Quote of the Day
Because of the Bruen decision we are going to see every gun law challenged, The NFA and GCA will eventually be gutted. I don’t think there will be a complete removal of both but they won’t look anything like they do now after @gunpolicy and GOA get done.
Scott Wilburn (@ScottWilburn138)
Tweeted on August 2, 20237
A persuasive argument can be made for this. If you are in a rational universe. I am from from convinced of the rationality of our legal system, let alone the entirety our country, world, and beyond.
Still, I know that if we do not try it is certain to not happen. So, I’m donating money every month to FPC and SAF. My goal is to have machine gun shooting sports in high schools in less than ten years.
I had this thought yesterday: the concept of “prohibited person” is not something the founding era generation would have conceived as legitimate. Yes, depriving a citizen of life, liberty or property after a criminal conviction before a jury would have been consistent, but the simple practicalities would have been foreign. Why in the world would you let someone that you were sure was going to commit violence out unattended with just an admonition not to touch a firearm? Or even pretend that by informing businesses that sold firearms not to give them to prohibited persons would even remotely be effective, while also burdening them with a paperwork process that does not advance the alleged purpose?
Here’s what would have been founding era consistent vis-a-vis people that you could not trust to possess firearms:
+ Posting a monetary bond to keep their firearms; the bond they would forfeit with regard to shooting a specific person, and this only after the afeared person had taken them to court to apply for the bond.
+ Keeping in prison
+ Execution by hanging
+ Indentured servitude or outright enslavement and sold out of the country
+ Exile upon pain of death, as an alternative to execution
+ Branding of the hand (the most analogous to ‘prohibited person’)
+ On a smaller scale, barred from entering town, enforced by the sheriff with a Henry
“If you are in a rational universe.” Indeed.
And the fact that NFA & GCA were put in place by humans that were thinking rationally and constitutionally?
Provides proof that the ignorance of the caste system has been at work in America a very long time.
The NFA was passed with the understanding that criminals would not comply. And would give prosecutors an avenue to use against them.
No problem burdening a whole class of law abiding citizens and denying them rights, just to add to the sentence of criminals.
And now those unconstitutional acts of treason have led to murder of innocents. And countless destruction.
In a rational world. They would never have been written. Or those that wrote them would have to answer for damage they have done. And be made examples of.
Thanks for all your contributions, Joe! Your goal is beyond worthy!
Our founding fathers knew with certainty that there was no voting their way out of tyranny, that king George would not relent, and that a violent shooting war was absolutely unavoidable, yet they still took the time, and *risk* to pen the Declaration of Independence.
Ultimately, we do *not* live in a “rational universe”, and these measures will fail, but we are still honor bound to do “due diligence”, take the moral high ground, and defend ourselves ethically, before defending ourselves more traditionally.
No….neither the NFA nor the GCA will go anywhere. Why? Because the criminals who now hold power will simply ignore any and all court rulings they don’t like. There is NOBODY in any position of power and authority who wants to uphold the Constitution. They are ALL corrupt and evil. The commie left did not spend the last 70 years infiltrating, subverting and suborning every meaningful portion of society just to give up and allow their number one platform….total disarmament of society….to fail. We are already seeing numerous laws being passed that are DIRECT violations of the SCOTUS Bruen opinion. And we are seeing corrupt judges’ rule in favor of these illegal laws. No….gun control is NOT going away. And there is nothing ordinary honest citizens can do to stop the left from doing whatever it wants….at least nothing legal or peaceful. TINVOWOOT
The issue that matters is gun free zones. The bad guys have figured out this is the way around court rulings and the bad guys control about 20 states including a lot of big ones. Even our states like say TX, allow private entities to use the criminal law to ban self-defense. And the big box stores do it. Currently visiting Wyoming where I have discovered that many public facilities including colleges are gun-free zones.
TX seems to be very much a mixed bag where the right to self defense is concerned. NH (where I live) is pretty good; for example, the state doesn’t enforce private disarmed victim zones, so the most that can happen is that you’re told to leave if caught carrying (subject only to trespass charges if you don’t comply).
I remember my employer has “gun free zone” stickers on the offices in TX but not in NH.
On a related tangent: the BATFE’s push to go after “Glock Switches” as unregistered machine guns. *
“26 U.S.C. § 5845(b)
For the purposes of the National Firearms Act the term Machinegun means:
• Any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger
• The frame or receiver of any such weapon
• Any part designed and intended solely and exclusively or combination of parts designed and intended for use in converting a weapon into a machinegun, or
• Any combination of parts from which a machinegun can be assembled if such parts are in the possession or under the control of a person.”
They’re going after the Glock Switches under the third section, as a part used to convert a firearm to a machine gun.
What I’m curious about, from a legal standpoint, is what this might do to Glocks from a legal standpoint.
All it takes to convert a standard Glock, of which there probably 100k or more in the US, to a machine gun is to swap out the back plate with one of these “switches”.
The work of less than a minute if it’s anything at all like replacing a standard backplate.
Certainly sounds to me as if Glocks are, “can be readily restored to shoot, automatically…”. If so, then EVERY Glock on the market would be a machine-gun by the NFA definition.
All the Glocks owned by private citizens.
All the Glocks purchased by LEOs for work.
All machineguns by definition.
Yet….Bruen.
Common Usage.
I’d say there are enough Glocks privately owned to meet the standard of “common usage”.
Might this be an angle for a good legal team to get the NFA overturned, or at the least overturn the The Hughes Amendment to the FOPA and reopen the MG registry?
While reopening the registry wouldn’t be a good as eliminating the NFA altogether, it would greatly increase the availability and lower the cost of machine guns for private ownership.**
*Aside from “range toy”, I have a hard time thinking of a usage scenario for these sort of things, but that holds true for many other firearms as well. Not a valid reason to prohibit them.
**Also of limited use in private hands, and expensive to shoot. And still not a valid reason to prohibit them.