacks in 2015; and Turkish-manufactured alarm pistols—currently the most prevalent converted firearm in Europe.

Geneva: Small Arms Survey, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, 2018. 70p.