As a fireman, I have seen that the truly treasured items when people experience a massive loss of property are family photographs and grandpa's old shotgun/rifle/ pistol.
People are not going to easily give those up, they're just not.
If it were to pass, it would become obvious very soon that people won’t give them up.
Dying parents would be passing them on to their children or friends and just not bothering to comply with the law. When it becomes obvious that is happening the anti gun crowd will use that as justification for registration.
But it won’t even take that long. Absent a registration requirement the proposed ban would just create an illicit market for existing banned military style semi auto rifles, and enforcement of the ban would be extremely difficult.
Based on 12 years writing regs inside the beltway and enforcing them, here’s how that extremely significant bit of regulatory creep would happen:
- If the law is passed it will be handed over to the ATF to write the regs needed to implement the law;
- The ATF will fully understand that registration is a necessary component for enforcement as it can’t be enforced unless they can attach banned weapons to their legally grandfathered owners;
- Based on that obvious fact they will determine that registration was envisioned by congress and was part of the original congressional intent of the law in order to make implementation possible and the provisions of the law enforceable;
- ATF will write the regs to include registration; and
- ignore the public comments claiming registration is an over reach as while ATF has to post NPRMs and respond to public comment they are under no obligation to modify the proposed regs based on public comment.
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Registration is as much of a prize to the anti gun crowd as banning assault rifles. Once it is required for assault rifles it’s just a small step to require it for other categories of firearms.
The logic will go like this:
“We require assault rifles to be registered, yet even before the most recent assault weapon ban they were involved in less than 1% of all gun crimes, and were only involved in 16% of mass shootings. *Semi-auto pistols* are a far larger threat. In keep with the intent of the law, they need to be registered as well.”
Then they’ll go after lever actions:
“Some pistol caliber lever actions hold more than ten rounds and can be fired almost as fast as semi auto rifles - and there are *millions* of them out there. In keeping with the intent of the law we need to register all lever action rifles.”
Then it will be revolvers:
“There’s a guy out there who can fire six rounds in a second with a revolver! They are as bad as semi auto pistols! We need to register them!”
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The later is very close to how the anti gun crowd thinks. An anti gun leaning person on Facebook explained to me that AR-15s fire 6 rounds in under a second, and said a guy did it. She was close to correct. Jerry Miculek did put 5 rounds on target in .96 of a second.
I had to correct her on the 5 versus 6 rounds part. I also explained it’s Jerry Miculek and that he holds the record for firing 8 rounds in under a second with a revolver. I suggested using him as the standard by which the average person can fire an AR-15 - or revolver, which was actually 60% faster - isn’t realistic. Yet it’s that kind of hyperbole that catches fire with the anti gun crowd.
