Some pro-gun people have gone to great lengths to find loopholes in the machine gun laws, and most of them are currently tied up in litigation with the ATF.
Is the third hole the problem?
Or the drop in auto sear?
Or the combination?
According to the ATF, it’s any of the three of course. Plus anything else that they don’t like.
If someone wraps a shoestring around a trigger group to make it "automatic", boom, it's an automatic weapon, seize the gun and arrest the citizen. It's the characteristic.
It's why banning guns based off scary black foregrips is silly. If we were to limit guns meaningfully in the US, we should ban all semi-automatic weapons with interchangeable magazines. You still have bolt actions, revolvers, shotguns, but this lowers rate of fire/reload time in combination well enough to meaningfully encumber terrorists.
For the 2A crowd ( of which I am a tepid member), my main principle is that citizens should be no less armed than their domestic law enforcement. So if we as a country made such a change, we would have to set a date past which domestic law enforcement must also switch back to revolvers and shotguns only.
And now we really live in a fantasy world! Truly, it would be better for society to be less armed, but we're past the point of no return. I say this as someone who owns close to a dozen firearms, including mosins, AR-15 and several semi-automatic pistols.
The reason why Law Enforcement is never going to do that is because they regularly run across criminals that are already better armed than they are. LAPD started carrying AR-15s (and for many units full auto M4s) because of the North Hollywood bank shootout [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Hollywood_shootout] for instance. And there have been many instances since then.
This isn’t a theoretical concern for normal folks either, even in the Bay Area. Just a few years ago, there was an attempted home invasion robbery in Sunnyvale by someone armed with what clearly would be classified as an assault rifle in CAlifornia, with what looked like a drum magazine.
[https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/sanfrancisco/news/police-2-armed...]
Both are major felonies to possess in California. Which, of course, isn’t likely to stop someone who was clearly intent on committing several felonies already. They never caught them, so it wasn’t clear if it was fully automatic or not. Thankfully the owner was suspicious enough it didn’t turn into an actual home invasion, and Sunnyvale has enough bored cops the perps bugged out before they could force the issue.
But this isn’t that unusual or isolated of an incident. And very few places are as well run as Sunnyvale.
The laws definitely stop anyone law abiding from having something similar.
So why should someone law abiding be willfully handicapped against something like that? Cop or civilian?
We can argue training or licensing, burden of proof to show you’re law abiding, or whatever - but that’s not the state of the situation in CAlifornia as I’m sure you’re aware. Or most of the other states where possession of those things is illegal. It’s just flat out illegal - unless you work for the police, anyway.
Well, finally, I would say that a blanket ban on the sale and manufacture of new semiautos with switchable mags would very likely make them disappear over time the way automatics would, for criminals as well. Then you aren't criminalizing their possession, but the supply will naturally go down.
I get your point about how bad guys have good weapons sometimes and so people and cops need to be armed, too.
I don't support the most extremist takes on it, but with comments like this, you aren't a "tepid 2A supporter." You flat out oppose it, so let's at least clear the air and be honest.
In an AR-15, if you put a dot of paint where you would drill the hole for the pin that makes it automatically, that prison time even if it’s never drilled and it’s physically impossible to install the pin for the auto seer.
Likewise, a guy recently got put in prison for painting the design for an automatic part on a piece of sheet metal.
The ATF needs to be reigned in hard. Information isn’t the same as doing.
I’ve looked into Regs in a number of countries, and they all either outright ban nearly everything unless you work for the gov’t, or have the same issues.
The US just has massive amounts of complaining and BS going on in every area, so it’s more visible. In Switzerland, for one example, you’d just hear some griping from dude at the range, not be able to link to a an hour long YouTube video on it.
The tricky part here is the US is essentially 53+ different entities legally, with large and meaningful differences between each of them and some overlap.
Less than an hours drive can take you from ‘no magazines over 10 rounds or years in jail’ to ‘60 round drums on sale, don’t forget to pickup a few up after renting a couple machine guns and sending a few thousand rounds down range’. With no real border in between.
In the rest of the world, those are national borders, with customs inspections.
You can pay some folks in Vietnam to be able to shoot RPGs no issues, and Finland/Scandinavia is generally permissive with firearms for instance. And if you know someone in Russia (especially Chechnya I hear) and have money, no issues getting pretty much anything you want and the paperwork to say it’s all good.
Good luck doing that in their neighbors or as a normal Joe though.
The result: A shit ton of less gun violence and mass shootings. So yes, everyone else has it figured out. Only the US insists on being the real world version of the movie wild west. You want to wear tacticool gear and camo, fire automatic weapons? Join the armed forces. That so makes SpecOps cos olay so much harder and requires discipline, regulations and includes the risl of being shot at by equally trained people in active shooting wars. Ranting at the range and posting on YouTube is much easier in comparison, that is true.
Automatic firearms are illegal for not rich civilians in the US.
It's perfectly legal to go but a machine gun, they just start at like $20k.
But regardless, the amount of crime from legal machine guns is like two crimes in 90 years.
Gun diacussions with American si weirder than speed limit discussions with Germans.
AR-15 is a Boogeyman/trap for gun discussions, because it's a rounding error when looking at the whole issue of violence in the US.
It’s literally not even in the top 10 for how people die at work. You’re far more likely to die in the drive to work, 100x more likely. Or from Covid. Or frankly, most anything else.
Sounds like a mental health issue and not a firearms issue
For sure, but almost exclusively due to handguns.
I mean rifles as a whole (of which AR-15s and their derivatives are a subset) are a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of homicides in the US.
Plenty of those countries you can get automatic weapons. Several of them completely legally, including literal AK-47’s. Switzerland issues automatic weapons in some situations, for keeping at home.
Plenty of those countries have notable gun (or other) violence issues - though they often categorize it differently. Most of them don’t.
In Mexico mere possession of a semi-automatic gun is a 20 year felony. I forget the penalty for machine guns, but it’s higher. Does Mexico have it under control? Do you think those laws are helping or hurting the situation?
Machine guns are so heavily regulated in the US that only two times since 1934 have legal ones been used in crimes - the most recent in ‘84 by a police officer using his department issued one.
Yet, it’s a common problem that criminals are using modified weapons (easy to do, especially with cheap kits ordered online or from China), and police are finding them more and more often during busts - everywhere. Not just in the US.
The US is about as far from the actual Wild West as you can get. Unless the FBI was running background checks on every purchase back in the 1880’s anyway. But it does get all the press.
Good that you bring up Switzerland. Because they have a long history of a militia (!) based military. So, Switzerland is actually a good example what "a well regulated militia" looks like. Glad you see that.
Regarding statistics on gun violence in general, if ypu see no problem because war zones have bigger issues says a lot.
Much if the South American violence never ends up in an identifiable statistic. Especially in places like Guatemala.
As always with statistics, the collection and context matters a lot.
The violence in these areas is very real, but they aren't no-mans-lands as people so often try to insist they are.
What's next? Military grade weapons readily available in Afghanistan and some African countries?
I’m pointing out that ‘everyone else has it under control’ is actually ‘a few Western European, a handful of ex Western European colonies, and a handful of totalitarian dictatorships have it under control’. And even then, not as under control or as different as the PR would necessarily lead you to believe.
The US gets the mindshare and publicity though.
So yes, my point stands, all countries that actually are in position (read no internal or external armed conflicts, no civip war like situations, no destabilized government) have it under control. The US gets rightly called out for it, as the only (presumely) developed democracy with this kind of problem.
Well, keep moving those goalposts and not responding to any of my actual points buddy.
Good luck!
Also, in the M1/shoestring case, the operator just puts tension on the string, and the charging handle cycling back and forth is what releases and applies that pressure to the trigger, so it is just one pull of their finger.
so, double barrels are machine guns..
I'm confused as to why; it fits the statutory definition much more than trigger reset devices like the aforementioned shoestring do.
This one is really an anomaly, it appears they skirt the regulation by having two triggers stuck together.
Also, for anyone like me who expected that jpg would be a photo of the shoestring instead of text on paper, here's what it looks like.