How easy would it be to smuggle unregistered weapons into USA?

[Warphead's Battlewaggon]

Modern day GURPS/homebrewed special ops and espionage campaign. How likely is it that thousands of automatic weapons could be brought into the US undetected? GM is a bit swamped by inventive players transporting them from far east etc on container ships. Few in a few containers or one container full amongest 6000+ on those huge ships. Or on Arctic fishing boats dropping off a small numbers at remote Canadian ports and so forth. I don't wish to give anyone real life ideas but these are just some of the more straightforward ones. Plan is to launch a huge wrong flag attack with mercenaries on both coasts, with other players racing against time trying to stop them succeeding. As a mobile European, Im not that well up on the agencies and tactics employed to stop this type of thing. Thanks.

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Why not buy them here?

Look, guns are readily available in the United States. While automatic weapons require a special license, I suspect the effort to modify perfectly legal semi-automatic AR-15s available over the counter at any gun shop for automatic fire would be rather less than the effort to bring in already automatic weapons. Indeed, if you'd be satisfied with semi-automatic weapons rather than full auto, you don't need anything more than ready cash. Laws vary from state to state, but where I am, I could this very minute drive to any of a great many gun stores, and after a quick automated background check to ensure I'm not a convicted felon or a minor walk out with with semi-automatic rifle. At most, you might want to conceal mass purchases by spreading the money around and have lots of different people buy guns from lots of different stores.

[Warphead's Battlewaggon]

For purposes of the campaign there must be no local paper trails and any recovered weapons can not have any registration marks. Even the factories they were manufactured at in Asia must be obscured by materials being brought in from many sources. Players have seen too many TV crimes dramas and read Tom Clancy novels to know that local crime and intelligence agencies can trace items by tiny evidence. Also a few tonnes of plastic explosives and multiple antitank/heavy weapons aren't that easy to come by even in US. They plan to take out lightly protected American landmarks and pin blame on fictional East European or Asian dictator.

[acrosome]

I fail to see how a stolen weapon that was illegally converted to fully auto gets traced back to your players. And illegal fully-auto conversion kits are fairly easy to come by. They're just legally precarious, since the ATF takes that crap very seriously. Hell, auto-sears for ARs can be made in any metal shop. It's just that you're risking damned near life in prison when you make one, and that's just not worth it.

So how about a nice bump stock? :)

But, realistically, moving that much material into the US is difficult. Sure, any idiot can walk across an unguarded part of the border with a single gun in his backpack. And you might manage to move a decent amount with a pleasure yacht on the Great Lakes or something. Maybe. But just about all ports of entry through which you could move containers get better scrutiny. They have chemical sniffers and radiation detectors at the entry points with Canada, for heaven's sake. I'm sure it could be done, but it's much harder. And they use guys walking around the container yards with chemical sniffers and radiation detectors to screen, too.

That said, a shockingly low percentage of containers get direct inspections, that's true. But a crapton of them do get millimeter-wavelength xrayed nowadays, especially if they are coming from a suspicious source, and automatic weapons are pretty distinctive. Not to mention that it's one of the things that the software involved is specifically designed to detect. It's much easier to hide onesies and twosies among other machinery that to move a large number of weapons.

But the greatest threat to such an operation is that it would of necessity be a large conspiracy. Two people can keep a secret, but only if one of them is dead. The FBI has informants everywhere. All it takes is one tip from some contact of theirs who says that something looks suspicious and, wham, you have Virginia farm boys hopping around you like jackrabbits. Who are they bribing to get these containers through customs, at BOTH ends? Lots of people involved, there. How trustworthy are they? What about the teamster who sees strange boxes being (un)loaded? The quartermaster of the container ship? Do you really think one of them might not want the $1million bounty? (Or whatever?) And consider the competition: Who are they paying protection money to (or hiring for security) for what would certainly be a VERY attractive target for any organized crime syndicate or terrorist organization in the world?

Likewise with your clandestine drops from ships offshore- the US, Canada, and Mexico make great efforts to watch their shores, if only for drug smugglers. A ship showing up on radar hovering around where it has no business or otherwise acting suspiciously in any way is going to invite a Coast Guard inspection. Or, conversely, it just takes one fishing trawler skipper who suspects that they are illegally poaching in the fisheries to report them and a fisheries officer will show up. Think of it this way: any way that a DRUG shipment might get intercepted, a weapons shipment might as well. And, yes, an awful lot of drugs do get through, but in this case the players only need to get unlucky once, since it sounds like they are doing all of this themselves.

The drug shipments also work on a different model- saturation. It works sort of like saturation during attacks on ships with point defense. They send so much that even though a lot gets intercepted, even more gets through. I doubt that the players can afford to do that. Terrorism is not as lucrative as drugs. :)

[Anaraxes]

If the PCs want "thousands" of automatic weapons, they probably want them all to be identical -- uniform issue to their minions for all those maintenance and training and logistical reasons (that go further than just matching the cartridge). Probably still possible to buy them by the thousand, but that seems more likely to attract attention even if it is perfectly legal.

It's also pretty simple just to drive across thousands of miles of border, or land anywhere along thousands of miles of coast. And you can just fly in -- lots of small unmonitored airports as well which are still plenty long enough for transport aircraft, especially if you don't have to deliver the whole supply in one trip.

There's also plenty of smuggling expertise amongst the drug dealers, at least. (Over 10,000 metric tons of marijuana imported annually; cocaine and heroin are in the mere hundreds of tons, but thousands of assault rifles would only be 10-20 tons. The weight and volume of the weapons aren't really all that high on the scale of stuff that's routinely being smuggled.)

[Warphead's Battlewaggon]

All noted and thank you verry much. Some of the players are properly paranoid and I can't began to go into their schemes to get around those chemical sniffers and get stuff past the Canadian border.

[acrosome]

It's pretty damned hard to sneak past an X-ray. Just sayin. All the ways to block them that work are obvious and attract attention in themselves. Usually armed attention. And ICE uses them extensively. Any truck or container that gets spot-checked for illegal immigrants is in trouble.

ALL SORTS of organizations have an interest in random checks of containers crossing the US border. And it is much more practical to check a larger fraction of containers crossing by land, since there simply isn't the same volume at any one point like there is in a seaport container yard. If you have been through the Peace Arch border crossing recently you will have noticed that ALL commercial trucking gets diverted through a station where it is sniffed, scanned, and xrayed.

Yes, there are still small roads across the US/Canada border where there is just a sign saying "Check in with customs in the next town", for instance. I kayaked down the Stikine River from Telegraph Creek to Wrangell, and was essentially on the honor system, for instance. But, again, those locations get random checks, and the locals WILL notice and report regular shipments.

If they do this regularly then just like the drug shipments eventually a load is going to get intercepted. And that will attract a LOT of attention.

[Dustin]

A couple ideas:
1) Ship the parts in separately, camouflaged with lots of other machine parts. Maybe mix'n'match this with commercial purchase of some of the more innocuous parts. Ship them to a warehouse for assembly.

2) Intercept an *outbound* shipment of rifles, perhaps a shipment that the dictator ordered, or whose order can be forged. The US sells/transfers a lot of M-16s. I'm sure a small team of murder hobos special operatives could overcome local resistance and make off with a couple trucks' worth.
Here's some export data for inspiration
https://fas.org/asmp/campaigns/smallarms/AAAS.html

[johndallman]

The best way to hide a needle is not in a haystack, but among a lot of needles. In this case, exploit some of the quirks of US culture.

Set up a gun import business. Import container-loads of semi-automatic versions of the guns you want to use. Conceal some full-auto versions amongst them, in the middle of each container. Your gun import business will have to have a machine shop, testing range, and so on. You can convert more to full-auto there. The whole business is part of the false-flag operation. Make sure to hire consultants who belong to the NRA, and make donations to that organisation.

To be a bit more comprehensive, make it an import/export business. Buy your plastic explosives, anti-tank weapons, etc., in the US, and launch your attack while these "samples" are "waiting in the warehouse for the paperwork to ship them back to the country that's buying them."

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Warphead's Battlewaggon

For purposes of the campaign there must be no local paper trails and any recovered weapons can not have any registration marks. Even the factories they were manufactured at in Asia must be obscured by materials being brought in from many sources.

Honestly the hard part of that isn't getting them across the US border, it's getting thousands of guns manufactured in some Asian factory and exported without the *Asian* government finding out, arresting everybody, beating your contact information them, and demanding the US extradite you. Most governments keep a lot closer eye on anybody who can manufacture guns in thousand unit lots than the US does, and take a considerable interest in where any large shipments are going.