Part of the 1968 Gun Control Act in the US put restrictions on importation of small handguns. These rules intended to protect US manufacturers and prevent people from having access to particularly inexpensive and concealable firearms, and these rules remain in place today. In particular, revolvers with barrels less than 3″ long are prohibited form importation. So how is it that we have Brazilian-made Taurus revolvers with 2″ barrels (among many other examples)? Well, today we have a factory oversight from Taurus that lets us see behind the curtain…
General Purpose MGs
A Brief Introduction to the M240 Golf
The FN MAG was adopted by the United States military to replace its aging inventory of M60 machine guns. It was designated the M240 in US parlance, and first used as a vehicle-mounted machine gun. […]
Flintlock
Model 1808 US Navy Pistol by Simeon North
This is Lot 2137 in the upcoming October 2019 Morphy Extraordinary auction. The US Congress passed a Militia Act in 1808 to provide funding for military supplies, and one of the immediate resulting contracts was […]
Slow motion
At the Range with the Marlin UD-42 SMG
This is Lot 1106 in the upcoming October 2019 Morphys Extraordinary auction. The Marlin / United Defense US-42 submachine gun was not used by the American military, but it did see service in World War […]
According to https://unblinkingeye.com/Guns/LBAutos/lbautos.html in Austria-Hungary since 1852 owning and carrying pistol with overall length less than 7 inch required special permits. For uses wishing to use 6,35 mm Steyr 1909 without that hassle, special long-barrel variant was offered.
In light of Bruen, the entire “sporting purpose” limitation should be stricken.
In light of the clear meaning of the 2nd Amendment, “sporting purposes” should have been straight out of the discussion from the beginning.
By any interpretation, the only weapons protected by the Second are “weapons of war”, meaning that everything constructed after the adoption of that amendment is in violation of it. In the early days of the Republic, all arms were available to any citizen. For good reason; you had private subscribers building up “arsenals” of light artillery for their militia units… Which would be the equivalent of buying not just machineguns, but tanks and other major weapons privately for the use of your self-organized militia.
This was a major piece of what the Founders believed to be the foundation of a free republic: Access to arms, and the ability to use them if the government turned on you as a citizen.
Frankly, they’d have reacted very poorly to the idea of 60% effective tax rates. The Stamp Act was like 2%… It’s amazing what people will vote for and tolerate, when they’re prosperous.
Remains to be seen what happens when that prosperity is spent away, however.
Very true. People may disagree about some nuances of 2A, but the idea that it has anything to do with a “right to sports equipment” is self-evidently preposterous (and always was, long before Bruen).
Perhaps doing what the English folks did by hiding their fire arms in separate/individual locations and burying correct lengths of pipe (which I have been told ticks the british socialist thugs off!!!) might be of value here!
Your reminder that a Mossberg 590’s bayonet lug isn’t a disqualifier for being a “sporting purpose” shotgun under the NFA, but is for being “sporting purpose” under the GCA.
Had the Founders foreseen the future, they would have written a very different Second Amendment:
“A well protected public, being necessary to the security of a free State, the Duty of the People to keep and bear arms shall be Enforced.”
The wording of the Amendment came as shorthand to what everybody knew the militia laws of the states were. There was no perceived need to talk about the duty of civilians to be armed and to be part of the militia. This was already the law in most states.
My inner economist asks Taurus to produce the revolver with a longer barrel, and utilize the cut part as a barrel for another firearm.
The savings by cutting down the barrel instead of unscrewing may come from a cheaper way to attach the barrel? Are the new Taurus barrels still threaded, or maybe pinned/press fit?
There are a lot of savings in having one less specialty barrel length to machine, chamber, and rifle. Whacking off the next longest barrel and re-machining the muzzle may be cheaper than making a special model barrel, but machining and chambering a pre-rifled barrel is most likely more expensive than just making a new barrel. Putting the chamber and mounting points (flats, screw holes, mating surfaces, threads, …) in exactly the right places and orientations is a lot harder than mounting up a new blank in the regular machining sequence.
What Ian did not discuss is the shape of the barrel extension. He talked about there being a special tool to cut it off, but did not give details of that process.
I am assuming that the shape and the groove around it was such as to allow the cutting tool to clamp onto the extension and make the cut at the correct angle.
My question is “was the barrel extension also rifled?”.
That “factory goof” version has a kind of Star Wars sci-fi blaster look to it. I’d kind of like to have a 605 with a “goof” barrel like that.