How Are CA Residents Keeping Their AR-Style Rifles? By Being Creative

This rifle that was compliant in 2007 isn't these days...but that doesn't stop gun owners from finding workarounds. (Photo by Mitch Barrie, from Flickr)

California lawmakers hate so-called assault weapons. There’s just something about an evil black rifle that gets them riled up. It’s so bad that they have tried everything to essentially ban the weapons. Following the failed federal assault weapons ban, they have opted to focus on features that they believe define assault weapons.

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Apparently, none of these people have heard of the Law of Unintended Consequences.

You see, in their zeal to eradicate AR-15 features their state, law-abiding Californians who want the rifles are finding creative ways to get around the law.

Still.

As Fox News reports:

At the heart of the legislation is the outlawing of the AR-15’s “bullet button” – already a feature not used in other states and designed to slow down the reloading process given that it requires a tool to be pushed on the ‘button’ to eject a spent magazine before being able to reload. By focusing on detachable magazines, California lawmakers were endeavoring to make it an even more laborious reloading process.

Marc Levine, a Democratic State Assembly member who was a huge backer of the new gun laws, told Fox News: “By closing the bullet button loophole, it is slowing down the reloading mechanism. Lawmakers will continue to do whatever it takes to keep communities safe.”

But savvy designers, Santiago contends, have other ideas.

“Lawmakers were probably thinking that guns would require being taken apart to reload them as a result of their new law. They were mistaken,” Santiago explained. “Ironically, the next generation of unregistered semi-automatic rifles will be better; almost all new designs will have detachable magazines again.”

Chris Eger, a staff writer for Guns.com, pointed out that within days of the new legislation, there already were workaround devices and tweaks being concocted by “some clever person … invented to defeat it.”

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That’s what will always happen with laws like this. If you ban a feature, those features will be replaced with something else.

For example, while trying to make it a pain to reload an AR-15, lawmakers sought to require shooters to need to use a tool to switch magazines. However, enterprising souls figured out how to leave the magazine release button alone by removing other features, thus completely negating the entire issue.

Gun grabbing politicians swear they will continue legislating away in a vain effort to combat this non-existent threat, and for once there’s every reason to take a politician at their word.

However, something else we can trust is that for every idiotic law they can produce, there will be some enterprising inventor that will create a product that will allow gun owners to get around such things. The free market is a wonderful thing.

It would be nice if gun grabbing politicos would learn that new laws only impact the law abiding. The criminals, the people who actually endanger the citizens of California, don’t really care about the law. You know…because they’re criminals. By definition, they have a tendency to ignore pesky things like laws.

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Then again, it seems that these politicians view every gun owner as actual criminals.

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