Originally Posted at Free Market Shooter
The city of Boulder, Colorado made headlines in the wake of an “assault weapons ban” passed in May 2018 – not due to the ban itself, but the large number of citizens engaging in “mass noncompliance” with the law:
Only 342 “assault weapons,” or semiautomatic rifles, were certified by Boulder police before the Dec. 31 deadline, meaning there could be thousands of residents in the scenic university town of 107,000 in violation of the sweeping gun-control ordinance.
“I would say the majority of people I’ve talked to just aren’t complying because most people see this as a registry,” said Lesley Hollywood, executive director of the Colorado Second Amendment group Rally for Our Rights. “Boulder actually has a very strong firearms community.”
Mass noncompliance with new firearms restrictions is hardly a new trend – recently, the state of New Jersey passed a law reducing the legal size of firearm magazines from 15 to 10, without a grandfathering restriction for existing magazines – and thus far, no residents have turned their now-illegal magazines in to police…
Two sources from within the State Police, who spoke to AmmoLand on condition of anonymity, told AmmoLand News that they both do not know of any magazines turned over to their agency and doubted that any were turned in. They also stated that the State Police also engaged the AG’s office for guidance on how to respond to inquiries such as ours. They were unaware if the Attorney General has returned to their request for guidance.
All the local police departments that AmmoLand contacted stated that they have not had any magazines turned into them.
…and New York State has been dealing with mass noncompliance ever since it passed the NY Safe Act in 2013. This was particularly intriguing in the case of the #OneLess movement and (possibly illegal) destruction of an AR-15 rifle, as previously covered by FMShooter:
Under the NY SAFE Act, all new AND existing “assault weapons” had to have been registered with the state no later than April 15th, 2014. Pappalardo’s rifle clearly has a pistol grip and a muzzle brake (or flash hider, barrel shroud, or compensator, if you want to be specific), making it a “banned” item. New York State’s rate of compliance with the SAFE Act is about 4%, making the odds very high that Pappalardo was illegally owning and possessing his rifle in the first place.
Even though it is the correct strategy, mass noncompliance of firearms laws is still ultimately a losing battle, for the simple reason that Bloomberg and his ilk are playing the long game. Even though a lot of these laws are virtually unenforceable, previously law-abiding gun owners are now criminals (possibly felons), with the weapons they own slowly decaying in number over time.
Door-to-door confiscation is is almost certainly not happening – the last thing anti-gun politicians want is violent resistance. But gun banners don’t need to bother with confiscation – they can just let noncompliant individuals off without seeking them out, safe with the knowledge that the 1) can’t legally use their weapons anyway, and 2) the supply of these firearms will slowly (but surely) disappear. In response to Pennsylvania protests of a similar Pittsburgh law, PA Gun Blog summed up the gun grabber position succinctly:
“They’ll be happy to have you defy the law, and keep your guns in your safe. They just need to wait you out. In a generation there will be no gun culture. That’s how they’ll win. They’ll never cross the line enough to provoke violent resistance. They don’t have to.”
The 1986 Hughes Amendment is the perfect example of this policy in effect on a national scale. Closing the NFA registry on fully automatic firearms, the count on these weapons has slowly decayed. In 2016, The Truth About Guns stated that the number of pre-1986 “transferrables” to be “a little over 182,000” ten years before the article, and currently at 175,977.
30 years after the Hughes Amendment was passed, and not only has the supply of NFA grandfathered full autos dwindled, the prices have gone through the roof, and will continue to do so as the firearms are used and slowly become non-functional. The below example from Gunbroker.com for a “pristine” MP5 in the registry has a minimum bid price of $21,000… for a firearm sold to law enforcement for under $3,000:
3. Our parent company has had this in our safe since 2011. It came from a collection and has never been shot since we have had it.
4. Why are we selling it? We have many in-stock that are dealer samples as well, but we shoot them. This one is so clean, the owner of our company said NO to shooting, and put it away since it came in from the AZ acquisition.
7. SOMETHING YOU WILL NOT SEE AGAIN- and if so, IT’S A RARE THING
After the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban (foolish in its name, goal and even more so in its implementation), grandfathered “pre-ban” firearms and magazines soared in value. If the law did not have a “sunset” clause that led to its disappearance after ten years, these items likely would have followed a similar path as the above NFA firearms, albeit in far larger numbers and with far more “home workarounds” than NFA firearms.
Even though these laws stigmatizing legal gun ownership are already bad enough on the state level, residents still have the option of moving and/or buying a second home in a more gun-friendly state. At the federal level, these laws give legal gun ownership no escape – possibly quite literally, in the case of Senator Dianne Feinstein‘s proposed 2019 Assault Weapons Ban redux:
For now, we can only trust what the AWB press release calls the “key provisions.” The ban, in its current state, will not affect those who currently own the banned firearms/magazines. However, these firearms/magazines will no longer be allowed to be made, imported, nor transferred (sold/purchased/given).
For the other items on the proposed ban, it is not yet clear whether they will be “grandfathered.”
New assault weapons are dead on arrival with President Trump in office, and the failure of the 1994 ban cost Democrats so heavily that they could only gather 40 votes directly after Sandy Hook in a Democrat-controlled Senate, forcing then-Senator Harry Reid dropped the AWB out of fear that it would “jeopardize more widely supported proposals.”
However, there will come a time where a more permissive legislature and President could force these bills to become law. More mass noncompliance would all but be assured, but it wouldn’t be enough to slowly chip away and stigmatize legal civilian ownership of these weapons.
So what is the winning strategy?
Obviously, the no.1 winning strategy is to defeat these moronic bills before they ever become law. The NRA, like them or not, are the best line of defense for gun owners. Still, public perception needs to be challenged. These bills have a lower chance of survival no matter the political climate if the politicians and big money gun grabbing billionaires pushing them are properly labeled as evil hypocrites pushing policies that will not apply to them – ad hominem attacks on anti-gun interests are a must to aptly combat legislation.
If that fails and more obstinate gun laws get passed, perhaps the last hope against these bans is the Supreme Court. Federal appeals courts have generally not been friendly to gun owners, upholding a multitude of restrictions. Recently the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals upheld New Jersey’s magazine restrictions, with two Obama-appointed judges ruling against one Trump-appointed judge.
With DC vs. Heller coming down to one vote at the Supreme Court just to uphold legal firearm ownership in the home, anyone in favor of gun rights has to be sure that SCOTUS appointees look favorably upon gun rights…
…lest gun-grabbing legislators criminalize millions of law-abiding Americans.
If you’re already a felon, why not just start purchasing all of your illegal weapons on the black market? In the end, there will be no stopping the gun grab. That is, unless you have enough guns to stop their grabbin’.
Cheaper on the black market too.
I lost all of mine in a boating accident.
We have become like the old Soviet Union where oppressive laws makes us all involuntary dissenters.
The NRA failed when it allowed the National Firearms Act of 1934 to stand without offering opposition, the 1968 Gun Control Act, the NICS “instant check” system, the “no new machine gun for civilians” ban in 1986, the so-called “assault weapons ban in 1994, and other infringements of the Second Amendment. Let’s face it. What better way to increase membership than to “allow” infringements to be enacted and then push for a new membership drive. Yes, the NRA has done good, but its spirit of “compromise” will only lead to one thing…confiscation.
If the NRA is truly the premier “gun rights” organization, it must reject ALL compromise…
GOA (GUN OWNERS OF AMERICA) IS supporting gun owner rights. The NRA, not so much
The NRA has been infiltrated by globalist spies and bad actors.
Read the first 4 pages. I dare you.
http://mileswmathis.com/marx.pdf
Pi=4
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say goodbye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling in terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand. The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst; the cursed machine would have ground to a halt” . . .
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
We know, as does the state at all levels, that the Supreme Court is not the last option. Like the new agers say, you meet your destiny on the road you take to avoid it…
That’s the last FM Shooter article I will ever bother to read.
Defending the ever compromising NRA and Trump who just executed one of the most outrageous gun-related power grabs in American history- the criminalization of gun parts known as bumpstocks- and the outlandish requirement to destroy or surrender the stocks *without compensation.*
Just keep voting and participating in political maneuvers to retain your gun rights?
Are you serious? I’m beginning to believe FM Shooter is run by intelligence to rock the masses to sleep, just like most other new and popular blogs are.
You sound upset.
Those who are well informed tend to be a little upset with the masonic clown show of American politics.
You may be pleased to see trump’s pick for AG is a previous GHWB gun grabber, and his part in Ruby Ridge should give comfort to the congregation of worshippers in the STATEISNEVERWRONG god system.
annuit coeptis novus ordo seclorum
Thank you sir.
May I have another?
.22mag.
You got 8 downers for that comment on TBP? WTF.
The # 1 strategy is to starve the beast.
You can’t beat them at their own game. They are the merchants, the media, the manufacturers, the leaders, the law makers, the courts and the police. By being a part of their system, they suck us dry until we are no longer useful sheep/cattle.
Why wait for them to suck us dry? Stop consuming their crap and become self-sufficient. Better yet, become a part of a self-sufficient community which means that the community needs nothing from the outside world.
Yes it mean giving up most of our comforts. But those comforts are how we are penned and taxed. Starve the beast.
Civilization cannot exist without slavery. Either abandon “civilization” or accept your slavery.
Starve the beast.
I think people need to wake up and realize this: We are in the middle of a Roman Imperial Collapse right now.
You ain’t going to like it, and the people who have still have their big optimistic hopes for some kind of rosy future sure as hell aren’t going to like it. Each month of each succeeding year gets more even screwed up than the one before it, until finally everything is reduced to basic life and death survival issues, and guns are a very big part of that equation. They sure as hell aren’t going away, but the people who think otherwise will sure go away. That part will be fun to watch!
Keep posting man.
The largest insurgent army on Earth (armed Americans) is gonna have it’s say sooner or later.
Write your congressman and vote.
That should work.
Thanks for the advice!
My RINO conspirator congress critter Kinzinger is probably compiling a list of everybody who calls him to oppose the control freak Deep State.
I have discovered that most laws are invalid for one reason or another. Fake laws.
In my studies of law, I am learning that the absence of a title, or enacting clause, makes a bill declaratory instead of mandatory.
Also, often, a bill has to be read on 3 different days is to ensure that legislators don’t vote on a bill without having read it first. Or a bill has to be about one subject.
Or, the bill comes from a Legislative Reference Bureau instead of an elected legislator.
All these requirements are generally ignored, making the particular law void.
Rule of Law is a European evolution. The desert tribes who invaded Europe toward the end of the Roman empire brought with them their idea of law which is by divine decree. Since the USA is a mixture of European and desert philosophies, we have the system we have. Us peasants prefer rule of law but the ((tribe)) that rules over us is smart enough to know how to make laws which we are predisposed to follow which they don’t mind ignoring (they follow their own laws, just ask them).
noBabel, weren’t those desert tribes muslims? The muslims have no law by divine decree. Unless you are talking of Jews who settled into Europe. But they didn’t invade.
You have me kind of confused because of your vague term ‘desert tribes’. Not attacking, trying to clarify what you are saying.
Also what are you saying US law is founded on? The only law I ever heard of that muslims want to impose is sharia. The USA wasn’t founded on that demon jive.
SamFox
the head must be cut off this snake
I’d recommend looking at this group over the NRA. https://gunowners.org/
I have to go with 22wm on this one. 3-4 hundred million firearms and god only knows how many rounds of ammo. They are going to wait what out? Obsolescence? How many full autos vs semis. Mute point. Yeah, I get it that we can’t use them if they are illegal… but I own a truck an a crematory, so…
FMS peddling stealth Prozac.
Hold your nose and vote Republican then write him/her and tell them you are so mad at them for double crossing you.
The guy who made the point about the gun grabbers playing the long game nailed it. A generation from now there won’t be much support for gun ownership in the US. The country will likely break apart over the debate over our constitution rights if the Chinese don’t invade and occupy us first. Use common sense, play the game and plan for the inevitable future. The gray man will win!
DC vs Heller did not limit firearm ownership to the home…And does the author really believe that the current political situation will last for decades? When things start disintegrating, there will be every reason in the world to own firearms…Liberal states are already seceding from Federal laws. Why wouldn’t conservative states do the same if provoked?
I wonder how long until people start using their guns to get rid of tyrants. The reason for the second amendment. I laugh seeing all the Democrats from socialist crap holes like new York city wanting to run for President.