Author: Grumpy
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Sunday Shoot-a-Round # 329
by Lee Williams
The United States Virgin Islands are beautiful, peaceful and serene as long as visitors don’t stray too far from the well-patrolled tourist areas. For Virgin Islands residents, as well as any visitors who may wander out of the safe zones, the USVI can be a death sentence.
The USVI has one of the highest crime rates in the world, per capita more than New York or even Washington D.C.
All major crime in the U.S. Territory is run by the “Commission,” hardcore but well-organized gangsters who are headquartered on St. Croix, the largest of the three islands.
The Commission is responsible for operating a massive international drug trade, which are delivered from across the Caribbean. It’s not unusual to hear planes landing at night without lights.
Virgin Islands criminals are smart, sophisticated and well-armed with handguns, shotguns and machineguns. For the most part, they only prey on other criminals, but this can change in an instant.
The Virgin Islands Police Department offers little resistance to the armed gangs who actually run the territory. The VIPD is severely undermanned, underpaid and undertrained. The department is horribly led.
Many VIPD officers are corrupt. If they’re told to stay away from an area because a shipment is inbound, they do what they’re told, or they can disappear without a trace.
Gun control in the USVI is the worst in the country, and as a result only the bad guys have guns. Civilians have no legal way to protect themselves, their family or their home.
In December 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against the VI Government, the VI Police Department and the Police Commissioner, alleging that they “have continued to obstruct and systematically deny law-abiding American citizens this fundamental right by systematically delaying the processing of applications and imposing unconstitutional conditions on the exercise of this constitutional right.”
“The conduct by the USVI, the VIPD, and Defendant Brooks has rendered the constitutional right to keep and bear arms a virtual nullity within the United States Virgin Islands territory,” the lawsuit states.
While this may appear to be a good step forward, many VI residents see little likelihood that the lawsuit will be quick, and even less likelihood that it will force any significant change.
A unique idea
Kosei Ohno owns the Crown Bay Marina, which is located on St. Thomas. The marina has 100 slips, including many that can take mega-yachts of 200-feet or greater, and it’s only five minutes from the airport.
Ohno, who also spends time in Washington State, recently filed suit against the Virgin Islands Police Commissioner and the VI government after they denied his attempt to renew his firearm licenses, which he had for several years.
Legally owning firearms in the USVI is incredibly invasive and expensive. Gun owners must pay a tax of $150 per firearm every three years. If you legally own 10 guns, you’re going to pay $1,500 every three years. You must also allow a VI Police Officer access to your safe, and they photograph the contents. Getting the actual license can take 18 months or even longer.
“The officer comes into your home without a warrant, demands to see your safe, demands you open the safe and then takes pictures,” Ohno told me this week. “Some people have guns, jewelry and gold bars as well as cash, and you wonder how it gets stolen. The whole process creates a vulnerability and a list of people, many of whom have lost guns through burglaries and theft.”
Ohno soon learned he was not alone.
“I found out through a source of mine at the VIPD that they made it their new mission to deny everyone’s permits,” he said.
So far, Ohno said, he has spent more than $70,000 to get his permits back, so he decided to act. He created the Virgin Islands Safe Gun Owners, a private group of more than 250 residents who all believed it was time to get organized. Their mission is to “restore and promote Second Amendment Rights in the Territory while promoting safe gun ownership.”
“There was considerable abuse happening,” Ohno said. “Our members include many retired officer, feds, military and business owners. It’s a pretty diverse and expansive group. We were able to give the feds evidence, which allowed them to get involved in the Second Amendment litigation against the police department. I learned it’s not just me whose rights were violated.”
The group introduced legislation that they say will modernize firearms ownership throughout the territory.
Ohno said his lawsuit, which he filed in federal not territorial court, has “expansive potential.” But getting arrested for a firearm that’s not registered, he said, would be disastrous.
“According to Virgin Islands law, if you’re caught with an unregistered firearm, the mandatory sentence is 10 to life,” he said.
Ohno has just launched a GoFundMe page and is considering other legal options.
Said Ohno: “Bravery is contagious. Fear is just as contagious, but transition is always risky.”
The AR-15 rifle is the most popular long gun in America. It is built around upper and lower receivers cut from aircraft-grade aluminum.
Aluminum is a ubiquitous material in modern society. Back in 1956 when Gene Stoner and a few others designed that first AR-15 rifle around aluminum receivers, they literally changed the landscape. In the 1980s, everybody in the combat handgun world was churning out high-capacity, aluminum-framed pistols. Nowadays, we discard or recycle aluminum beverage cans by the zillions.
One of the neat things about aluminum is the way it sort of heals itself. Pure aluminum is highly reactive when exposed to air. However, the resulting aluminum oxide is exceptionally stable. This results in a natural microscopic protective coating on exposed surfaces. In applications like window frames, mechanical trauma from repetitive use results in tiny scratches that instantly oxidize, ensuring a robust material that resists environmental degradation.
Aluminum is relatively soft and easy to both extrude and machine. There are dozens of recognized aluminum alloys. Most AR parts are formed from 6061, which includes trace amounts of silicon, magnesium, copper and chromium. The 7075 alloy includes zinc in place of the silicon.
The 1980s was the decade of the “Wonder Nines.” These high-capacity 9mm pistols were built around aluminum frames.
Digging Deeper
Aluminum is indeed fascinating stuff. It has an atomic number of 13 and is roughly one-third of the density of steel. Aluminum is the 12th most common element in the universe and the third-most common element in the Earth’s crust right behind silicon and oxygen. It accounts for 1.59% of the Earth’s mass. The stuff is everywhere.
Despite the fact that aluminum was so common in nature, back in the late 1800s it was actually considered a precious metal. Gram for gram, aluminum once cost more than both gold and silver. Napoleon III reserved his aluminum flatware to impress visiting dignitaries. Lesser visitors got the silver.
In 1884, the Washington Monument was capped with a six-pound piece of aluminum. The total national output of aluminum that same year in the United States was only 112 pounds. Aluminum was revered similarly to platinum. How was it that such an abundant material might have been considered so rare and valuable a short century or so ago? That all depends on how you refine it.
While there are scads of elemental aluminum in the earth’s crust, prior to the late 1800s, it was terribly difficult to access. Most elemental aluminum is found in the form of a natural ore called bauxite. By 19th-century standards, extracting usable aluminum from this ore was nigh impossible.
Nowadays, lots of guns are built out of aluminum. This custom
takedown AR short-barreled rifle and this FN SCAR-15P carbine
are counted among them.
Find a Need and Fill It
In 1886, a 17-year-old college student named Charles Hall was sitting in a chemistry class when his professor told him about the aluminum quandary. Hall’s professor actually said that if someone could devise a cost-effective method for extracting aluminum from bauxite, he would become the richest man in the world. Intrigued, the teenager went home determined to find a better way.
For the next five years, Charles Hall toiled in a workshop he had erected inside his family’s woodshed. Eventually, his perseverance paid off and he discovered a unique process that would produce aluminum from bauxite using electricity. At age 22, Charles Hall was indeed about to change the world.
Bizarrely, at exactly the same time in France, another 22-year-old, this one named Paul Heroult, discovered the identical technique. The resulting electrolytic extraction of aluminum from bauxite has become known as the Hall-Heroult Process.
AR-15 receivers are lightweight, ubiquitous and strong.
Changing the World
Because both men discovered the process at the same time, neither established a monopoly. However, there was more than enough sweetness to go around. The young Charles Hall founded Alcoa, short for Aluminum Company of America. In 2023, Alcoa’s total revenue was $10.55 billion.
Extracting usable aluminum is still a terribly energy-dependent undertaking. As a result, most aluminum smelters are located in places where electric power is cheap. Production of one kilo of aluminum requires the equivalent of seven kilos of oil energy. That compares to 1.5 kilos for steel and 2 kilos for plastic. Today, 5% of the electric power produced in the United States goes toward smelting aluminum.
Ruminations
I am pretty quick to denigrate young people. With the exception of my own kids, I just don’t find the youth of today terribly impressive. In fact, I’m not sure I’d trust your typical Information Age 17-year-old unsupervised with electrical tape, much less a homebuilt metal smelting workshop. However, when Charles Hall was seventeen, he took up the challenge to find a better way to extract aluminum from rocks. In so doing, he did become lyrically wealthy.
Had Charles Hall been born a century later, he would not have been able to buy a beer or own a gun when he first embarked upon his holy quest to conjure aluminum from the ground. However, through hard work, perseverance and no small amount of talent, this driven young man did, indeed, change the world. So, the next time you drag your favorite AR-15 out to the range, just appreciate that some teenager figured out how to extract the stuff they used to make it.
