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Old 03-16-2018, 02:19 PM
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Evil Tim Evil Tim is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Mazryonh View Post
Rifle-grenadings? You mean carbombings, right? And gangland bayonet charges still exist, they're called stabbing sprees, since bayonets that aren't WWI-vintage are just knife-length blades. What you're talking about might be par for the course in the worst part of cartel violence in Brazil or Mexico, or maybe 1930s Chicago.
Was joking, but the Clinton AWB included "a grenade launcher" as a banned feature. Nobody could ever work out what the hell it was talking about and it's generally assumed it was trying to bag Yugo SKS rifles with grenade launcher sights under the mistaken impression they had detachable magazines.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Mazryonh View Post
Obama banned importation of quite a few former Soviet firearm manufacturers without mentioning features, so the anticompetition bit wasn't necessary in the end. But the purpose behind "sporting features" bit escapes me. Even a single-shot .22 LR hunting rifle can be perfectly serviceable as a killing tool in the right hands.
Gun Control Act of 1968. There's two lines of reasoning for the import restrictions, one's a smokescreen for the other.

The fake reason was related to what the Soviets were busy doing in Africa: anyone who looked like a Marxist was getting free crates of factory AKs signed by Santa Lenin, and this was played up with the claim that the Soviets would try to legally import AKs to civil rights groups in the US in the attempt to trigger a civil war or something.

The truth was that it was a protectionist ban imposed at the not-so-subtle behest of the American gun industry. Imports of extremely desirable weapons from the Communist bloc and Europe (particularly AKs and compact pistols in metric chamberings) were really starting to put the hurt on the big US companies, so they were all for a law that either banned these weapons entirely, forced them to be nobbled with features that made them less desirable than domestically produced weapons, or forced their manufacturers to open up American subsidiaries and lose their dirt-cheap labour costs. Since they couldn't just come out and say it was protectionism, they came up with a line about these being weapons that don't have a "sporting purpose."

What the gun-grabbers did was come along and say "hey, if these weapons are too dangerous to import, why can people buy them here?" The sporting feature thing wasn't even their idea.
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