The link on the influential Drudge Report reads: Gunmakers alter appearance of AR-15 to make it legal in NY… which assures that all the right people (on the left side of politics) are going to be frothing at the mouth when they read the Charles C.W. Cooke story on National Review Online:

Pass a stupid law, get a stupid result. This, Clash Daily reports, is a remodeled AR-15, and it is legal in New York despite the state’s “assault weapons” ban:

When the opponents of “assault weapon” bans argue that it is preposterous for the state to ban firearms based on the way they look, they really mean it. It is. The rifle in the photograph above is no more or less powerful than the one that has been banned; it just looks different. And, because the SAFE Act was, typically, interested only in cosmetic questions, a simple change to its aesthetic rendered the rifle legal once more.

That’s interesting… and old.

Rick Karlin wrote this up for the Albany Times Union on May 25, 2013:

It might be the most divisive element of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s NY SAFE Act: an expanded ban on what the administration terms “assault-style” weapons, such as the Vietnam-era AR-15s that are wildly popular with gun enthusiasts.

But the ban is proving to be less than total. Gun dealers, with the help of machine shops and gunsmiths, are on the cusp of offering what they call NY SAFE-compliant AR-15s and other military-style rifles.

Prototypes for the new rifles have been on display at gun shops from western New York to the Adirondacks in recent weeks. And now a lawyer representing one shop says he has gotten what amounts to an OK from the state, in the form of a letter from a State Police lawyer confirming that AR-15-style guns should be legal as long as they lack the characteristics prohibited by the law.

“It’s basically an AR-15 without the features,” said James Tresmond, a western New York lawyer representing H&H Firearms, a Lackawanna gun shop that’s seeking to sell such a rifle.

The photo, taken by photojournalist Cindy Schultz of the Times Union, graces every variation of this story that has blown up out of nowhere to be news again, eight months after it was originally written.

Of course, this 2013 article merely echoes the same articles written by a previous generation of incensed journalists in 1994 after the Clinton-era “Assault Weapon” Ban went into effect, and the “banned” firearms were back on the shelves the following week with only minor cosmetic changes, without missing a beat.

Tec-9 to AB-10, anyone? Do “pre-ban” and “post-ban” AR-15s ring a bell?

Bans on cosmetic features result in changed cosmetic features, not actual functional differences in accuracy, range, or rate of fire.

You would think that 20 years of failed gun control policy would teach anti-gun Democrats that trying the same failed laws will result in the same failed results, but that would be assuming that they are capable of educating themselves, and they’ve shown no evidence of that capability at all.