We need more guns!

Don’t tell the third graders. Puts a whole new twist on a game of tag.

 

So are cannons, tanks, and fighter jets. Of those, flamethrowers are the only ones that aren't prohibitively expensive. They also have other uses, particularly in agriculture (think controlled burns, removing problem plants, etc).

RPGs are around $1500 plus a $200 destructive device NFA tax stamp. Every round you want to shoot out of them, though, is another $200 stamp plus requiring a special explosive license and the necessary storage facilities. The bigger problem with RPGs is you're generally buying a de-milled one that has had a large hole cut in it has to be welded back together with additional metal, and RPG rounds available to purchase are notoriously finicky. There was a pretty widely known recent incident with a content producer on youtube who literally blew himself up with one an suffered a concussion, severe burns to both arms, facial lacerations and fractures, etc. He was lucky it wasn't worse. The whole thing was captured in slow motion and an AAR was conducted. The channel is Ballistic High Speed if you're curious. There isn't any gore or anything like that.

Cannons are, like flamethrowers, not even regulated. They are considered antiques. Tanks can be bought, though generally the cannon is welded up and disabled. You could buy it without the demilling, or repair it, but you run into the same thing as the RPG in that you would pay a $200 destructive device tax stamp, $200 per round, special explosives license, storage facilities, etc., and then you would have to find someone to sell you the ammunition.

Fighter jets are completely legal but terribly expensive, and none of them can have integral classified (or once classified) tech. They're fairly expensive to acquire, and even more expensive to operate. All of them are disarmed, and you're not going to find anyone who will be willing to sell you a tomahawk missile, sidewinder, etc. even if you had the money, storage facilities, etc. If you had that much money at your disposal, you'd probably be able to start a business to manufacture your own.

 

No one is going to give up their right to protect themselves from animals on the streets... CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT.

 

The takeaway here is you do not want to buy a rewelded RPG or closed back rocket launcher.

They are demilled by cutting a big hole in the tube, typically right next to where your face would go when firing. Someone has to have welded that hole back closed to make it function again.

It propels the round by filling the tube with rapidly expanding, superheated gas. The quality of that weld and the fit of the projectile are the primary two things determining whether it actually fires as a rocket launcher, or instead becomes essentially a very large pipe bomb that you’re holding right next to your head. I don’t think there’s anyone out there whose welding skills I trust quite that much.

 

We will not have gun control until there is a shoot-out at a Super Bowl parade.


DOH!


We will not have gun control until there are two shoot-outs at the same Super Bowl parade.

or (just get to the end game)

We will not have gun control until we have everyone shooting at a Super Bowl parade and no one survives.


There is a dog show coming to town and I'm out of ammo.

 

Oh Boy! This decision will mean more guns in the hands (and pockets) of those that should not have them………………….
After Bruen, a police officer in New York can no longer assume that seeing a person with a gun in public — here, a possible gang member who has a gun in his pants pocket —is doing so illegally. No PC, motion to suppress granted. (EDNY, per Garaufis)

 

Apparently we missed the 2 a being amended to read " the right to kill as many people as possible as quickly as possible shall not be infringed".

 

What's interesting to me is the ATF bump stock issue is basically identical to an issue litigated over a decade ago that the Eleventh Circuit decided. It was such an uncontroversial decision back then that it was per curiam and unpublished (those are generally reserved for cases where judges think the issues involved are settled and not important). Even Bill Pryor, the Samuel Alito of the Eleventh Circuit, signed on to the opinion. Here's what the court said:
William Akins v. USA, No. 08-15640 (11th Cir. 2009)
The Bureau acted within its discretion when it reclassified the Accelerator as a machinegun. A machinegun is a weapon that fires “automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.” 26 U.S.C. § 5845(b). The interpretation by the Bureau that the phrase “single function of the trigger” means a “single pull of the trigger” is consonant with the statute and its legislative history. See Staples v. United States, 511 U.S. 600, 602 n.1, 114 S. Ct. 1793, 1795 n.1 (1994); National Firearms Act: Hearings Before the Committee on Ways and Means, 73rd Cong. 40 (1934). After a single application of the trigger by a gunman, the Accelerator uses its internal spring and the force of recoil to fire continuously the rifle cradled inside until the gunman releases the trigger or the ammunition is exhausted. Based on the operation of the Accelerator, the Bureau had authority to “reconsider and rectify” what it considered to be a classification error. See Gun South, 877 F.2d at 862–63. That decision was not arbitrary and capricious. See id. at 866.
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Sounds an awful lot like the common-sense takes many of us (including me) had on the bump stock case. Weird how much things have changed in 15 years.

 

The non-trivial difference is the Akins Accelerator has a spring and is self-regulating. You pull the trigger once and the action moves back and forth in the stock with no other input from the user. The bump stock has no actual mechanical self-regulating function and requires a bit of finesse to get to work correctly and maintain a cycle of fire. You pull the trigger and have to use enough but not too much force with the support hand to slide the action forward and bump the trigger to keep the cycle going, slightly decreasing the forward pressure as the device slides back and slightly increasing as it goes forward. Go too fast and you'll outrun the action. It makes it might easier to fire fast since slight changes in pressure in large muscles of the support arm are faster than rapid movements of the index finger for most people not named Jerry Miculek

 

It's a trivial difference when the court's conclusion was: "The interpretation by the Bureau that the phrase 'single function of the trigger' means a 'single pull of the trigger' is consonant with the statute and its legislative history." With the bump stock, you pull the trigger once, leave your finger in place, and it fires continuously until you pull your finger away or run out of ammo.

 

Technically the serialized part is the "gun".

 

There is a notable distinction between the bumpstocks at issue now and the Akins Accelerator - the Akins Accelerator has a spring in the stock to mechanically capture recoil, and ATF’s position was that the spring is what was making its firing sequence “automatic.” That’s the reason they approved all the bump stock designs that did not have the spring, and if I’m not mistaken even sent letters to owners of Akins Accelerators saying that one of their options was to place it in a non-regulated configuration by removing and destroying the spring.

 

Well, no, without other manual inputs that’s not what happens at all. If you pull the trigger once and leave your finger in place, without doing anything else, it will fire a single shot and then not even reset the hammer.

And, as noted in yesterday’s oral argument, there are two different aspects of the machine gun definition the challengers are claiming they don’t meet: the “single function of the trigger” part, and the “automatically” part. They only need to prevail on one of the two to win, and the “automatically” aspect is the primary factor where the difference from an Akins Accelerator comes into play.

 

That’s the parts kit business. What is legally the “gun” is the serialized frame (what they are destroying). Legally they destroyed the gun, and then sold all of the various non-regulated parts and accessories.

The way you could make what is left function as a gun again is to buy a new frame and install all of the other parts on that, but your new frame is also a serialized part, legally constitutes a gun, and requires a background check to buy it. If you do that, what you wind up with is a new gun, with its own new serial number, that just happens to have a bunch of old parts installed on it.

100% legal and has the complete blessing of ATF. Also not unique to bought back guns or even unusual. Search “parts kit” online and you can find all sorts of stuff, including cut up machine guns imported from overseas and chopped up US military surplus weapons - it’s legal because once you destroy the frame/receiver in a way that complies with ATF’s de-mil rules, what you’re left with can’t function as a firearm without being installed on an entirely different “gun” (the frame/receiver that allows it to function and has to be serialized).

ATF even has a guide online of what cuts are required to have legally destroyed various kinds of machine guns: Machinegun Destruction | Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives

 

Scant consolation for victims of gun violence, I know, but given that we have more guns than people I suppose I’m surprised that we don’t have more gun homicides than we do.

 

That was a fun rabbit hole, thanks for the link

 

A lot of people would just as soon see you or your family killed.

 

The ATF also changed course on the Akins Accelerators, so the ATF reversing course is not unique or dispositive. (Although, it certainly matters when discussing criminal prosecutions.)

Again, the substance of the argument is ignore your eyes, ignore common sense, and ignore what Congress was seeking to prohibit because here's some trivial technicality that makes a weapon firing automatically with one pull of the trigger not exactly that. This Supreme Court is insanely gun-friendly, and even they don't seem entirely persuaded.

 

The “trivial technicalities” are that the trigger is being pulled repeatedly and that nothing is happening automatically. The argument that they’re illegal amounts to little more than “sure, they don’t actually meet either prong of the statutory definition of a machine gun, but they shoot almost as fast as one so they ought to be illegal and it would be too much trouble to expect Congress to do that itself.”