Posted on 12/11/2012 10:59:04 AM PST by marktwain
National Gun Rights Examiner David Codrea reports that Representative Steve Israel (D-NY) has announced his intention to renew the ban on "plastic guns," set to expire next December:
A test of a printed plastic lower firearm receiver has resulted in an anti-gun politician demanding renewal of a law against a gun that does not exist, Live Science reported today, citing a call by Rep. Steve Israel, D- N.Y., to renew “the federal ban on plastic guns just days after members of the ‘Wiki Weapon’ project tested a 3D-printed gun part in a live-fire test.”
The "Undetectable Firearms Act" was first passed in 1988, in (over)-reaction to polymer-frame Glock pistols--which had far more steel than could be slipped past any metal detector. An excellent short summary of the history of this law can be found at Prevent Tyranny, where we find that the 1988 law expired in 1998, and was not renewed until 2003.
Care to guess how many people were shot, or even threatened, with a "undetectable, plastic" guns over that five year span? If your guess was "zero, because no such gun existed," give yourself a cigar.
Still, that inconvenient little fact did not prevent then-Representative James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) from bringing this pointless law back in 2003, for another 10 years (thus the December, 2013 expiration).
Mr. Codrea also points out that Rep. Israel claims that he was prompted to renew this ban by news of a partially plastic gun (which fell apart after six shots)--which was never banned. If his new bill (not yet introduced, so we cannot know the details) would ban that, it would have to be a very comprehensive ban (every polymer-framed gun), covering vast numbers of very popular firearms.
(Excerpt) Read more at examiner.com ...
This law needs to be allowed to expire.
They’re doing everything they possibly can to get some sort of gun ban on the books. They want to get their foot in the door or the camel’s nose in the tent, pick your analogy. Democrats, Liberals, Progressives, Socialists are all scattershotting every law and regulation they can in the hope that something sticks.
It’ll just take one flake to start the snowball, folks.
What fools we have for legislators. They make laws and policy concerning subjects of which they have no knowledge or technical aptitude.
don’t make much difference what the gun is made out of, the bullets are all the same..steel/brass, lead/copper, etc..
But he kept going on about how the "new technology" needed to be banned, and I asked him if he was going to try to get "Star Trek Phasers and Klingon Disruptors" banned too, since even though "there ain't no such thing," we need to ban the technology!
Mark
And don't forget that they will vote FOR bills that they not only don't understand, but don't even bother to read... Or even vote for bills that haven't actually been completely written!
Mark
they don’t necessarily need to be. ceramic could be used as
a projectile very effectively, and a case could be made of
polymer. would have less working pressure to work with, but enough to be effective close in.
It was a republican that re-intoduced the law in 2003.
It might have been a republican but that doesn’t mean they weren’t a liberal progressive socialist.
Sensenbrenner has been known as a conservative Republican for some time. My only guess is that he put this forward at the behest of the Bush administration, as an “anti-terror” measure.
I was shocked to learn that he was the person who introduced it. It pretty much was slipped in “under the radar”.
He can always be counted on to assault the Constitution.
Metallic-cased or jacketed ammo isn't the big problem, it's the barrel and breechblock parts. Ceramics have lousy tensile strength and would more likely turn into a fragmentation grenade than deliver an aimed shot.
Materials Science is proceeding at an incredible pace. I think that composite materials with a majority ceramic component could be made strong enough to withstand low pressure loads like some shotgun, pistol, and rifle loads. Low pressure loads can still be effective.
I have a ceramic hand grenade sitting on the bookshelf. It is empty, of course.
It was made in the waning days of WWII in Okinawa. Steel was in very short supply, so the inventive Japanese made ceramic (unglazed porcelain, I think) hand grenade bodies.
The Hungarians used lengths of water pipe to disable Russian tanks during the revolution of 1956. They’d run out of a side alley and shove a long piece of 2” or so water pipe between the lower tread and the rear sprocket. Popped the tread right off, leaving the tank to run in circles.
“Where there is a will, there is a way” to make a weapon. When Milton Obote’s second UNLA government was overthrown in Uganda there was a story of citizens beating UNLA soldiers to death using old shock absorbers.
Maybe we should outlaw NAPA or AutoZone? /sarc
But they must be real! I saw the bad guy use one on CSI! It was even made with one of those 3-D printers.
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