I’ve made full AR15s from the 80% lowers talked about in the article. Contrary to the views of many people here, I haven’t killed anyone or committed any crimes with those guns, nor do I intend to. To those calling it a loophole. It’s not a loophole when it is specifically allowed.
To Ryuthrowsstuff; 80% is the cutoff. How that level is determined is unkown to me, although it generally seems to be accepted that in the case of an AR15 it means the fire control pocket needs to be milled out along with the trigger pins and safety selector holes drilled/reamed. These actions make it a ‘complete’ lower.
To the person saying “the solution is to have to register automatic weapons, period” you already do in the states where they are legal. California is not one.
An assault weapon as defined in California law is based on being a semi-automatic, centerfire rifle, with a detachable magazine and having any one or more features on a list specified in the appropriate law.
The list includes things such as a pistol grip, thumb hole stock, collapsible or folding stock, flash hider, grenade or flare launcher. The lower receiver on it’s own has none of these and it is possible to complete the AR15 without any of those. For those curious enough, search for “featureless ar15” .
The only issue (legally) is whether or not the customer did the work on the lower receiver. The ATF has found in many, many, many, cases that the customer hitting the button on someone else’s machine does not qualify as the customer doing the work.
Since in their view, the owner is completing the lower (which at the point of completion becomes a firearm - this is the only part on an AR15 that matters legally, everything else is available for sale and just considered parts.) , and then giving (the sale already having happened when it was still legally just a hunk of metal) the unregistered gun to someone, he has broken the law.
are you sure this isn’t an urban legend? 99 % of all lasers use CMYK as toner colours, and it seems very unlikely that the firmware tracks the exact amount of yellow and cyan powder on one spot to divert a part of the mix.
I am only aware of systems like EURion or more generic pattern recognition to identify money bills and print black rectangles (or display an error)
Actually, direct experience. DH worked at a Kinko’s long ago, and one of the overnight staff was involved in counterfeiting 20s to be passed off at local strip clubs, where the lighting is bad enough you couldn’t immediately tell. Turned out the Feds had been surveilling the shop for several months from across the street, and raided them one night.
is there anything written about this technique? this is fascinating and I never heard this before - I googled a little bit around but got nothing, probably the wrong search terms
It is 80%. And depending on the type of gun, the last 20% can be insanely complicated. The reason all this had to be decided in such detail is that someone had to draw the line between what is a gun, and what is a non-gun. We sometimes manufacture dummy receivers for rare guns, so that they can be displayed in collections and appear to be complete, but are actually inert. There are also guns that cannot function, but are classified as guns or even machine guns.
The rules are very specific because people want to be able to work on guns and know that they are not breaking the law. In our case, we want to make a dummy receiver that looks real, that all the other parts can mount to, but that cannot chamber or fire a round. Also one that is unambiguously legal.
A person who wanted to explore the legality of some method or stage of manufacturing would normally just ask the ATF. If they say that what you propose to do is legal, they provide you with a letter to that effect. You would then make copies of that letter available to customers.
Painting all gun owners as criminals or engaging in dangerous fantasies is ridiculous. Some people just like to shoot guns. Maybe they shoot cans, or skeet, or whatever. In this case, I think it’s likely that they just don’t want the state to be aware that they have a gun.
Like it or not, the second amendment gives people the right to own firearms.
I like the Second Amendment just fine. It doesn’t give people the right to own untraceable firearms, and it doesn’t give the firearms industry the right to operate without regulation.
It’s possible to protect a firearm owner’s right to privacy and right to bear arms without allowing that person to purchase untraceable firearms. We just need a different system than the one we have.
May I assume you have never found yourself in the path of a male jackelope during mating season? I assure you this is an occasion where maximal firepower is quite desired.
The fact that most criminals are using stolen guns or guns sold on the black market or through straw purchases makes “tracing” guns not very useful in solving crimes. The world doesn’t work like CSI. This can be seen by the states and cities that do have registration schemes not using them to significantly solve more crimes. Maryland and New York even had programs where they would catalog spent casings from every gun sold in the state (ballistic fingerprinting). After 15 years and millions of dollars Maryland shut it down because it was a huge waste of time and only helped solve a very small number of crimes.
And especially when it comes to rifles, which are very rarely used in crimes, its a huge waste of time. Canada abandoned their rifle registry for this very reason.
The icing on the cake is that this is in CA, and, while it’s still legal to manufacture a long gun for personal use (and you’re absolutely not allowed to sell them), you still have to stamp it with an individually identifying marking and register them with the DOJ.
Couldn’t one argue that gun registration acts as a disincentive towards “casual” or opportunistic gun crime? My gut feeling is that not many people have easy access to stolen guns but if all guns were unregistered, people would be a lot less hesitant to use their legally purchased weaponry for nefarious purposes.
Lack of gun access would deter casual gun crime. I suspect that’s about it. People use guns because they’re easy to get and those sorts of folks (who would use them) probably already have them handy. If I have a gun in the next room or my car, it certainly makes it easy to use in a crime versus if I had to go find one somewhere that might register me when I bought one.
The reason for the easy availability of black market guns in the US is because it is trivially simple for a legal purchaser to on-sell to the black market. The reason why this is easy is because guns are not effectively identified and tracked, and owners are not held responsible for the security of their firearms.
The reason why the limited local efforts to do so are ineffective is because it is trivially simple to trade guns across borders…because they are not effectively identified and tracked, and owners are not held responsible for the security of their firearms.
In the age when people have legitimate fears of being rounded up into camps, a thing that kills people might be useful. I mean, if someone came to take away my neighbors having a people-killing gizmo handy would be just the thing.
I think the article we’re posting about here demonstrates that there’s a market for firearms without serial numbers. I also think that if we ask a straw buyer whether he would prefer purchasing firearms with serial numbers or without, he will say he would prefer them not to have identifying marks.
Rifles are used in approximately 6% of violent crime, and black rifles account for some part of that. It’s literally the smallest part of the problem with gun-involved crime in the US. BUT, here’s an entrepreneur making ARs with no serial number. Entrepreneurs build on success. If he can make money on ARs, he can probably make a lot more on something smaller.
I think it should go like this: Everyone should have the option to run a firearm transfer through an FFL (which we already often do). The FFL keeps a record of the serial number, the seller, and the purchaser. He reports a transfer involving the serial number to the ATF, but does not report the buyer and seller. If the firearm is later found to be used in a crime, the ATF checks its database, finds the last FFL to transfer the firearm, gets a search warrant to review the FFL’s transfer record for that serial number and finds out who received the gun. As a free citizen of the United States, you have the option to transfer firearms privately without going through an FFL. If you transfer a firearm privately, without an FFL registering the transfer and performing a background check, and that gun is later used in a crime, you can be charged with furnishing the firearm used in that crime. If you transfer it through the FFL, you are absolved of any responsibility for the subsequent crime. If your firearm is stolen, you report the stolen gun’s serial to the police and they do an investigation and you are absolved of any responsibility for future crimes. My goal with this system would be to stop the flow of legally purchased firearms to illegal possessors. This way the government doesn’t know who has a firearm unless a crime has been committed and they’ve obtained a search warrant. No registry, beyond a database of serial numbers and FFLs.
Uh, I am going to go with no. Crimes of passion are crimes of passion. I mean no one at that point goes, “Shit, what if I get caught?”
Plus these are the minority of murders. Especially in big cities where if you look at the stats that most murders have arrest records (meaning involved in crime), as are most of the victims, and a considerable number of victims know their murderer. (These are generalizations from some of the larger cities who break down their crime stats way more than the standard FBI reports.)
How do you all think tracing guns works? I guess if you LEFT the gun at the scene of the crime, they could trace the number back to you. But WHO does that? Generally you find a dead body with holes in it and possibly some shell casings. Casings won’t trace it back to anyone, as the Maryland program showed. Casings and some times the recovered bullet can LINK them to the murderer if they find the gun. But again, a traditional investigation would require one to have a suspect and do a search and turn up a gun they can compare evidence with. But at that point, whether a gun was properly registered or not just tacks on an extra charge. It wouldn’t help or hinder in an investigation. Like I said, some cities and stats do have registration schemes and have neither less crime nor better results with crime solved.
Plus my bigger issue is the a fraction of a fraction of a percent of gun owners use their in crime. The justification for extra tracking etc is right up there with the gov wanting back doors to your phones and computers. Sure, people use these things to plot murders, trade kiddie porn, stalk and harass people, human trafficking, steal, con and defraud people, network terrorism and hate groups, etc etc. Lots of bad things are done on these devices by bad people (far more often than with firearms.)
While I think a lot of these ideas have good intentions, I disagree with them both on the principle side, as well as the realistic side that it doesn’t DO anything.
Yep, anything LEGAL is going to be super easy to sell on the black market.
Yep, more legal guns means a larger pool for people to steal from. But that is also victim blaming. What is funny is, often times gun thieves get slaps on the wrist as well. Guy in Texas broke into a safe and stole 80 guns and got like 20 years of probation.
Straw purchases by legal buyers are also incredibly difficult to detect and stop.
Still - despite all that, our gun crime rate has FALLEN since the mid 90s, as well as the overall violent crime rate. Maybe we should be looking at other issues that seem to be affecting crime right now and promote those.
Perhaps the fact that “a fraction of a fraction of gun owners use their [own, legally registered] gun in a crime” has something to do with the fact that their weapon is registered?
Fear of getting caught is a powerful incentive to stay within the boundaries of the law. Do you also object to car registration and license plates? If no one had license plates on their car, how many people do you think would consistently obey traffic laws? More or less than currently?
Also, if gun registration does nothing, why do criminals go to the effort of buying unregistered weapons specifically for the purpose of committing crimes? Surely it would be easier and cheaper to just walk into Walmart and buy a gun in your name to use for that drive by you were planning? Why risk extra charges if there is no risk whatsoever in using a registered gun?
