I live in a semi-rural area with many, many hunters. In fact, my employer and all of the area schools consider the first day of antlered deer season a holiday. Very few of the hunters (not shooting enthusiasts) knew that the 1994 assault weapons ban only banned semi-automatics. Even those individuals had fallen for the mass media propaganda. Most of those folks thought that anybody could buy an AK-47 or M-16 and rock and roll. BTW, many of those same guys are NRA members, yet support bans on high cap magazines, “assault weapons”, and anything else that “can’t be used for hunting”. One guy even said that he wouldn’t mind giving up all of his guns because it would make everybody safer! The anti-gun crowd is definitely winning the war of public opinion, whether we like to admit it or not.

Gun owners are not becoming fractured – we’re already in separate camps. Some folks, like myself, are hunters, collectors, and plain old shooters, but many folks only fit into one category. They could give a damn less what happens to other peoples’ guns, so long as they’re not affected. Anything that restricts free ownership of firearms by law-abiding individuals rather than criminals, eventually will affect all of us. I remember that for a short time a couple of years ago there was mention of the “sniper rifle” problem. I think that it was during the D.C./Virginia and Columbus, OH shootings. It probably lost steam when it turned out that neither case involved a scoped sniper rifle (aka, a deer rife). However, you can be sure that it will be an issue again sometime in the future. After all, how many millions of those accurate, long-range killers are in peoples’ homes? I’m convinced that we will be all be split off from the pack, group-by-group, until practically no gun ownership is legal. Don’t worry, the “guys in black” won’t come one day to knock own your door and confiscate all of your guns – they’ll request that you make arrangements with your nearest BATFE field office to turn in the most recent item that’s been reclassified or redefined and declared illegal. It will be all very orderly and reasonable. No new legislation is necessary. After all, laws are very concrete rules that can result in charges being fought and overturned in court. That wouldn’t be very efficient.

Block Head

If we’re not careful the anti-gun crowd will grab on to this capability as a reason to ban all semi-auto firearms.

They already do. they just call it spray-firing from the hip. Even when they’re on to something, they get it wrong.

Women shouldn’t wear short skirts, because it will cause them to be raped, and result in the government banning all revealing clothing.

We either quit sending the same drones to Washington or we send them to the graveyard or we kill ourselves. Living free; with them in power is not possible.

However, I expect that everyone will vote his goddamned pocketbook and the “freebies” promised by the latest popular thug and return the same bunch to DC in the next election also. Which means only option 2 or 3 are viable. With three leading by two furlongs.

I am interested to see how that sporting purposes challenge goes (can’t remember the name) and also parker.

Regarding vagueness, I dont think that is the problem. The law is vague, but the issue here isnt interpretation of a vague section. One pull of the trigger has been the law for a long time, as is reflected by the ATF’s original letter. I suspect the problem is that the ATF is twisting the law to mean stuff it plainly doesnt. It wont be easy, but you can get injuctive relief when an agency goes against the language of the statute. The supreme court recently laid smackdown on the EPA for interpreting “daily” to mean something other than daily. Can’t remember name of teh case.

Sporting purposes might be susceptible to vaguness attack because the ATF hasnt come up with a meaning in 40 years of trying. It was basically a tool to protect domestic manufacturers from an influx of cheap milsurps after WWII. In the early days, they ended up with a lot of very inconsistent results because they wanted to ban things that were clearly sporting (imported sporting shotguns) but allow things that were clearly non-sporting (like expensive handguns). In later years we have seen all sorts of weird results like “3-gun isnt a sport.” And so on.

renders a semi into a fully auto

It does not. A machine gun is defined as (from memory) as firing multiple rounds per pull of the trigger. This device mimicked bump-firing (see video here on bump-firing a semi-auto) in that the trigger was pulled one time.

If you read the letters here, you can see the ATF approved it because one trigger pull was required. Now, they’ve changed their mind. I’m curious to see the reasoning as the weapon does comply with the law as machine gun is not defined in the law by rate of fire. I could build a weapon that fires two rounds in 10 minutes as a single function of the trigger and that is a machine gun. Stupid law, actually. the rules are the rules, no matter how arbitrary.

What’s that old saw about a honest congress-critter stays bought?

I gotta side with the ATF on this one.