this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2024
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The Virginia House of Delegates approved an assault weapons ban on a party line vote Friday.

Fairfax County Democratic Del. Dan Helmer’s bill would end the sale and transfer of assault firearms manufactured after July 1, 2024. It also prohibits the sale of certain large capacity magazines.

“This bill would stop the sale of weapons similar to those I and many of the other veterans carried in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Helmer said.

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[–] ShittyBeatlesFCPres 29 points 9 months ago (2 children)

This will only embolden the feral hogs.

[–] Leviathan 14 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Usually we just call them 'Republicans' or '2a nuts'.

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[–] FlyingSquid 3 points 9 months ago

Uh-oh, I know what the next Cody Showdy is going to be about...

[–] [email protected] 18 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I wonder what database is in place that would allow them to determine what weapons were made after that date. It seems there would be a lot room for getting around that aside from just buying used.

[–] Death_Equity 33 points 9 months ago (4 children)

When a firearm is manufactured by a licensed individual or company, it is logged into a book or database. When a firearms retailer receives a firearm, they log it into a book or database. When that firearm is sold, it is logged into a book or database. That is federal law.

Some manufacturers include the date of manufacture with paperwork, but that may only be month and year.

To my knowledge, there is no way for an FFL(licensed firearm retailer) to know a precise date of manufacture without inquiring with the manufacturer if it is not provided with the documents that are supplied.

The law is poorly written, so the real-world effect would be no new sales of specified firearms after the effective date. How restricting the sale of new firearms and not all firearms of the type that they want to restrict does anything is outside of my understanding.

[–] cbarrick 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Maybe it's not so poorly written. The ambiguity could be a feature.

If the manufacturer date can't be proven, you shouldn't be able to sell the gun. So maybe more guns get prohibited in practice that would otherwise be allowed.

And it forces folks to keep more detailed records going forward.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago (1 children)

You'll be happy to know that as long as you don't sell it, it's completly legal to manufacture your own firearms without serialization

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[–] prayer 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

It is effective. Machine guns had a similar law placed on them in 1968, now buying one is at least 10k, making it virtually unheard of to be used in crimes, as well as limiting the total number in existence, as some machine guns break beyond repair over time.

[–] Death_Equity 10 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The National Firearms Act of 1934 created a registry for fully automatic firearms. The registry was closed to civilian individuals by the Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986, meaning all lawful machine guns had to be registered by May 1986 and any machine guns manufactured after that date could only owned by special excemption. The law in question has no registration requirement, unlike Illinois recent assault weapon registry and sales ban.

Registered machine guns have only been used in crimes 4 times since 1934 and two of those were unlawful police use during the commission of a crime and one was military with his service rifle. There are over 638,000 civilian registered machine gun in the US.

Unlawful machine guns are used in crimes more often in recent years. The recent prevalence of "Glock switches", which illegally convert a Glock handgun into a machine gun, has increased machine guns being used in shootings. There are other means to convert various firearms to fire fully automatic, some as simple as a bent coathanger or 3D printed parts. The exact number of illegal or converted machines guns being used or recovered is not well documented, but detection of events of automatic fire in cities with acoustic shot detection increased from around 400 in 2019 to 5,600 in 2021. The ATF recovered more than 1,500 conversion devices in 2021. That trend has increased.

The law does not stop criminals and it does not address gun deaths in any meaningful way. Mental healthcare reform and improving socioeconomic circumstances would reduce gun deaths by up to 2/3 by reducing suicides using a firearm. Using a magic wand to remove semi-automatic rifles would reduce gun deaths by <2%, because that is how often they are used to kill. Under 9,000 people are murdered with a firearm every year, ~43,000 die in car accidents(~14k alcohol involved), ~80-100,000 from overdoses, and 480,000 die from smoking related illness.

[–] reattach 5 points 9 months ago

Out of curiosity, what source do you use for gun violence data? The Gun Violence Archive puts the number of non-suicide gun deaths at almost 19,000 in 2023. I'm sure there are other groups running their own estimates though, and I'm curious how the methodology and results differ.

https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/past-tolls

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago (4 children)

What are the odds a court deems this unconstitutional?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

that question depends on when glenn youngkin is up for re-election

[–] pHr34kY 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

I'd argue that you could ban anything that you don't have to manually pack gunpowder into.

That's what was available when the constitution was penned.

You don't even need to ban the guns. Just ban bullets.

[–] mipadaitu 7 points 9 months ago

That's a bad precedent to set. There are certainly reasons why this can be upheld, but saying that anything new is by default banned unless explicitly allowed is the opposite of what it states in the constitution.

That would allow for decisions like the freedom of speech doesn't exist on the internet because the internet didn't exist when the constitution was penned.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

A potential loophole: many rifle owners save money by pressing their own cartridges. The tools required are a bit pricey but not out of reach for the average person. You'd have to use some careful wording to ban home made bullets but not muzzleloaders.

[–] ABoxOfPhotons 2 points 9 months ago

That's a word they'd use but the actual reasons would not be mentioned as mentioning them would be damaging to the collective American psyche.

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[–] LemmyIsFantastic 4 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Hand guns are where the actual violence is. This is theater.

[–] SendMePhotos 19 points 9 months ago (42 children)

The problem that I have is, "what is an assault style weapon?" because a ruger 10/22 looks like this, but if you put a scope on it and get the black version, it looks like this. If you put a pistol grip on it and a larger magazine, it looks like this, but it's all the same gun. It does the same things. The shape of the magazine does not affect the gun in any way aside from more ammo. But you don't have to get a banana clip to do that.

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