If I've got this straight, the feds are getting everybody's bowels in an uproar to gin up demand to make DIY firearms illegal by characterizing them as the weapons of choice for that other narrative standby, racist white terrorists. [More]
So this is taking care of two birds with one stone...
Whether any of the handful of anecdotal examples they highlighted shaved their beards remains unstated.
That feeling I mentioned yesterday -- that something big is in the air, something horrible that will be used to cast blame and then to act -- is getting stronger. Let's hope I'm just being paranoid.
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The most despicable people to ever walk this planet still have managed to come up with things that deserve to be quoted and kept in mind. With that disclaimer out of the way, remember what Woody Allen said about paranoia.
“Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you.”
And on another occasion he opined:
"Paranoia is knowing all the facts."
Well "they" predicted a violent summer.
So, your gut instinct is probably right.
Being paranoid does not mean they aren't out to get you (us)...
For one reason or another, by the 1990's the Left was in some ways feeling a "pushing sh*t against the tide" sense of futility about banning handguns. That led more or less directly to the (in)famous white paper by Josh Sugarmann of the VPC where he called for banning something he called an "assault weapon."
https://www.vpc.org/studies/awacont.htm
Shortly thereafter, the Left's efforts to ban handguns were redirected into banning these "assault weapons" which were defined in a rather "nailing jelly to a tree" manner using something like "containing one or more of the following characteristics."
At the time, there was little demand for AR15s or AK47 in the USA, but nothing stirs up demand quite like telling Americans they can't have something. Fast forward to SCOTUS saying you can't ban firearms in common use and a sitting Federal judge saying there are more AR15s out there than Ford F150 trucks and it looks more and more like the door has been slammed on another AWB.
I may be hallucinating, but it looks to me like the Left may be making another pivot away from "assault weapons" to another class of weapons defined in "containing one or more of the following" fashion forever more to be known as "ghost guns".
They are, depending on who is talking, home made, lacking serial numbers, unregistered, untraceable, undetectable, or some combination of the above.
I haven't finished reading "Ghost Guns: Hobbyists, Hackers, and the Homemade Weapons Revolution" by Tallman yet, but one thing that sticks out to me in a Heller context is the following.
"If the primary concern about ghost guns is that they will not appear on registries, it may surprise some readers to know that ghost guns are most guns. "Small Arms Survey" estimates there are 857 million civilian-held firearms in global circulation, with 88 percent of that total unregistered (Karp 2018, 3) Perhaps a more relevant definition is that a ghost gun has no traceable serial numbers. Serialization may seem like longstanding regulation, but it wasn't universally applied by American manufacturers until the 1968 GCA. Guns made before 1968, guns whose manufacturing or sales records are lost, defaced guns, and many foreign-made guns, may be untraceable (US Department of Justice BATFE 2011, 3). Quoted from the book's introduction on page xvii.
Does 88% of guns in the world seem like "in common use" as stated in Heller?
I invite you to read Florida statute 790.335:
“790.335 Prohibition of registration of firearms; electronic records.—
(1) LEGISLATIVE FINDINGS AND INTENT.—
(a) The Legislature finds and declares that:
1. The right of individuals to keep and bear arms is guaranteed under both the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution and s. 8, Art. I of the State Constitution.
2. A list, record, or registry of legally owned firearms or law-abiding firearm owners is not a law enforcement tool and can become an instrument for profiling, harassing, or abusing law-abiding citizens based on their choice to own a firearm and exercise their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms as guaranteed under the United States Constitution. Further, such a list, record, or registry has the potential to fall into the wrong hands and become a shopping list for thieves.
3. A list, record, or registry of legally owned firearms or law-abiding firearm owners is not a tool for fighting terrorism, but rather is an instrument that can be used as a means to profile innocent citizens and to harass and abuse American citizens based solely on their
as guaranteed under the United States Constitution.
4. Law-abiding firearm owners whose names have been illegally recorded in a list, record, or registry are entitled to redress.”
There is more, including exceptions for the record keeping required of those who possess a FFL.
http://www.leg.state.fl.us/statutes/index.cfm?App_mode=Display_Statute&URL=0700-0799/0790/Sections/0790.335.html
I've been a student of gun-control history for three decades, and in all that time, I don't remember ever seeing a single study quantifying how useful serial numbers have been for solving crimes. From the material I've read, first, the subset of crimes where you have the gun but not also the shooter is relatively small; and second, since most "professional" criminals get their firearms by theft, a serial number search almost always goes cold when the chain reaches the homeowner it was burgled from. Not to mention that the very fact that this information is so hard to obtain suggests it might show serial number tracing to be statistically ineffective. Keep in mind that the grossly-expensive Canadian national gun registry was proven never to have been instrumental in solving a single real crime, save the synthetic crime of "failure to register" which existed only because the useless registry did.
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