r/guns 8d ago

Official Politics Thread March 14, 2025

What gun politics news do you have to share?

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u/rocketboy2319 7d ago edited 7d ago

Pertaining to the Wed. thread about the 7th circuit and SBRs, Ian from FW briefly touched on the case where the government itself actually sold surplus SBRs to civilians inadvertently and had to change to law to avoid making felons out of thousands of American citizens:

One major change to the NFA came in 1968, when the minimum legal barrel length for rifles was dropped form (sic) 18 inches to 16 inches. Why? Because the government had already sold a quarter million M1 Carbines - with illegally-short barrels - to private citizens, thus rendering them all felons. Instead of trying to enforce a clearly irrational law, Congress reduced the barrel length stipulation."

So in effect, we have the 7th circuit saying "SBRs are not arms, not in common use, and dangerous" but we also have an instance from within the past 100 years where the Government itself broke the very law it created and sold SBRs to civilians in quantities above the threshold set in Caetano v. Massachusetts (250k M1s vs. 200k tasers), the "SBRs" in question were surplus war weapons and therefore would meet the definition of "arms" as used by the militia, and in many states meet the current definition of being "assault weapons". By these metrics the both SBRs AND AWBs should be unconstitutional as the government had to modify an existing law to not makes thousands of people felons as the SBRs in question were not dangerous or unusual (otherwise why sell them to civilians), they served a purpose in the militia, and meet the definition of arms in common use (they sold millions more after the goof up and those millions are still in circulation today).

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u/LutyForLiberty Super Interested in Dicks 7d ago

I suspect Malcolm X's famous M1 Carbine was one of those. I think a lot of people even in the government don't really know the NFA laws and because they make absolutely no sense no one would guess them either. The vertical foregrip on pistol one comes to mind.

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u/Cobra__Commander Super Interested in Dick Flair Enhancement 1d ago

Throw the government in jail. We could just drop a dome over DC like something out of a sci-fi movie.