5 thoughts on “Machine Gun Scam”

  1. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a totally legitimate practice. It may be illegal, but it’s not immoral. If you have a registered machine gun, what does it matter what caliber, make, or model it is? It’s a MACHINE GUN! The government knows you have it, and they have given approval for you to own such a thing, so how could it possibly be wrong to put new parts on it which improve it’s function, even if those parts alter the mechanism? Example, you have a full auto that you convert to 3-round burst. Fine? But you just made your M-16A1 into an M-16A2. Big whoop. It’s legal to change the appearance, such as put new accessories on it, or change the upper, and it’s legal to change the basic function, add a safety, decrease the rate of fire, etc, why the hell is is wrong to transfer that Serial Number, an irrelevant piece of data, onto another gun if you destroy the first? Imagine if they treated car registrations the same way!

  2. It’s immoral because they sold these to customers at extremely high prices, claiming they were legal to own… when in fact now these people will lose the MGs they paid lots of money for. They were ripping off their customers intentionally. Would their customers have bought them knowing what they were doing???

    The fact that this BS even exists is due to the immoral, unconstitutional Hughes Ammendment, however.

  3. Let’s call the machine gun ban what it really is, it’s a machine gun ban. It’s designed to grandfather to death machine guns.

    And as far as I’m concerned, it should be over-turned. I have no problem with NFA registration for such weapons. But, I do have a problem with telling me I cannot own one because I am too young to have bought one when they were available to the average man.

    And therefore I have to be well off to pay $20,000 for a gun I can buy in Mexico for $2,000.

  4. I don’t think it’s accurate to say this was a NFRTR mismanagement issue. The persons involved are claimed to have bounced the remade guns between them dozens of times, tweaking the firearm description a little each time. The examination process usually involves looking at the last transfer, and a minor change of length or caliber doesn’t throw up flags (gun configurations get changed all the time, and there is no duty to report them). So it’s not a case of a .45ACP Mac becoming a 7.62x51mm M240 in one step – it happened over ten or twenty transfers, an inch of length here, a couple milimeters of bore size there.

    The only ways to stop it are to require that examiners be firearms experts (most of them know nothing about firearms at all, they’re clerks), to require a hands-on inspection of the firearm being transferred, or to require that firearms never change configuration. You can guess which one is most likely to happen if they get pressed.

  5. The mechanism of the machinegun ban is extremely crafty.

    The Hughes Amendment created an elite class of people who could own automatic weapons – people who are wealthy enough to purchase a toy gun, because nobody in his right mind will purchase an automatic weapon for self-defense for $10,000 when an identical gun, with only semi-auto functions, is available for $1000. So the only people who bought machineguns were rich guys with toy guns, and they had a growing investment in them.

    Now, I do not mean to say that all, or even most MG owners are for the Hughes Amendment. I’ve so far saw 3 people, on separate occasions, say that online, but I fully believe that the oppressive majority of MG owners are pro-gun. However, what matters is also the intensity of a person’s belief. People who may even be ideologically pro-gun are less likely to put a lot of effort in repealing a law if it stands to lose them money, or that doesn’t affect them personally since they already have theirs. Again: I am not saying that there aren’t honest pro-gun volunteers among MG owners, or that most of them are anti-gun. Add to this the many people who own a gun as an investment – which does occur -and the many people who own a gun for entertainment and have no care for gun rights. Dick Cheney is an MG owner.

    So by creating this group of people, the legislators have basically reduced opposition to the ban. And every year, the pool of MG owners gets smaller – one guy dies, one guy has his gun confiscated, one guy sells his gun to a Hollywood props company. And every time a gun is destroyed or confiscated, that’s the pool of guns available to gun owners in the US getting smaller and smaller. And the population is growing.

    Eventually, you’re going to have reduced the amount of machineguns and their owners to such a point that practically nobody will be familiar with machinegun ownership as a social concept – just like few people in Europe are familiar with the notion of personal defensive firearms as a social concept. Can you imagine how near-impossibly difficult it would be for a European movement for expanding RKBA to form, much less succeed? That’s what the goal of the Hughes amendment is: an irreversible status-quo.

    However, the antis weren’t banking on the growth of gun rights in the past 24 years. There are many people today who would be happy to repeal the ban. Now, it’s true that, if there were a Gallup poll, most people would be in favor of keeping it – although I suspect far less overwhelmingly than you’d think if they phrased the question properly. But that isn’t even really important.

    Most people who would be for repealing the ban are more active and more willing to vote and donate based on that idea than people who are for keeping the ban, and that is something you can take to the bank. That’s the Hughes Amendment is going to die the day someone attached an amendment to kill it to something. All it takes is the spine and balls to do it.

    P.S. Besides, remember: in 2004, Brady and the VPC tried very hard to persuade everybody the AWB was about machineguns. And *it still died*.

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