Anti-gunners want you to believe that gun control reduces crime. I'd say this is despite all evidence to the contrary, but since anti-gun researchers keep cooking the books, there's "evidence," of a sort. The short rebuttal is that it doesn't, and when you look at a graph of both when major gun control laws were passed and the homicide rate, you don't see any positive impact at all.
Hell, the homicide rate skyrocketed after the Gun Control Act was passed in 1968.
But the truth is that there's one thing gun control does that's positive, in a manner of speaking, and an editorial at News2A gets into it.
A prison security guard once observed that prisoners are the most innovative and creative people he’s ever met, proving yet again that necessity is indeed the mother of invention. And while nearly all gun owners are law-abiding citizens, they are often treated as criminals by legislators who would disarm them through fees, red tape, and administrative paperwork until gun ownership becomes so burdensome and onerous that citizens simply give up their rights.
Fortunately, Americans are resilient, and often look at opposition as opportunity. Legislative mandates intended to be hurdles have turned into technical challenges that the creative community of firearms owners constantly conquers through new innovations.
While legislators intend legal definitions to be functional deterrents, the definitions themselves are often the very tool used to develop firearms (and related products) that give options and latitude to gun owners, frequently in the most restrictive jurisdictions.
Guns That Defy ATF Definitions
For example, in 2019, Franklin Armory created two new firearms that neatly circumvented definitions under the National Firearms Act. The designs were so unique that the ATF didn’t know how to categorize them, but decided to shoehorn them into categories of restricted arms anyway, a move that resulted in a lawsuit and a settlement in which the ATF admitted that the new design “is free and clear from any NFA restrictions due to its unique characteristic.” (See our full coverage of this story here as the ATF continues to fight against these new products.)
A Decade-Old Solution to the California ‘Assault Weapon’ Ban
The Kali Key is a unique product that nullifies the California statute designed to limit the ability to own common rifles such as the AR-15. California’s features-based test in Penal Code section 30515 lays out the definition of an “assault weapon.” Developed a decade ago, with tens of thousands of units sold, the Kali Key’s modified drop-in charging system redirects gas so that the bolt doesn’t cycle, effectively turning the firearm into a bolt-action rather than semi-auto action, neatly side-stepping the prohibition.
And there are plenty of other examples.
I'm also reminded of the 1994 Assault Weapon Ban. While anti-gunners like to pretend the ban accomplished something, the truth is that it couldn't have. AR-15s were sold by the millions over the span of that decade and became the most popular model of rifle in the country because of it. All that the gun companies did was create guns that didn't have too many of the "evil features," such as rifles without bayonet lugs and collapsible stocks.
They were still AR-15s in every way imaginable, they just didn't meet the legal definition.
Or the thumbhole stocks for ARs that were all the rage in California because of how their law was framed.
One great example from the above-linked piece is the forced reset trigger, which was categorized as a machine gun by the ATF only for a judge to tell them to hold up a second, because it ain't. The availability of those FRTs means I don't care as much about getting an actual machine gun because I can drop them in my rifle, run them however I want, and get similar results.
And so much cooler than bump stocks, which are yet another example.
The truth is that restriction triggers innovation. Contented people rarely change the world. There needs to be some desire to innovate beyond some nebulous idea that something better might exist. If you don't have a problem with the status quo, you're unlikely to seek a way to do something better.
Gun control establishes an unsatisfactory status quo, and those who are now discontent get to work developing something that works as well as needed, skirts the rules neatly but legally, and then goes to town providing it for the entire world to see. Prohibition leads to innovation, and that's a beautiful byproduct of the anti-gunners' attempts at tyranny.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their extreme gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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