you cannot stop the signal

This post will be a slight departure from the norm, but it should be worth it.  A while back, I departed on the adventure of building a Glock-like firearm without using a single Glock OEM part, just for the sake of doing it.  Personally, I am much more a CZ person, and have never understood the attraction of Glocks, but I also love building firearms, and the Austrian bricks are some of the most-heavily-supported when it comes to aftermarket parts.

I chose to use a receiver/frame from Lone Wolf Distributors, but if I had a drill press, I could have had one of these delivered to my door, no FFL, no paperwork, no background check, nothing:

That carefully-formed piece of plastic is not legally considered a firearm, given that you cannot currently install the trigger group, recoil assembly, slide, or other essential parts.  However, after less than a day of work with a drill press and a few other basic tools, you will have a full-operational Glock-like frame.  And if you never sell it, it never even has to be serialized.

No doubt the “gun control” extremists are already lining up to figure out a way to shut this company down.

Ok, fine, here are the blueprints necessary to build an AR-15 receiver out of sheets of aluminum.  No joke.

And lest any “gun control” useful idiot get the bright idea of trying to get WordPress to pull down the blueprints, do not fret – I have them backed up on my computer, and will happily host them elsewhere on the internet.

Oh, we cannot forget the mad genius who successfully built a fully-operational AK-47-pattern rifle out of an old shovel and junk parts.  I am not even close to kidding.  It was even capable of keeping all ten spam-can rounds inside the 10-ring at 50 yards.

So what are you going to do now, folks?  Ban shovels and hammers?  You might as well try to ban the Khyber Pass as a whole.

For heaven’s sake, jewelers down in “gun control” utopia Australia are supplying bikie gangs with sub-machine guns and silencers.  Inmates in German prisons are building shotguns.  And apparently staple guns have become a platform of choice for improvised firearms.

And that is a core concept that “gun control” extremists simply refuse to comprehend – you cannot ban, restrict, or otherwise regulate firearms in any meaningful way.  Or, as some of my friends like to put it, “engineers > politicians”.  The truth of the matter is if “gun controllers” get their way and make the ownership of a previously-lawful semi-automatic rifle as illegal as owning an open-bolt, short-barreled, fully-automatic rifle… well, Aisle 6 at your local Home Depot has all the parts necessary to make the latter.  And given how easy it is to make the fully-automatic firearm – variations were literally being produced in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation – why would anyone bother with the less-capable rifle?

In turn, I think that is a core concept that the pro-rights advocates do not comprehend as well.  “Gun control” extremists do not want to regulate firearms.  They do not even want to regulate you.  They want to destroy knowledge, pure and simple.  Though, if they could kill a few peaceful, law-abiding Americans along the way, a disturbing number of them would be sanguine with that (and this is a mere sample of the screencaps I have).

Not only do they want to ban “assault weapons”, they would be absolutely ecstatic if no one could ever make one ever again.  One need only look at their outrage over the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act for an example of this – “gun control” extremists attempted to use lawfare against firearm manufacturers by suing them over the criminal misuse of their products.  The government rightly stepped in and said, “this is dumb,” and the wailing and gnashing of teeth that continues to this day borders on “epic”.

To put it another way, “gun control” is another variation – both morally and functionally – to book-burning… but at least the book-burners were – and, sadly, are – more honest about their motivations.

And lest you think I am being hyperbolic in my comparison, consider the recent YouTube Terms of Service changes wherein they banned any content that included perfectly-legal activities such as demonstrating how to reload ammunition.  The only possible motivation behind this move is to attempt to suppress knowledge and limit its spread – just like with book burnings.

(Note:  Since YouTube is a private corporation, they can set whatever standards they want for the content they host; however, let us be honest about the situation and call it what it is – pure censorship.)

But just as the printing press removed the power of book-burners, so too is the internet rendering “gun control” extremists impotent.  They can no longer control the narrative.  They can no longer massage the message.  They can no longer spout their lies unchallenged.

The truth will out, whether they want it to or not.  That is, after all, one of the reasons I started the “graphics matter” series of posts here – to demonstrate that so much of the information and arguments used by the “gun control” extremists is fundamentally flawed, if not outright dishonest.  That is also why such things as the Ghost Gunner exist – the democratization of technology will ultimately render “gun control” a meaningless phrase, and that is why they hate it.

And that is part of the reason I like assembling firearms at home.  Sure, sue the manufacturers into oblivion.  Shut down the FFLs.  You cannot stop the signal.

So on to the build itself.

the ineffectiveness of “assault weapon bans”, part 2

This time, I will go ahead and be forthright about the two firearms I want you to consider.

This is a Springfield Armory M1A SOCOM II that I purchased a number of years ago.  You will have to forgive the lacking quality of the photo – it turns out I sold it before I took any good pictures of it.

And this is an AR-15 that I half-built, half-bought.  Again, you will have to forgive the truly derp-tastic stock that is on it presently – it did not last long, and it has a much better stock presently, I am just bad about taking pictures apparently.

Now here is the important part:

Both firearms are semi-automatic, magazine-fed rifles; i.e. both will shoot as fast as you can pull the trigger, and both can accept magazines up to 100 rounds (though I cannot imagine carrying the M1A at that point).  However, the M1A shoots a larger, heavier bullet that has, on average, double the muzzle energy of the bullet shot by the AR-15 and somewhere around double the maximum range.

So here is this post’s test: one of these firearms is currently banned by the California Assault Weapon Control Act, and one of them is not.  Which is banned?

If you answered “the more powerful rifle”, you would be wrong.

That M1A was, ironically, purchased in California – I even still have a picture of the receipt –  after I discovered that coming by AR-15s there would be… challenging.  At that point, I figured I might as well go with the more-powerful, more-capable rifle, simply to drive home the point that the state’s “assault weapon ban” was precisely useless.

As the previous post indicated, the entire notion of “assault weapon bans” is flawed to begin with since it literally prohibits one configuration of a rifle, but allows another configuration of the exact same rifle.  Once you realize that those bans allow firearms that work in almost the same way* but are significantly more powerful than their banned brethren?

Well, then it becomes painfully apparent that the purpose of the bans is not “safety”.

(* – Both firearms are gas-operated; the AR-15 uses direct impingement while the M1A uses a short-stroke piston system.  Both are still semi-automatic, but the two operating systems are just different ways of employing the gasses from the discharging round to cycle the actions.)

the ineffectiveness of “assault weapon bans”, part 1

Do you what the difference is between this rifle:

… and this rifle:

I will give you a few hints to make it easier:

Both are made by Sturm, Ruger & Co., Inc.

Both will happily shoot either .223 Remington or 5.56x45mm NATO.

Both are semi-automatic and gas-operated with locking breech bolts and a self-cleaning gas cylinder.

Both will shoot as fast as you can pull the trigger, one round at a time.

Both accept removable magazines ranging from five rounds to 100 rounds.

Both have cold hammer-forged barrels for increased accuracy and longevity.

Both are configured to accept magnifying optics and have ghost-ring sights if you choose to stick with iron sights.

Both are set up to accept slings.

In other words, I have a confession to make:  there is no functional difference between the two rifles.  

Yes, one is configured to be more ergonomic for the end user, what with the adjustable butt stock and the flash hider to mitigate the flash of the round being fired beneath the sights/optic.  However, the top rifle can almost entirely be transformed into the bottom rifle so long as you have a small screwdriver and the “tactical” stock (even the flash hider can be added without having to thread the barrel).

That is all you need.

But the top rifle would have been legal under the failed Federal Assault Weapons Ban, and under the current California Assault Weapons Control Act, while the bottom rifle was not and is not.

Even better?  The top rifle’s barrel is about two inches longer, giving it about 50-100 feet-per-second more velocity at the muzzle.  So, arguably, it is the more-powerful of the two rifle… but it is the AWB-approved one.

When the features that were banned under the “Assault Weapon Ban” have no actual impact on the operation of the firearm, and when that ban can be circumvented by a single screwdriver, just what was its point?

(For reference, the top rifle is a Ruger Mini-14 Ranch Rifle, and the bottom is a Ruger Mini-14 Tactical Rifle.  Both images were borrowed from Ruger.)