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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Depends on your state.
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.
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.
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
Love this phrase. I may start using it regularly. Like, in response to other things as well… It’s so… Good. Thank you.