For some reason that second link isn’t working. Try this one.
Due to the 1934, 1968, and 1986 bans, you can modify a rifle to be a fully automatic rifle, but only with parts manufactured prior to when those bans affected that particular item. The end result is that a sear intended for use to convert a semi-automatic weapon to an automatic weapon is the controlled item, and any gun with that part in it can be tracked because following the conversion it too must be carried with paperwork.
So yeah, nobody manufactures those parts anymore. They are all, at a minimum, 21 years old.
Your article talks about the impending export to South American countries. It makes no mention about the legality of the weapons themselves. It makes no mention about whether they were converted or not.
In short, I’m not convinced that black market gun conversion is a cottage industry. Even the dumbest criminal knows that the nail that sticks up is the one that gets hammered.
ExTank I am still confused. Are you saying that the constitution’s right to bear arms only applies to things like guns and swords and not to things like cannons? Do you view the right as applying to the states through things like trhe National Guard or to individuals in the states even if they are not part of a “well regulated militia”.
You fucking lying cocksucker! I called bullshit on your “interpretation” of the fights the NRA picks to fight, citing it’s battle against the "Cop Killer’ bullet legislations as an example, and of its reasoning behind picking that particular battle!
And you calling it a “practiced response” is another tactic of a goat felching baby-raper; there’s nothing practiced in the truth, unless people like Sensor and I have to repeat it ad nauseum because hypocrites like you ignore such “inconvenient truths” in your ongoing campaign to smear and outright slander gun owners and the organizations to which we belong, that help us retain out rights.
I glanced over it. Seems like it discusses legal conversions.
I was going to let this pass… but I thought better of it.
Fuck you, you slaptastically stupid jerkwad. Somebody asked a theoretical question and I replied with my opinion based on real world events. This somehow makes me an ‘emotionally stunted and pathetic gun-nut’. You can take your snap judgement and cram it sideways up your narrow ass. Just because I give an answer that is unpleasant to think about doesn’t mean I salivate over the prospect of inacting it. Hell, I gave thought to a world wide Zombie War too but that doesn’t mean I’d be head over heels at the prospect of an invasion of the undead (well… maybe not tooo much.) Whenever I read comments like yours I realize how many people are fucking idiots and can’t be trusted to seperate people’s hobbies, interests and just idle fucking speculation from their character as real life human beings. You sir, Suck.
Also, in reviewing your posts… I see one recently where you watched the “Future Weapons” program and described a new form of shaped charge as, “Neat”. You stunted, pathetic ordinance-jockey. :rolleyes:
Excuse me a second, Dan.
AAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!
That wasn’t directed at you; just getting it out of my system in order to address your points a bit more rationally.
In essence, the “classic” interpretation of the 2nd Amendment protects two rights:
- The right of citizens to keep and bear arms;
- The right of states to form militias.
#1 is there in order to help #2, but #2 isn’t required in order to have #1.
As I stated earlier, historically, the people who comprised the militia, and thus the state militias, were generally not financially capable of fielding entire units equipped with ordnance. Therefore, no laws prohibiting their ownership were enacted because they were unecessary.
It’s why we don’t have laws against you owning an aircraft carrier. While there are certainly individuals who can afford an aircraft carrier, they typically evince no desire to own one.
With the evolution of the state militias into an organized “federalized militia” called the National Guard, equipping the militias with arms and ordnance became the purview of the federal government, and not Farmer John showing up with his M-1 Garand during the monthly militia muster. This was not done to disarm or marginalize the citizen soldier militiaman, IMO, but to provide a certain uniformity of training and equipment necessary to the efficient functioning of a modern military.
There are currently a very few true official state “unorganized militias;” to my knowledge, none of them possess ordnance. Whether this is due to laws against it or the incredible financial burden of such weaponry, I cannot say.
I have no idea of the cost of equipping, say, an artillery battery (even a lightweight towed battery) of 4 to 6 guns, vehicles, ammunition, much less the training requirements to become sufficiently proficient with such weapons that Uncle Sam might be tempted to “call forth” such a militia unit should they deem it necessary.
So taking the two clauses of the 2nd together, it protects the right of individuals to possess arms, as well as the right of the states to form militias. If the states have the wherewithal to equip their militias with ordnance such as artillery and aircraft, I see no Constitutional impediment to their doing so.
As a practical matter, on the other hand, I could see other states (as well the the Federal gov’t) getting a tad nervous if, say, Georgia decided that it wanted ICBMs, and a shiny new Ohio-class sub from which to launch them.
While no particular Constitutional impediment might arise, several dozen regulatory and, ah, electoral impediments might (probably would!) block such an eventuality.
The other thing that came out of that media witch hunt was that the specific round they kept talking about was never sold to the public, but the media had a field day informing criminals all over the country that cops were routinely wearing ‘bullet proof’ vests. They effectively told the criminals to aim for the head.
As I see that Airman Doors has already covered the ridiculously low homicide rate with legally owned fully automatic weapons, I think it’s important to note that an occurance of two incidents in nearly 73 years is low enough for me to say ‘it just doesn’t happen.’
If you mean keeping them out of the hands of lawful people, yes. You’ve also got to look at the situation and times under which they were effectively banned: one year after the end of Prohibition in the US. Much of the violence that led to the ban stemmed directly from organized crime and bootlegging that came out of Prohibition and the Great Depression. You had these characters, gangsters like George “Machine Gun” Kelly involved in bootlegging, and the ‘machine guns’ were secondary to the real operation.
Much like now, a lot of gun crime is secondary to gang activity and drug trafficking. Then again, these are people who aren’t buying guns legally in the first place!
Exactly. The BATF refers to it as a ‘registerable item’ and one must go through all the paperwork and pay the tax in order to legally buy one, and thereafter the firearm that it is installed in is considered to be a fully automatic rifle and cannot be transferred without again going through all the proper legal channels.
Do idiots still try to do it themselves because they read about it on the Internet?
Probably. But idiots tend to do a lot of stupid things they read about on the Internet, and sometimes get themselves killed in the process.
To be perfectly honest, even if it were 100% legal to modify any semi-automatic rifle to fully automatic, I would not do it because it is not safe, and I’d really not want to shoot one of those home-modified jobs. Some of them will fire at the slightest touch and will not stop until they run out of ammunition, which is an extremely scary proposition considering that it might do that while say, putting in the magazine.
Now, I have fired an H&K MP-5 select fire on full auto, and I learned firsthand that Hollywood is full of shit. You don’t care a smiley face with one of those. I am not a small person, and the MP-5 uses 9mmx19 ammunition (small round for a rifle), but even so the muzzle climb is there. Control of a 1-second, five round burst was hard. I doubt I could’ve hit the broad side of a barn trying to fire a hundred round magazine in one go, and I shoot a lot.
The North Hollywood shootout involved bank robbers using both automatic and semi-automatic rifles, from what I’ve seen. Although they managed to hit and wound several cops the only fatalities in the entire incident were those of the two bank robbers themselves. They’d likely have been a lot more dangerous with any hunting rifle, or hell, some knowledge and a few household cleaning products.
I think you’re missing what I’m saying. Yes, the law regulates such things as sears, etc. But breaking that law is as simple as breaking any other law. We are talking about formed and shaped pieces of metal that can be made in an advanced high school shop class, not esoteric materials or complex metal work. Not only that, but it’s not true conversion kits are no longer made. That second page about H&K guns was published in 2004. Here’s a BATF .pdf file that describes a conversion device to make Glock pistols fully automatic that is so small and simple it can be bought off the Internet and then installed in 60 seconds. Here’s another BATF document ruling on the legality of a device to make the Ruger 10/22 rifle fully automatic. It was published in 2006, and is obviously not about a 21-year-old modification. These modifications are not complex; I daresay a journeyman machinist could figure out how to make them.
ANY manufacturing on the “black market” is by definition a cottage industry. That’s the difference between an illegal market and a legal one. The same principles apply to illegal drug manufacturing. Smith & Wesson is not out marketing machine guns for the same reason Pfizer has left the manufacture and sale of cocaine to the Colombian cartels. If these things were legal, they would not stay cottage industries for long.
The webpage about the gun bust in Miami specifically says:
“Counts 8 and 9 of the Indictment charge defendants Samper and Sharp with possessing machine guns, in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 922(o)(1).”
Perhaps I was a bit snarky in my last reply Airman Doors, but your knowledge of the gun industry is very incomplete. It’s a strange, complex business that has more permutations than even the drug business does. Roam around the BATF’s website for a while. It’s very enlightening. They don’t put out these public statements like the ones I linked to above to address fictional scenarios.
I have never claimed complete knowledge of the gun industry. But notice that the BATF is aware of such things, and it stands to reason that they know who manufactured them as a result. Like I said before, I have no doubt that the BATF is on top of things. Being a reactive agency, you can do a lot of things without them knowing, but if you put it out in the public, when they find out about it they’re all over it.
None of this changes the fact that you are more likely to be hit by lightning than you are to get killed by an automatic weapon.
As far as the Miami thing, the men were charged with possession. That in no way implies the weapons were illegal, just that they did not have the right to possess them. Were the weapons legit, or were they modified for automatic fire? If they were legit, that means that they were stolen. If not, then you have a case, because that’s what we are talking about.
This is a tautology, or else extreme semantic hair-splitting. The legality of a person’s possession of a regulated item is the substance of the crime. A weapon modified for automatic fire is regulated the same way a weapon originally built as automatic is. And I said before, I mentioned this incident only in response to your statement that gun trafficking was only “in the movies,” not necessarily to show how common modification of weapons to fully automatic is. Whether weapons are modified or original automatics, gun trafficking absolutely does occur.
I agree with you about lightning.
There’s no reasonable way to conclude that the NRA is an extremist organization when you look at the facts. In my view, they’re, by far, not extreme enough. They’re pretty soft, really.
But the popular conception of them is that they’re extremist, because the vast majority of anti-gun advocates are liars.
I haven’t always been a gun nut. Until a few years ago, I didn’t really care about the issue. But I got interested in it, and read about it, read debates on it, the history of it, etc. And I noticed that the pro-gun side of the argument almost had a complete monopoly on reason and truth.
The gun control advocates would flat out lie, manipulate, and attempt to get people to have an emotional rather than rational reaction. Not just a few, but almost completely across the board. To them, I guess, they emotionally know that guns are evil, so it’s okay to lie in the pursuit of demonifying them, right?
Not that there aren’t emotionally manipulative people on the pro-gun side, but when you look at the amount of sane, logical, rational people advocating on the issue, they’re almost exclusively on the pro-gun side.
So, I thought that if you were under the impression that the NRA was an extremist organization, it was because of lies like the “cop killer bullet” ban, and how the NRA was portrayed in it. Which is why I chose it as an example. There are others, but that’s the most clear, prominent one that came to my mind.
As far as a cottage industry to illegally modify guns, is there any kind of cite?
Common sense dictates that it really does not occur on any sort of noticible scale. The media absolutely loves the sensationalist gun violence that crimes committed with fully automatic weapons brings. They salivate at the idea of someone gunning down people with an AK-47. If it ever happened, you would be certain to hear about it if you watch any kind of news. The lack of such a thing suggests that criminals aren’t really using these weapons.
It’s also not as easy as you characterize. The BATFE uses “readily converted to fully automatic” as a criteria for denying importation or distribution of guns. In response, manufacturers and importers modified the rifles so that you can’t simply drop in a part - generally, the things that it would normally connect to are gone or modified into uselessness into the rifle’s design. You would have to pretty much rework the rifle to the point where you might as well be building a new one anyway.
And as I’ve tried to explain all throughout this thread, even if criminals were, in small numbers, gaining fully automatic weapons, it really doesn’t matter. This isn’t the movies, they aren’t disproportionately powerful killing machines. They would actually most likely reduce the actual effectiveness of the weapons for most users. So not only is it a phantom threat, but even if it weren’t, and it actually happened, it’s not disproportionately dangerous enough to really matter anyway. Certainly not enough to justify banning military style rifles because of the miniscule possibility of them being re-engineered into fully automatic weapons, which, if it happened anyway, isn’t all that big a deal.
There aren’t enough rolleyes in the world. I’ll lay out my position and you can demonize me. I’d like to see gun ownership regulated similar to how cars are regulated. Require a license and test to shoot a weapon off your property, register guns when they change hands, keep them out of the hands of felons, make sure they are locked up when not in use (so criminal don’t steal them and kids don’t shoot people by mistake), and take a ballistics sample to match up against bullets used in crime. If guns are used in a crime then the person wielding the gun goes in prison for life.
I’m not saying that there are no rational people who honestly advocate gun control. The SDMB is far more likely to see such people on average (and yet, in this thread, you can still see more people reacting on emotion, and stretching the argument to fit what they know on some emotional level rather than evaluating the information presented).
There are a lot of people who don’t feel strongly on the issue that have reasonable opinions.
Perhaps I should’ve said that of the people who are rabidly on either side of the debate - the people who actually spend effort to try to convince other people of the merits of their side of the debate - the gun control side tends to attempt to scare people and get them to react emotionally (think of the children!), whereas the pro-gun side tends to attempt to win people with reason and logic.
I’m not attempting to personally insult anyone. This was the observation I had as an outsider - before I ever was convinced of the merit of gun rights, back when I was reading up on it and making up my mind. But even then, my bullshit detector was already fairly tuned, and I realized that if someone attempts to convince you of something with emotion, manipulation, and deception, then they’re almost certainly full of shit.
Fair enough.
Elaborate, if you will, on how I can maintain my Second Amendment rights while simultaneously having my name on a list that will tell someone exactly where to go when they decide that the Second Amendment doesn’t mean what it says.
I disagree, but it’s a simple thing indeed in most locations to get a concealed carry permit.
What, the instant background check isn’t good enough?
That’s the purpose of the instant background check. Of course, go figure, criminals generally don’t subject themselves to that. I wonder why?
So what you’re telling me is that the primary purpose of having a gun (particularly a pistol), self-defense, is completely irrelevant to you? As a responsible gun owner I take care of my weapons, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to lock them all up. Is an assailant going to give me a time-out so I can unlock it, load it, and point it at him? Surely not. But hey, that’s a good first step in banning handguns, because if you take away the primary justification for owning one, most people will resign themselves to the futility of owning them and turn them in.
Waste of resources. A new barrel changes the rifling. Are you going to test every gun, every time a modification is made? How are you going to manage that? For that matter, do you have any idea how large a database that would be? Oh, yeah, there would be names attached to it as well, invading my privacy and creating a potential list for confiscation.
No objection here. Just be careful that you don’t conflate “crime” with “self-defense”. I’m not keen on spending the rest of my life in jail for defending my family because you don’t like guns.
You seem like a reasonble guy, but there is plenty of rabid, emotional pro-gun argument as well. When people talk about needing guns so they can fight the evil, black-helicopter govt conspiracy that doesn’t come across as calm and rational. The pro-gun side also seems to ignore the fact that having a gun in your house makes you less safe, rather than more safe.
However, like the war on drugs, prohibition, etc., I don’t think banning guns is going to work. Just the same, I don’t want guns where I live and work or where my child goes to play. I’d also not feel very safe knowing my neighbor has a rifle whose rounds can penetrate both his and my walls.
Less than that, running some steel wool through the barrel will do that. Changing the ballstic fingerprint of a gun is ridiculously easy.
Last I read about it, which was probably 2 years ago, Maryland had spent over a billion dollars on their fancy gun fingerprinting scheme, and it had yet to be used in solving a single crime.
I actually don’t mind the car analogy too much for guns, but you have to realize what the actual analogy is. You don’t require a license to own a car, nor as far as I know can they restrict what type of car you own. The act of driving on public roads is what’s licensed. It would be analogous to not interfering at all with private ownership of guns on public property, but licensing the act of carrying them in public places. Not an especially unreasonable proposition.
No, I understand that. I did say there were plenty of crazies on both sides. I just observed that that when you looked at only the rational, logical people on the issue, most of them were in the pro-gun camp.
This is not a fact, and far too simplistic in any case. This would be a good point to point out stuff like the Kellerman “you’re 43 times more likely to shoot someone you know than a criminal” study that was utterly bullshit, and yet gun control advocates, some of which who are fully aware that it’s bullshit, still use.
I don’t find anything crazy about these concerns.
Edit: Forgive me, I didn’t mean to imply that anyone who believes in any sort of gun control is irrational. I mean to say that the people who are truly passionate about the issue tend to have some emotional reason for it, and more importantly, almost exclusively attempt to use emotional reactions to convince people, rather than logic. People like Sarah Brady and hardcore anti-gunners routinely lie and manipulate, far more than, say, the NRA does.
Thank you, and I agree that there are disingenuous people on both sides. I don’t cotton too much to Wayne LaPierre, for instance.
I agree, but we have a history of that sort of thing. A five year war, Valley Forge, George Washington, Very famous. Trust me.
Now this, I vehemently disagree with. The police will come and investigate, and clean up the mess. What I have done buy owning a gun is made my home a site where proactive law enforcement is practiced, not reactive law enforcement.
Don’t get me wrong here. If someone comes in and wants my computer or my DVD player, they are welcome to it. I won’t stop them. I will call the police the first chance I get with a physical description, but I will NOT shoot someone over a replaceable asset. My family, however, is irreplaceable, and that’s the name of that tune.
And that’s your prerogative. Exercise it at your leisure. There are laws about that sort of thing anyway. Incidentally, depending upon where you live I will all but guarantee that someone you passed in the last day or two was carrying (some big cities and a few states excluded)
That would be a hell of a rifle unless you live in attached housing.