Bill to Ban (some) Body Armor

BStrong said:
Yes, and no.

If you're going to look at current California law. a semi-auto M14/M1A w/o a "flash-hider" or other qualifying features is legal to possess, something that would be similar to this rifle:

[qimg]http://imageshack.com/a/img34/1813/hbp6.jpg[/qimg]

While the same exact rifle in this configuration:

[qimg]http://imageshack.com/a/img856/899/rcyz.jpg[/qimg]

Would be illegal if not registered as an "assault weapon by features" under the second round of Ca. AW laws.

Most of the designs listed by name and model in the original California AW law, the Roberti-Roos Assault Weapon Control Act were the then currently available semi-auto only versions of both battle rifle types (M14, G3, FAL, etc.) and assault rifle types (AR platform, AK) and pistol caliber cartridge carbines based on common SMG type designs (Uzi, HK MP 5, Sterling) All of these types started out in the basic configuration that were eventually sold to civilians absent certain mechanical features and barrel length, but outside of adapted variations on the AK platform and the standard rifle configurations of the 14 platform, none of these are adaptable to a standard rifle or carbine configuration.

What is important to note is that at least in the case in California, there are rifles on the ban list that most folks, including firearms collectors and LEO's have never seen outside of a photo, and have never been used in a crime - here's a few:

Spanish CETME from the mid 1960's:

[qimg]http://imageshack.com/a/img196/7824/9y42.jpg[/qimg]
[qimg]http://imageshack.com/a/img42/3424/vynu.jpg[/qimg]

SIG American Match Target:

[qimg]http://imageshack.com/a/img547/7783/sswq.jpg[/qimg]

FN G series FAL:

[qimg]http://imageshack.com/a/img59/2383/3g5e.jpg[/qimg]

Australian L1A1:

[qimg]http://imageshack.com/a/img560/9252/n6wz.jpg[/qimg]

The rifles above represent a class of firearms that politicians (as you noted) banned because of how they appear in their eyes - the fact that none of the rifles above have ever turned up as a crime weapon (a function of price and rarity, there were only 153 Aussie L1A1's ever imported, somewhere under 2000 G series FAL's perhaps 1500-1800 AMT's and similar numbers on the MARS CETME) and were essentially unavailable in 1989 (only the Aussie L1A1 was a currently available rifle, and in that case 153 examples isn't a mass market commercial product) had -0- influence on the legislators involved, it looks scary, on to the list it went.
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Thus, the necessary but obvious: Incompetents will be incompetents and ******** will be ********..........
 
I live in England. Guns are very difficult to legally come by but you can buy whatever armour you like. In the past I had a late night commute through a very seedy area of Salford and bought an anti stab vest because of my perception that there were lots of late night stabbings in the area. (This was almost certainly ridiculously paranoid overkill but I was glad I had the option.) If I lived in an area with what I perceived to be "lots" of gun crime, I'd want the option to buy protective clothing to increase my chances if i was caught up in a shooting.

I also played airsoft and had some old British army Ehanced Combat Body Armour for cosmetic purposes. In this country I cant see any reason for banning armour as it does not harm anyone. (BTW some of my buddies had the newer Osprey armour/webbing and similar spec commercial products. When there was a shortage in Iraq they donated it to serving soldiers.)

In the US there is a lot more gun crime, but very little of it is with military style rifles. I can see the argument that more effective body armour might make crazy people more optomistic about their chances in a gunfight with police, but any criminal plan which includes "Get in a gunfight with police" is a bad plan. Crazy people might misuse armour as they misuse everything else. Frankly I think it just as likely that it could save the life of a fearful liquor store clerk wearing a plate carrier under his jacket than a machine gun wielding Ned Kelly wannabe. Before banning anything we should assess the actual and potential harm caused by the thing as well as the actual and potential benefits. I don't really feel that has been done in this case.
 
BStrong said:
KL:

Oh please. You really think that the NRA would not oppose gun control if it came in one big lump, and is only fighting tooth and nail over every millimetre of territory because it's coming in small doses? That's hilarious. I mean, that's so dumb that it's not even worth arguing against, you should just point and laugh.

When every firearms owner hears this phrase over and over wrt any anti-Second Amendment legislation that gets passed:

https://www.google.com/webhp?source...8#q=it's a good first step in gun control law

Can you blame Second Amendment advocates for not endorsing any gun control measure?
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Exactly what is the point in owning guns if you cant legally sell them to random strangers in a parking lot somewhere. Anything else is tyranny.
 
I am still wondering when there will be some public shoot out with criminals in this kind of armor and what the new weapons included in patrol cars to counteract it will be.

One shoot out with home made armor made 5.56mm rifles standard in many patrol cars, what will the next one do?
 
ponderingturtle said:
Exactly what is the point in owning guns if you cant legally sell them to random strangers in a parking lot somewhere. Anything else is tyranny.
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This wouldn't be an issue if the gun control advocates would stop tying background checks to registration, or attaching a price tag to it.

Because fears that registration is a prerequisite to confiscation are well-founded, and does happen.

"Mick Roelandts, firearms reform project manager for the New South Wales Police, looks at a pile of about 4,500 prohibited firearms in Sydney that have been handed in over the past month under the Australia government's buy-back scheme, July 28, 1997."


australia_gun_confiscation.jpg
 
WildCat said:
This wouldn't be an issue if the gun control advocates would stop tying background checks to registration, or attaching a price tag to it.
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So where does the money for the system come from? If they actually cared about such things they would write their own damn bills, but that will never happen.
 
ponderingturtle said:
So where does the money for the system come from? If they actually cared about such things they would write their own damn bills, but that will never happen.
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The infrastructure is already in place and being used. We already have instant background checks nationwide, but it's only available to dealers now.

There is no rocket science involved, nor any new bureaucracy or infrastructure necessary. In fact a simple software upgrade is all that's needed. It would work like this: If you're in the market for a firearm you do the background check on yourself, and upon passage it gives you a confirmation code matched to your name good for 30 days. The seller confirms the code is good and the sale takes place. No need for the government to know make, model, caliber, or serial number or even if a sale actually took place.

But the gun control advocates don't want just background checks, they want registration (with an eye on future confiscation) and they also want to make it expensive to keep the poor and minorities from owning firearms.
 
ponderingturtle said:
Exactly what is the point in owning guns if you cant legally sell them to random strangers in a parking lot somewhere. Anything else is tyranny.
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The idea of face-to-face transactions w/o paperwork is a valid question, but as the district court found last year in Silvester v Harris

http://ia700803.us.archive.org/13/items/gov.uscourts.caed.233362/gov.uscourts.caed.233362.106.0.pdf

The California 10 day waiting period is unconstitutional when applied to individual gun owners who already have registered firearms in California, or who have a valid California concealed carry license, or who had a state issued Certificate of Eligibility - in California and some other states the authorities have deliberately made the legal purchase of firearms into a series of hoops to be jumped through, and in that process some states and municipalities have enacted laws that legally constitute "infringement," and those laws will need to be addressed individually. I don't believe that requiring background checks through the federal instant check system constitutes an infringement, and I don't believe that requiring all transfers to go through an FFL dealer with the required 4473 form would be considered an infringement, but many laws that have been taken for granted as legal in some areas will be struck down by the courts, as the district court in Texas did last week on the federal law requiring interstate transfers of handguns to be conducted through an FFL dealer:

http://cdn.pjmedia.com/instapundit/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/guraop021115.pdf
 
WildCat said:
The infrastructure is already in place and being used. We already have instant background checks nationwide, but it's only available to dealers now.

There is no rocket science involved, nor any new bureaucracy or infrastructure necessary. In fact a simple software upgrade is all that's needed. It would work like this: If you're in the market for a firearm you do the background check on yourself, and upon passage it gives you a confirmation code matched to your name good for 30 days. The seller confirms the code is good and the sale takes place. No need for the government to know make, model, caliber, or serial number or even if a sale actually took place.

But the gun control advocates don't want just background checks, they want registration (with an eye on future confiscation) and they also want to make it expensive to keep the poor and minorities from owning firearms.
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And gun owners what to make sure that they can safely dispose of their collection for cash with out any questions of how the people they sold their weapons to used them coming back to them. Trace-ability is the enemy of that.

You sell your gun to some guy from a facebook forum and he kills a bunch of people you don't want anyone to know you ever owned that gun. After all anything that could be used to prevent the moving of guns from the legal to the illegal market would be possible to be used for confiscation so it is better to keep the pathways getting guns in the hands of criminals than do something about it.
 
ponderingturtle said:
And gun owners what to make sure that they can safely dispose of their collection for cash with out any questions of how the people they sold their weapons to used them coming back to them. Trace-ability is the enemy of that.

You sell your gun to some guy from a facebook forum and he kills a bunch of people you don't want anyone to know you ever owned that gun. After all anything that could be used to prevent the moving of guns from the legal to the illegal market would be possible to be used for confiscation so it is better to keep the pathways getting guns in the hands of criminals than do something about it.
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IIRC, the way it is done now is that the identification info of the firearm is recorded during the check, but it is not looked at unless there is a reason.

I don't see why that couldn't be the case with a new system.

If a certain make and model of gun was used in a crime, then the records are searched for relevant sales/info.

Otherwise, the info is just stored.

The problem is that our government is not to be trusted. They would eventually use the records to seize weapons. I have no doubt of that, given what I've already seen.
 
Giz said:
A 72 year old with a clean record gets 10 years in jail for having an unloaded flintlock pistol in your car? Well, I feel that the citizens of New Jersey can sleep safer in their beds tonight knowing that they wont be carjacked by Dick Turpin.
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Well, any gun owner voluntarily living in that draconian state is a fool.
 
ponderingturtle said:
And gun owners what to make sure that they can safely dispose of their collection for cash with out any questions of how the people they sold their weapons to used them coming back to them. Trace-ability is the enemy of that.
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Why is that any of my business or responsibility? What if you sell your car to someone who then drives drunk and kills people in an accident, is that your responsibility?

What is the point of tracing a legal sale?

ponderingturtle said:
You sell your gun to some guy from a facebook forum and he kills a bunch of people you don't want anyone to know you ever owned that gun. After all anything that could be used to prevent the moving of guns from the legal to the illegal market would be possible to be used for confiscation so it is better to keep the pathways getting guns in the hands of criminals than do something about it.
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None of this prevents the movement of guns from the legal to the illegal market. File off the serial numbers and sell them to some guy on the street, no law is going to prevent that.

For all its restrictive laws nothing prevented that nutjob in Denmark from obtaining a gun and going on a shooting spree 2 weeks out of prison.
 
LTC8K6 said:
IIRC, the way it is done now is that the identification info of the firearm is recorded during the check, but it is not looked at unless there is a reason.

I don't see why that couldn't be the case with a new system.

If a certain make and model of gun was used in a crime, then the records are searched for relevant sales/info.

Otherwise, the info is just stored.

The problem is that our government is not to be trusted. They would eventually use the records to seize weapons. I have no doubt of that, given what I've already seen.
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Exactly we can't let the police track who owned the guns used in a crime back to previous legal owners. That would be a police state.
 
LTC8K6 said:
The problem is that our government is not to be trusted. They would eventually use the records to seize weapons. I have no doubt of that, given what I've already seen.
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Yep, it's happened in California already and another instance was prevented only by Gov. Brown's veto. Connecticut passed an "assault weapons" registration law after Sandy Hook, and just a few weeks ago the Governor-appointed panel tasked with making further recommendations recommended making those now-registered firearms illegal to own or possess, no grandfather clause either.
 
ponderingturtle said:
Exactly we can't let the police track who owned the guns used in a crime back to previous legal owners. That would be a police state.
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In the transfer model I mentioned the buyer passes a background check. What is the point of identifying the seller who did nothing illegal?
 
ponderingturtle said:
And gun owners what to make sure that they can safely dispose of their collection for cash with out any questions of how the people they sold their weapons to used them coming back to them. Trace-ability is the enemy of that.

You sell your gun to some guy from a facebook forum and he kills a bunch of people you don't want anyone to know you ever owned that gun. After all anything that could be used to prevent the moving of guns from the legal to the illegal market would be possible to be used for confiscation so it is better to keep the pathways getting guns in the hands of criminals than do something about it.
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Any link for the bolded?

I've sold a bunch of firearms on Gunbroker as an non-licensed individual and have paperwork from the buyer and a copy of the receiving FFL's license in my records - I know of no serious firearms owner (I know, NTS fallacy) selling firearms at the price level of high-end collector firearms or NFA weapons and devices that doesn't do likewise.

I also have never experienced a potential buyer that attempted to buy a firearm w/o paperwork. I have had folks complain about the high price of shipping though, and have had people bid up a rifle and win the auction only to crawfish out of the deal.
 
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