Feds say man was manufacturing machine guns in his Miami Gardens house

Crime admin August 14, 2026 0 Comments

Feds say man was manufacturing machine guns in his Miami Gardens house

Federal agents raided a Miami Gardens home this week and found a machine gun-making factory, along with homemade, automatic weapons and devices used to switch semiautomatic weapons to fully-automatic firearms, according to a criminal complaint.

Agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives executed a search warrant on the home on the 3900 block of Northwest 173rd Terrace on Wednesday after an undercover operative arranged to pick up three homemade guns with the conversion devices installed to make them fire automatically.

Agents had previously traced shipments of several conversion devices sent from China to the home, lived in by 20-year-old Lance Ricardo Dwyer, according to the complaint.

While searching the house, agents found a bag containing three homemade guns, two with the devices installed and one that was disassembled, along with an uninstalled conversion device, the complaint states.

They also found several plastic, AR-15-style guns, a plastic, Glock-style gun with a conversion device installed, four uninstalled conversion devices, a Glock-style pistol that was built using a 3-D printer and two Springfield firearms, according to the complaint.

The agents also located what they said to be evidence of a gun-making facility in the home, including a kiln, jigs to manufacture firearms, clay forms, metal shavings and a tool that matched the material composition of the metal conversion devices, the complaint states.

In Dwyer’s backyard, agents found several workstations and a test-firing apparatus that was designed to “reduce the likelihood that gunfire would be detected by ShotSpotter technology,” agents wrote in the complaint.

Dwyer was arrested on a charge of unlawful transfer or possession of machine guns. He is jailed and scheduled to appear before a judge to be read formal charges on Aug. 27. He is being represented by a federal public defender, who did not immediately respond to the Miami Herald’s request for comments.