While researching AR-15 parts, I discovered that the liberal (redundancy alert) antigun media has managed to find out that the El Paso shooter was seeking ammo referred to as 8M3 ammunition because his WASR-10 wasn't as deadly as an AR-15. As near as I can tell, the 8M3 number is merely a designation for a hollow point 7.62x39mm bullet. It became legendary among people who claimed that it was some sort of super bullet. More hype from Internet chairborne commandos. So much for this source being a reliable source of information. That leads me to:
That same source talks about how much a so-called buyback of "Assault Weapons" would cost. They claim that there are 265 million firearms in the US, with 33% of them being rifles. That number is ridiculously low. Since the NICS system was put in place, there have been more than 325 million NICS checks. Even assuming that, on average, each NICS check symbolizes one firearm transaction, that would mean that there are many more firearms in the US than they claim.
The article then goes on to claim that a mandatory buyback would mean that the government would take your property and reimburse you a percentage of its market value. So I would be reimbursed, according to them, $200 for each AR-15. In an Op-Ed that they link to, Swallwell claims that his bill would pay $200 to $1000 for each AR-15. Even the cheapest AR costs more than that. I would argue that you will not get many rifles turned in for only $200. The select fire version of the AR-15 is the M-4 rifle, which costs the US Military more than $600 each would be a heck of a buy for them at $200 a unit. I would argue that this would make a mandatory buyback at anything less than $600 an unconstitutional taking, violating the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment.
Further, there are a couple of important points here:
1 No one can even define what an "Assault weapon" IS. I own some stripped lowers. Since they have not yet been made into weapons of any type, they are NOT assault weapons under any of the proposed definitions.
2 No one knows how many there are. There is no way to know, and that is without taking homebuilt lowers into account.
3 There is no way to gauge compliance with any sort of buyback, since you don't know what or where all of the objects that you wish to "buy back" are.
4 Even if you did, now what? Who is going to go door to door when compliance rates are low? There are tens of thousands of gun owners that would use this as the trip wire event that would result in hundreds of thousands of deaths of both cops and citizens.
Unless they specifically address it, if there's an assault weapon buy back, all you sell back is the serialized lower, because that's the gun. Get some 80% lowers and get them ready to assemble or swap them out in advance and sell back stripped lowers.
ReplyDeleteUppers are not guns, stocks are not guns, trigger groups or drop-ins are not guns.
Unless they outlaw it, we have the right to fix our own guns without having to go to a federally licensed gunsmith, and those parts are the essence of fixing your own gun.
The numbers are so unfavorable for law enforcement that if even a very small percentage of gun owners decide to shoot it out and manage to kill one cop while dying themselves...
ReplyDeleteLaw enforcement will run out of cops long before the very small percentage of gun owners who're willing to shoot it out.
The ATF publishes numbers every year of total firearms commercially produced, imported and exported in the USA. From 1986 through 2017, there were 227,044,688 net increase in firearms in the USA. (manufactured + imports - exports) = total.
ReplyDeleteAlso, from November 1998 through July 2019, there have been 320 million NICS checks. As of right now there are only 34 states that use NICS, and many of them skip NICS for people with CCW permits/licenses. This data set is somewhat incomplete as the number of states using NICS has changed over time and there is an unknown number of purchasers that do not need to use it even in states where it can be used.
If there are "265 million" firearms in the USA, that means there were only about 40 million produced and retained from prior to 1986. These numbers are not realistic seeing as how in 1986 the total increased by approximately 3,500,000 firearms and based on the trend of following years was not unusual. You could conservatively extrapolate from the data that their total of 265 million would not include any firearm produced before 1970, and still account for loss/damage/destruction of millions of firearms.