That reminds me of the married woman who only had one extramarrital lover at a time 'cause she didn’t want to cheat…
Stranger
Sorry to hijack, but why are they so cheap? I mainly got it as a plinker, but I’ve fired 3 boxes though it, it hasn’t jammed yet or anything.
I was considering opening a “critique my cheap-ass pistol” thread.
My earlier reply re: replicas is just as true with “el cheapo crap guns” subsituted for “replica”, FWIW.
Wait, you know cops who actually spend time on the range? I used “trained professional” in hopes that Una’s KC cops were closer to that ideal than my town’s.
“Unseemly,” sure. “Better than forming a burglary ring, like the son of a friend, or regularly shaking down motorists, stealing evidence that still had a chain of custody, dealing coke, or taking bribes, the practices that got our entire force arrested or fired about 25 years ago (one of those “climate of corruption” things),” well, my expectations ain’t high.
They recently did a gun buyback program in Boston. They gave out $200 gift cards to Target for a working gun.
The cops at the Boston police stations would check the gun to see that it was operable. (I don’t know what this entails, but I don’t think they were firing them.)
I know that there are lots of gun dealers and collectors who used this as an opportunity to clean out thier junk guns. Any junky, unoperable or barely operable parts guns aren’t worth nearly $200. The joke is that they give the gift cards to their wives as justification for their gun hobbies.
I’m fairly certain that no testing was done on the guns, and that they are destroyed. Local radio talk hosts were very critical of the program for not testing the guns.
The only good thing about the program is that it was privately funded. It’s a stupid, wasteful and pointless exercise, but at least it’s not my money their wasting.
Regarding the testing: What would be the point? Let’s say you get a handgun in via the program. You test it and learn that it’s the infamous gun you’ve been searching for in a string of murders. So what? How are you better off now that you have the gun? You don’t know who turned it in. Maybe it’ll have some prints on it, but that’s doubtful. Even if it does, it doesn’t prove anything. How would having a weapon obtained as evidence through the program be helpful to any open case?
I certainly hope they’re not test firing guns that were just handed over by the general public. Only a gunsmith can verify if any gun is in firable condition, especially older guns that predate the higher pressure smokeless powder loads used today. Just randomly firing random handguns is asking for disaster. Never fire anything you don’t know is in good working order, ever.
I shudder to think how many of those guns being passed over the table are loaded and what could happen… If it were me working there, everyone can just set the gun down waaaay over there, and I’ll be by to check it out when you’re nicely away from it, thanks.
I wonder if the people who do these gun buybacks have the legal authority to do so. Doing pistol transfers requires a FFL and the attendant paperwork. Police or not, this is a purchase program, not a confiscation program, and as no crimes are being committed, why are the police exempt from this requirement? How is any party doing gun buybacks exempt from this requirement? Also, if someone finds a nice pistol and keeps it for themselves, does that not make it an illegal transfer?
For all the big talk about reducing crime, it seems to me that we are discussing criminal activity in and of itself.
Is this true? I thought it wasn’t required for private transfers.
Not as long as it is intrastate. The Feds have no Constitutional authority over transfers that occur between non-felon adults within a state (since their regulatory authority comes from an extention of the 14th Amendment). Most states at least require that the parties record the purchase or transfer of a firearm, though.
Stranger
Er, that should be the Commerce Clause. I don’t know where the 14th Amendment came from–post-prandial retardation, I guess.
Stranger
As far as I am aware, all handgun transfers in PA must go through an FFL with the paperwork except for transfer from spouse to spouse. Private transfer of long guns in PA does not require an FFL to handle the transfer.
Which would make a ‘no questions asked, you throw a handgun in the bin and we give you 200$’ an illegal transfer here.
Duck!
Actually, you may have a decent plinker. From what I hear on gun boards, it’s about 50/50 with half saying total trash and half saying fun cheap guns. Of course, never put yourself in a position where you’d actually have to rely on it.
If you want something good in that price range you can get a makarov.
As for FFL transfers, it varies greatly by state. In Ohio, you can legally transfer a gun to any adult not known to be a felon in a private sale.
Ammo can be a pain in the butt to find for some of the cheaper Makarovs out there. I almost bought one about 7 years ago for what looked like a great price, around $75 I think, until I realized that it was chambered in some funky Egyptian 9mm round that would make it hard to find cheap ammo. At least with the Hi-Point you can easily find parabellum rounds.
Now that I think more about it, I think this was chambered in 9mm Largo, the Spanish round, not Eqyptian. I think the gun itself was from Egypt. Either way, I took a pass since I was looking for a shooter and not a shelf piece at the time.
Most makarovs are 9x18, which you can even find at sporting good stores, but any decent ammo supplier (where you should be getting stuff from anyway) will have plenty of it. It’s among the cheapest, if not the cheapest, pistol round to shoot.