Following the letter of the law

I find this rather funny. As explained by Brennan B. on the gun.mail discussion from work yesterday:

For anyone who’s been lusting after a handgun that’s not on California’s “safe” list, a new workaround for that infernal list has recently surfaced.

Basically it involves converting the handgun into a single-shot with overall length >10″ in order to qualify for the target pistol exception to the handgun list.  Then it can be legally sold to you.  Once you’ve completed the paperwork and waiting period it’s your gun, at which point you can legally hire a gunsmith to change out the clowny-looking ~8″ barrel back out for a standard one, and un-pin the 0-round magazine from the frame.  Then you can sell those parts back to the shop that did the single-shot conversion.

Note that this work can be done in-state which means the gunsmith hired to do the conversion, the FFL from which you buy the gun, and the gunsmith that converts it back can all be the same guy.

Prohibition of things doesn’t work. It doesn’t matter what you are trying to prohibit. You can only punish actions.

Share

6 thoughts on “Following the letter of the law

  1. Some really clever people have come up with some very interesting ways around some of the laws out here. I suppose it helps that the idiots writing some of these laws wouldn’t know a “shoulder thing that goes up” from a hole in the ground.

  2. A frind of mine was suggested putting a VFG on the gun and have it registered as an AOW for import into the state, then simply pop the VFG.

    There are easier ways around such laws. Also Alan Gura is working on this little dumb law.

  3. But-but-but if we just pass another loophole law, then we’ll keep the guns out of slave civilian hands! Because no one ever figures out how to weasel through those silly legal thickets that we call “law”.

    And, in the end, if we succeed in passing laws that do what we expect, we obviously succeed in disarming the criminals law-abiding people who attempt to follow the law–because people who want to pillage, smuggle illicit drugs, rape, murder, and kidnap wouldn’t dream of smuggling and/or making their own guns! It’s unpossible!

  4. Please note that this is not a loophole or “getting around the law”. It’s a matter of us gunnie types in my beloved Clownifornia STRICTLY following the law. It’s not our fault that the idiots in the CA state government are too incompetent to infringe on our rights effectively.

  5. “Please note that this is not a loophole or “getting around the law””

    In one way, I completely agree with you–this is completely legal. But then, so is every so-called “loophole” in the law. Indeed, you can make the claim that the law is nothing but a set of loopholes that any free person has to navigate, in order to do anything legally.

    The point I’m trying to make is this: no matter what law is passed, there will likely be some way for human ingenuity to get around it. Either that, or people will just break the law, if they decide that the reward is worth the risk, or if they decide it is the moral thing to do!

Comments are closed.