In places under heavy restriction, when people talk about improvised submachine guns, they usually mean very crude workshop-made firearms, not precision weapons. These show up in multiple conflict zones around the world, not just Palestine. Here’s the high-level reality of how that happens: they’re built like 19th-century tech, not modern guns. Modern firearms need advanced metallurgy and precision machining. Improvised ones avoid that by using extremely simple operating principles that were common over 100 years ago. They typically rely on blowback operation (no locking mechanism), open-bolt designs (fewer moving parts) and low-pressure pistol cartridges (easier to contain than rifle rounds). These design choices mean fewer precision parts are required — but also make the guns inaccurate, unsafe, and prone to breaking.
Materials come from ordinary hardware. Instead of specialized gun components, builders repurpose steel tubing, springs from machinery or vehicles, scrap metal and basic fasteners. Nothing exotic — just whatever metal stock and springs can be found in repair shops or salvage yards.
Tools are basic workshop tools. These are usually made in small metal shops, not secret high-tech labs. Think hand drills, files, simple lathes (if available) and welders. That limits precision. Tolerances are poor, which is why these weapons often jam or fail.
What about ammunition? This is the hardest part under a blockade. Manufacturing modern smokeless powder or reliable primers requires chemical processes and materials that are much harder to improvise safely, which is why ammo scarcity is often a bigger constraint than the gun itself. You'd need black powder.
These weapons are dangerous to the user. Improvised SMGs can explode from weak metal so you need the right psi, often lack safeties, have poor barrel quality and are wildly inaccurate. They’re closer to desperation tools than military weapons.
This isn’t unique to one place. Similar improvised guns have appeared in the Balkans in the 1990s. Southeast Asia insurgencies, Latin American prison gangs and WWII resistance movements. Whenever formal supply is cut off, crude local fabrication tends to emerge.
>>6095These days I mostly think about 3D weapons