80% lowers/receivers, etc.., are NOT FIREARMS. That’s the whole point. Chunks of Unfinished metal are worthless until someone turns them into a finished product. Where does this stupidity end? If I possess a ton of scrap aluminum or steel, should I have to register it as a car and forced to purchase insurance? The ignorance of some of you only help the lying media fool the American public.
thatgunguyfl
May 12, 2020
Posted on Reddit in response to ATF or Congress should act to declare ‘ghost guns’ firearms requiring background checks
[The people who advocate for the making “ghost guns” illegal, or “declaring them firearms” must not be aware of the existence of “shop class” in high school. And as such they are doing the equivalent of expecting someone who fails to observe the laws regarding violent crime to dutifully obey them in regards to engaging in an activity which harms no one.
And when you see this you wonder how they made it to the directorship of a government agency without knowing laws are not supposed to be made by government bureaucrats:
Thomas Brandon, the former acting director of the ATF who retired last spring, said he recommended to his bosses at the Department of Justice that they reclassify certain ghost gun kits as firearms because of the ease in putting them together.
I suppose I just need to remind myself, and others, of what Henry Kissinger said.—Joe]
Ah that lovely little thing called knowledge. These people created a new term “assault weapon” and suddenly anything with a scary bayonet lug, pistol grip and a muzzle device are “to deadly to allow civilians to own”. The results of which were a 1000 different kits that remove those problem pieces.
A Heavy Barrel Bushmaster from the time of the AW ban looks just like an AR-15 but no muzzle device and no bayonet lug. Unless you know what you are looking for, it looks just like every other evil assault weapon.
I know of a person that bought an AK looking rifle in that time period. It had the ugliest shoulder stock you can imagine, with a thumb hole stock. It was a used rifle. The FFL asked the customer to take a box to the garbage on his way out of the shop. The box just happened to be filled with the original stock for the rifle and some magazines that had to be disposed of. The customer took them home to throw them away. Right…
The other push back was for people to try and avoid 4473. There is a great scene in _Red Dawn_ (The original) where the Cuban commander tells his LT to go to all the sporting goods stores and get their copies of the 4473s to create a list of everybody in town that had purchased a gun.
I know of FFLs that kept their books on rolls of TP. So that when they retired and sent in their “books” the ability of the ATF to copy them would be low. Or the books that were kept on paper that had stuff in it that made scanners of the time go bonkers trying to read or make copies of them.
Regardless, the hobby of making your own firearm from parts became away of avoiding the government from knowing you owned that particular firearm.
So the new magic term is “Ghost Gun.” It means “personal manufactured fire arm.” There use to be youtube videos of people CNCing the lower receiver from a block of 7075. The blue prints for the M4A2 are out there, if you can read prints you can manufacture every bit of the AR platform yourself.
Requirements: Milling machine, lathe and tooling.
(The tooling might get expensive. The cost of an AR15 barrel is around $100-$200. The cost of gun drills to make your own barrel is north of $200. (That would be multiple drills as most lathes can’t take a full length gun drill so you would have to have two or more.) Not to mention the rifling button and such.)
Regardless, “Ghost Gun” is just another made up scary term.
Building a fully functional modern semi-auto weapon is a good challenge, though certainly doable. Arne Boberg mentioned that he built the first prototypes of his XR-9 pocket handgun on his Bridgeport manual milling machine.
On the other hand, building the rough equivalent of a 1944 era Liberator is much easier and requires little more than hardware store parts. Web site thehomegunsmith.com is all about this sort of thing, written by a Brit for the severely controlled audience in his home country.
To me its far better for the state to know how many guns might be pointed at them. Let them know we Americans have taken to heart the hard lessons of history. And stand ready to defend those things we know to be correct and decent in society.
Politicians everywhere need to see our middle finger and hear BFYTW!
The idea that they can stop ghost guns from being made is as ignorant as thinking one can stop crime by passing a law.
Mao was right. Now who has most of the guns in this country? Why do you think they are so desperate to reduce those numbers?
Hint, It has nothing to do with safety. and everything to do with power.
Oh, even without 4473s, other forms and NICS checks, the gubbermint has had a pretty good idea of just how many hundreds of millions of guns there are available that might be pointed at them since at least the mid 80s.
Subtract the export numbers to the number reported imported and manufactured and away you go .
In WWII, with much of the equipment of the BEF left on the beaches of Dunkirk, and British arms factories going all out to re-arm the British army, the STEN gun was designed to be produced in any garage machine shop to quickly arm an English population expected ” to fight them on the beaches…”. The design, although flawed, was simple enough and effective enough to become the standard Commonwealth submachine gun of WWII. The Israelis found it simple enough to manufacture under the noses of the British army prior to independence. Better designs have emerged over time that only require a visit to a big box hardware store, and some basic mechanical ability. In a nation where people make hand forged midlevel weapons as a hobby, there will be a lot of folks who can and will make full auto weapons in their garages.
The really sad state of things is that it is easier to build a fully automatic firearm than a semi-automatic.
A full auto can be built with an open bolt design with a simple sear. Trigger might be horrible, but it will work. If you want to make a semi-automatic, you need to work from a closed bolt, you have to have some sort of sticker/hammer system. And you have to have a disconnecter of some sort. Getting any part of the disconnecter wrong could lead to a full automatic firearm which is bad.
So the complexity of a semi is higher than a full auto.
Regardless, there are a number of books and articles out there that describe how to build firearms from scratch.
An open-bolt gun could be semi-auto. It locks the bolt back after each round, even if the trigger is still held down. There are obvious disadvantages to carrying the gun open-bolt, but they also apply to open-bolt auto-only weapons.
But I suspect that the semi-auto trigger linkage will indeed require one or two more pieces than the simplest form of full-auto.