At the risk of veering of into IMHO territory more than we are already, John Q. Public, who gives a shit about being a felon? Yes, it deters him/her, and decreases the amount of fully automatic firearms they’d buy.
Joe Shit, the felon? No. They don’t use full auto because they usually don’t need those features to commit their crimes, and because it’s otherwise too much of a pain in the ass to acquire a fully automatic firearm. But gun control doesn’t prevent them from getting one, if they wanted one.
Mexico is an easy counterexample—how hard is it for criminals to get a cuerno de chivo, nevermind any thing the Mexican Army feels like selling them? But look at Europe. Are criminals like outlaw motorcycle gangs deterred from acquiring things like full auto AKs and RPKs? Were the guys that did things like the Bataclan Massacre?
You’re just making it difficult for people who were going to obey the law anyway.
Didn’t it also come with things like the really long barrel? To have it qualify as a rifle, is my guess, things like AR pistols with braces not yet being in vogue, or made for fear of a bad BATFE ruling.
Again, I’m not asking about committing crimes or what Joe Shit the felon thinks. I’m asking, in your opinion, if the laws that were passed made purchasing a fully automatic weapon, or a gun that had an open-bolt design difficult.
But to what end are you asking? You’ve been told, repeatedly, that the things are banned. It’s not a matter of opinion, that’s a matter of fact. Banning something pretty much, ipso facto, means that it’s going to be harder to buy. That means it’s going to be ‘difficult’, by definition. Not sure how else to say it. You can’t buy open bolt semi-automatic weapons manufactured after 1986 (I think…might be '83, I don’t recall and am too drunk to look it up). Even those before that you need to jump through all sorts of hoops to purchase from someone…plus they are really expensive. Just like automatic weapons. They are treated basically the same.
Oh. I thought it had a long enough barrel to qualify as a rifle. Ignorance fought. Was never in the market for one, but saw them in Shotgun News and thought, “That’s silly.”.
Can’t imagine why you’d go with the long barrel if you’d still have to get the stamp as an SBR. if you already have to buy the BATFE, why not get the one with the happy switch?
Nah, the shorter barreled one I wanted from that time was the AUG.
Because the happy switch is $$$$$$$. Looking at an auction for a full-auto Uzi right now and seeing the starting price at over $13,000. Full-auto is fun, but it hits the pocketbook in more ways than one.
In the mid 80s it was a Big Dealsup[/sup] “article of faith” that the Bad Guys were outgunning the police.
Yes. there ***was ***a concern in the 80s about there being firearms around that could be “easily” converted to full auto. At the same time how much actual crime involved such weaponry was probably exaggerated in both news and entertainment media. There were newsworthy incidents where police were at a disadvantage vs. crooks with greater firepower but it was not a daily thing. More like the worry of officers with six-shooters knowing there were 16+1 pistols out there.
Looking at it in hindsight one would wonder if this may not have been a way to justify appropriating cash for Police Departments to buy a lot of auto pistols, highcap mags, MP5s and AR15s…
ISTM one side-effect of the type restriction in the 80s and the pseudo “ban” in the 90s was to cull the marketplace of any number of weapons that were just cheapo pieces. Meanwhile, Colt for example was not going to stop making AR15s, they could afford to make a compliant Sporter version, and did.
At least in the USA it doesn’t seem the general run of criminal these days finds much of an ROI to go thru the hassle of getting the full auto versions when what’s available commercially works just fine. If you are enough of a Big Shot you probably will have a few illegally-acquired real autos to make an impression on whoever tries to muscle in, but the guy in the street’s better off with a store-bought piece. Oh sure you do find some gangbanger-image types getting legal weapons illegally modified to full auto but in the end all that does is shorten the life and increase the rate of malfunction.
To address this part of the OP, the 1994 Assault Weapons ban had nothing to do with full automatic weapons. It banned normal semi auto rifles that looked like machine guns by virtue of having certain features like pistol grip stocks, flash hiders and removable high capacity magazines. “Assault Weapon” was a made-up term to begin with.
The effectiveness of particular gun laws is definitely going to take us well into IMHO territory. Feel free to start a new thread there if you’d like. There are likely existing threads on this topic as well that you may find interesting.
Let’s stick to the factual topic of the OP in this thread, please.
One reason for open bolt designs was facilitating cooling in a high volume of fire weapon like a true (not submachine gun or automatic rifle) machine gun. The barrel is naturally open for air to flow through between bursts and there’s not a chambered round getting heated up and possibly ‘cooking off’, IOW firing on its own.
The other reason more relevant to classic submachine gun designs was simplicity. Some open bolt blowback operated SMG’s had/have extremely simply operating mechanisms: just a weight, the bolt, which doesn’t lock in place when closed, with a raised nub on the face serving as a firing pin when it strikes the cartridge, a spring to drive it, a catch controlled by the trigger to release or hold it. You can’t come up with a closed bolt system quite as simple. And likewise making such a simple design resistant to illicit conversion to automatic not practical either.
Among weapons with some kind of bolt locking device there’s less of a difference in complexity between open and closed. A small nitpick, Browning’s recoil operated machine guns like the M2 are basically closed bolt designs. There have been open bolt conversion kits offered on the market in recent times, but the overwhelming majority of few million M2 .50 cal types and their smaller .30 cousins have been closed bolt. The M240, aka FN MAG, is a distant relative of another Browning design, the BAR: gas operated, open bolt.
I finally chased down two fictional examples from that era that I wanted to mention, courtesy of the Internet Movie Firearms Database.
1984 The Terminator. In the movie, the Terminator acquires an Armalite AR-18 rifle (unlikely because that’s a full-auto rifle). In the novelization of the movie it’s the semi-auto AR-180 version, which the Terminator converts by “filing off the interrupter pin” (I don’t know if that was actually possible).
1999 Law & Order, S10E1. Jack McCoy goes after the manufacturers of the fictional “Rolf 9” machine pistol (‘played by’ an Armitage International Scarab Skorpion) for marketing a gun that’s deliberately designed to be easy to illegally convert.
It’s not. Sometimes people look at a diagram of a semi-auto trigger group, see a part labeled “disconnector”, and think “Aha! That’s what stops it from firing full auto.” In reality, the disconnector prevents the hammer from riding the bolt forward and resting on an unfired cartridge. Removing it would make your semi-auto gun at best an unreliable burst fire gun and more likely turn it into a straight-pull bolt action.
Open-bolt semi-auto guns, which in many ways work oppositely of a closed-bolt gun, are easy to convert and likewise regulated as machine guns as mentioned upthread.
From what I’m reading, 99% of the full-auto weapons problem in the 1980s was solved by simply making most open-bolt designs NFA items. I’m doubtful whether the follow-on legislation was necessary or useful.
The T-800 picks up an Uzi and an AR-180 at the gun shop. Both would have been semi-auto. IIRC in an interview with Schwarzenegger from Soldier of Fortune back in 1984 they were going to have a scene where you saw the T-800 converting both firearms to full auto, but they decided to drop it. There’s far more involved to converting a firearm to full-auto than just filing one part, but then the movie wouldn’t have been so cool.
I was never a big fan, but I wonder if the show Miami Vice pushed the full-auto in the hands of criminals buttons the most during the 80s.
I’m surprised nobody’s modified an open bolt design to shoot 20/28/.410 shells. You wouldn’t even need rifling and presumably practical accuracy would be sufficient for most purposes, including shits & giggles.
OP: Movies and TV shows vastly overestimate how useful long bursts of automatic fire are (aside from suppression and anti-air). They do look cool though so you see them plenty. Criminals tend to prefer handguns for portability and concealability.
That means it’s going to be ‘difficult’, by definition. Not sure how else to say it. You can’t buy open bolt semi-automatic weapons manufactured after 1986 (I think…might be '83, I don’t recall and am too drunk to look it up). Even those before that you need to jump through all sorts of hoops to purchase from someone…plus they are really expensive. Just like automatic weapons. They are treated basically the same.
