So, sneaky tricks are afoot once again.
Last year the Washington State Legislature accidentally knocked their heads against a piece of common sense and came into line with most other states on their position on Short-Barreled Rifles (SBRs).
Then they turned right around and in a major cranio-rectal inversion said that you can't make your own. Let's be clear- this is like saying you can buy a race car, but you can't build or maintain it yourself.
Washington Representative from the 19th District, Brian Blake has been working with the ATF to correct this fiasco, but when the Mandarins of the Bureaucracy don't want you to have something, despite no substantive reason they can always find a million procedural reasons why you can't have it.
Here's the thing. The National Firearms Act of 1934 didn't ban these firearms outright because it would be clearly unconstitutional, so they did the next best thing (also unconstitutional) and put a huge barrier in place to discourage and deter people from having these firearms. $200 was a huge amount of money in 1934, over $3500 in current dollars. It STILL didn't stop gangsters from using them while bootlegging, because the monetary incentive provided by prohibition basically creates an inescapable impulse to criminal activity. The only people who no longer had these firearms were the non-LE good guys.
If it's not illegal to do something, then it's not the government's place to put artificial barriers in place to doing it. The only thing you do by prohibiting someone from building their own SBR in our state as opposed to buying it, is make sure more Washingtonians are spending money outside our state where it's not stupidly illegal to build the damned things.
And then there's also the minor matter that there is zero practical difference between owning a SBS and an SBR, but our legislature failed to make the latter legal at the same time.
What part of "Shall not be infringed" is hard to understand?
Write your legislators.
Last year the Washington State Legislature accidentally knocked their heads against a piece of common sense and came into line with most other states on their position on Short-Barreled Rifles (SBRs).
Then they turned right around and in a major cranio-rectal inversion said that you can't make your own. Let's be clear- this is like saying you can buy a race car, but you can't build or maintain it yourself.
Washington Representative from the 19th District, Brian Blake has been working with the ATF to correct this fiasco, but when the Mandarins of the Bureaucracy don't want you to have something, despite no substantive reason they can always find a million procedural reasons why you can't have it.
Here's the thing. The National Firearms Act of 1934 didn't ban these firearms outright because it would be clearly unconstitutional, so they did the next best thing (also unconstitutional) and put a huge barrier in place to discourage and deter people from having these firearms. $200 was a huge amount of money in 1934, over $3500 in current dollars. It STILL didn't stop gangsters from using them while bootlegging, because the monetary incentive provided by prohibition basically creates an inescapable impulse to criminal activity. The only people who no longer had these firearms were the non-LE good guys.
If it's not illegal to do something, then it's not the government's place to put artificial barriers in place to doing it. The only thing you do by prohibiting someone from building their own SBR in our state as opposed to buying it, is make sure more Washingtonians are spending money outside our state where it's not stupidly illegal to build the damned things.
And then there's also the minor matter that there is zero practical difference between owning a SBS and an SBR, but our legislature failed to make the latter legal at the same time.
What part of "Shall not be infringed" is hard to understand?
Write your legislators.
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