Actually, they exist because the NFA was passed in 1934 (if you believe John Ross’s explanation in Unintended Consequences, because they had to find SOMETHING to do with all those revenooers that the Treasury Dept had hired!) and this country seems to have a galloping allergy to repealing laws, even rotten ones.
The NFA was passed to restrict ownership of SBS & SBR, as well as various other items (machine guns included). In order to put some kind of hurdle in place to ownership of these items, the government decided that a $200 tax (or $5 for those pesky sword canes) would suffice. In theory, criminals would balk at the extra $200 and registration of their short barreled weapon and decide not to use those items to commit crimes.
In the real world, criminals laughed at the law, chopped their barrels, did what they wanted to and ignored the laws. Law abiding citizens then shouldered the additional burden on the exercise of their rights, because the only people affected by this tax are the law-abiding (by definition).
Now you tell me what’s fair. If you don’t understand yet, here’s a quick analogy for you:
Jimmy brings gum to school every day. He keeps putting wads of gum in Suzie’s pony tails. Last week they had to cut part of her pony tail out to remove the gum. The school has decided that any kind who brings gum to school has to have a note from their parents and pay $10 (as a damage deposit). Jimmy doesn’t give a shit and brings gum anyway. Who is harmed/affected by this rule? Sally, Tommy, Robert … but not Jimmy.
The problem with arguments that start “laws restricting X only affect law abiding citizens!” is that the counter argument becomes “then why have any laws in the first place?”
That’s not so much a counter argument as a point of discussion for any law: what is the purpose in having this law? (Or as an examination after the law is in place, are the effects of this law actually those which were intended?) It’s not an argument against having any laws at all so much as being open to an examination of actually purpose and results.
The question is “why have laws in the first place?” And the answer is “to set guidelines and punish behavior that is harmful to society.” The answer is not “to try to ban items that might or might not be harmful to society.” A person choosing to harm another person is antisocial; laws exist to deter and punish such behavior. An object has no will and cannot itself be antisocial; laws targeting it are obviously missing the real problem.
I desperately wish we could have a mandated periodic review to see if laws accomplished what they were set to do; maybe six years (one Senate term) after their implementation they could be checked for both effectiveness and side effects, with the law needing to be re-passed at that time to remain in effect. Of course, I’d also like to see the existing code of laws examined and cleaned up, but that’s obviously implausible.
I agree. CongressCritters seem to think their job is to PASS LAWS. IMO it is actually to be there in order to pass laws IF NECESSARY. I would FAR rather see them go through the existing mountains of laws and repeal the obviously badly written, stupid, moronic, insane, or out of date ones. THEN they could think about new ones that might be needed.
Making laws that ended the vast majority of the “Administrative rules” and such that are created by the Bureaucracies in order to enforce the laws Congress makes would be a good start.
When the IRS is NOT RESPONSIBLE for any advice their own staff give to taxpayers, even if it is in writing, THAT is a sign that their Bureaucratic code is far too complex. It is imo a sign of several other things also, but…
What people are saying is why impose laws that only penalize the lawful? Since there are alreadfy laws that cover harming people outside of defined self-defense, laws about the length of a weapon are redundant, absurd and useless.
The issue is that anything over 1/2″ bore diameter requires a “sporting purpose” exemption to avoid being labeled a “destructive device.”
IOW, it’s the GCA of 1968 rearing it’s ugly head again. The only way you’ll see a change in this status quo is major reform of federal gun control statutes.
“The only way you’ll see a change in this status quo is major reform of federal gun control statutes.”
How about they stay within the confines of the constitution? 2nd Amendment says ‘shall not be infringed’… 10th amendment (paraphrased) says that only those powers written in the constitution are given to the Feds, all other powers to the people and the states.
Since the Constitution does NOT specifically enumerate the power of the Feds to regulate firearms within the country, I hold that the 2nd and 10th Amendments make all federal gun control laws null and void as they violate the constitution.
They could declare 680nm light to be the color blue, and it would still be red.
Another court decided once that any such laws which offered partial infringement were unacceptable because SEVERAL laws could each offer partial infringement, where the combination would manifest as complete bans, and no single law could be held to blame… So they struck down a partial infringement as being unconstitutional. I wish everyone had Georgia’s views on guns, if I recall the state correctly.
AND, since it has a rifled barrel and chambers a round that ISN’T a shotgun shell, it EXACTLY meets the statutory definition of a “handgun”, and DOES NOT meet the statutory definition of a “shotgun”. The fact that it can ALSO chamber a “shotgun shell” is irrelevant.
Just as the fact that you can make shot shells for handgun rounds doesn’t transform every handgun into a sawed off shotgun.
Hell, there are a few shotgun shells that are based on RIFLE cartridges, meaning that any rifle (or, say, a T/C Contender or Remington XP100) chambered for those rifle rounds can also fire the shotgun shells.
Nor does it change the fact that the Taurus Judge is simply stupid. 😉
Longtime reader, first time commenter. Working at a gun store, I can say that nearly all of the comics you do that center around visitors to a gun store are 100% true. We get lots of bubba types wanting to get the Judge/Governor for concealed carry or for their wife for home-defense. “It’s better than that 637 Airweight I got yew huney. Yew don’t even gotta aim wit this wun!”
The Judge and all its variants are trash, both in design and build quality. The S&W Governor is just trash in design. The guns are nothing but novelties and god help you if you put 3 inch shells in either one. I agree with yesterday’s sentiment about gun companies dancing on the razors edge of the BATFE. They’ve gone back on decisions before and I really don’t see why they wouldn’t change something like the ‘Arm Brace’ to a prohibited item.
Hell, the gunstore strips are my favorite for that reason as well. It’s been a while since I worked as a gun pimp, but the derp factor is eternally constant. . . 😀
Sorry about the cold. It hit San Diego last month and wiped out my whole office, me included.
Turned me into a snarfling, gurgling, coughing mess for a week and a half.
Drink NyQuil like jagerbombs, sleep hard & pee green.
Legal matters aside, that revolver looks ridiculous.
You’re conflating two different things. If the Judge was a 28ga [or any other shotgun over a half-inch bore] then it would be an AoW or SBS. If it was a smoothbore, it would be an AoW. It’s not. It’s a centerfire handgun with a rifled barrel that can chamber a round capable of firing a multiple-projectile round. Just like every other common-caliber handgun.
I don’t think there’s any conflation going on. The point is how broken the law is.
The fact that…
A centerfire handgun with a RIFLED barrel that can chamber a round capable of firing a multiple-projectile round = O.K.
-while-
A centerfire handgun with a SMOOTH barrel that can chamber a round capable of firing a multiple-projectile round = NFA
…is dumb.
So let me get this straight, firing Stingers from my Beretta is all good, but if I switch to .22 shotshells, I’m guilty of exploiting a loophole in the NFA? Nope, sorry. Doc is right… It’s a centerfire handgun with a rifled barrel that can chamber a round capable of firing multiple projectiles. JUST LIKE EVERY OTHER HANDGUN EVER INVENTED.
And oh by the way, if you choose to use what is arguably one of the worst pistol designs in history in a self-defense situation, you’re STILL not guilty of exploiting a loophole in the NFA, but you ARE an idiot.
I don’t think I like the sound of a shotgun with a four-inch barrel. Short of some ridiculously contrived design, that’s not going to have two grips. Somewhere in the 3 to 4 kilojoule range, firing one-handed? No, thankyou. If you did you’d waste a lot of available power. If there’s a visible fireball at all you didn’t get all the available energy out of the powder and into the lead and I’ve got to assume that even with a low-recoil shell, a 4″ barrel is going to make a visible fireball. Now, H&K’s take on our bullpup AR-18, with a suitable magazine housing, bolt carrier assembly, chamber and smoothbore barrel, firing 20-gauge from replaceable box magazines? In that, I could see the point. It’s got a 16.457″ barrel as is (25.43″ in the heavy version with the legs) so you could stick with that for a compact weapon that’s easy to use indoors and you’d have a really effective way to convince the guy still outside your house that he’s glad he let his two friends go first, with enough left over in case he wasn’t even that smart and neither were his other two friends. 15 rounds in the same magazine length, I reckon.
I don’t think I like the sound of a shotgun with a four-inch barrel.
A few months ago, some Federales were at my indoor range with 14″ shotties. Every time they fired a volley, heads turned. Every time someone walked in, they would ask “What the HELL is going on back there?!”
Now cut that barrel down to just barely longer than the shell itself. No, thanks.
Hollywood? Naw, it’s what happens when a room full of legislators with zero gun experience (especially with the shoulder thing that goes up, and the ghost guns that fire 30 bullets in a half-second) try to write laws with no respect for the laws of physics and engineeering, not to mention the lessons of history.
Of course, they make their living writing laws that completely rape the laws of economics, so it’s no great surprise.
If someone shoots another person with a sawed-off shotgun, the feds can’t get them for the shooting (there isn’t actually a blanket federal law against murder. Go ahead, look it up. No, REALLY.), but they CAN get the shooter on federal weapons charges.
This is why the moderates choked down the tax in 1934 – it gave the feds a way to prosecute gangsters who were otherwise not in violation of federal laws. It was a marginally stupid law back in the days when almost all firearms were variations on maybe six different styles, but modern design has moved well beyond the 1930s, and what little sense these laws did make has been absent for many years now. I don’t think people really give much thought to sawing off barrels anymore, and when they do, they are usually small-time enough that the feds aren’t interested in prosecutions.
But yeah, the laws weren’t entirely fucktarded for the entirety of their history. Sorry to those of you with a B&W worldview.
You and I clearly have different definitions of “entirely fucktarded”. What you basically just said is “they didn’t have a law against murder, so they wrote a law against the guns that were being used in murder so that they could charge the suspects with something.” They did this instead of just passing a law against what they actually wanted to prosecute.
In what way is that NOT entirely fucktarded, even at the time it was enacted?
Well, emphasis on the “entirely” part, not the “fucktarded” part. I meant to say there was a sliver of usefulness and/or purpose, rather than being just 100% useless.
As for the laws, there are various arcane reasons why the feds can’t pass generic all-encompassing laws, like burglary, robbery, murder etc. That line has gotten pretty blurry in the two and a half centuries that it’s existed (and yes, things like this are HOW the line got blurry), but the line is between the feds and the states is still there.
Ah, but that statute only covers “federal enclaves” and other places and cases (for example, killing a federal officer is a federal crime) the federal government has exclusive jurisdiction if they choose to use it.
The feds cannot make a common domestic murder in a state illegal all by themselves — there MUST be a nexus between the incident and some actual federal authority.
Shoot a dude on Fort Myer, and the feds own your ass under 18 U.S. Code § 1111.
Walk right outside the fence and shoot the dude in Arlington County, Virginia, and the feds don’t have a thing on you, unless they can establish some nexus (victim was a federal official carrying out his duty, in furtherance of another federal crime, etc.). But Virginia will merrily put your ass on the table for the needle for violating VA § 18.2-31. . .
Of course. That’s how the bipartite legal system works—separate jurisdictions.
But I’m not sure why the feds would even want to take over a case which was a purely state matter—or why it would want to prosecute a murder which didn’t involve some federal angle.
Power. Empire building. That’s why people keep pushing Congress to pass federal laws for things purely domestic to each state, and why Congress has been justifying it (for the most part) by vague references to “affecting interstate commerce”.
Most people (even those I generally agree with politically) do not realize that, outside explicitly national things (naturalization, foreign affairs, warfare, etc.), the federal government is *supposed* to be pretty weak, and 95% of ALL interactions with government citizens would normally have should be at the state and local level. At least as the system was set up (and with very few exceptions, we haven’t actually amended the Constitution to change that theoretical balance of power).
The point being that while there are a lot of very specific examples where they DO ban murder (murdering a foreign official, murder in a federal prison, etc), there is no broad general law against ALL types of murder at the federal level. If there isn’t some kind of federal jurisdiction in that specific instance, it’s a state issue.
Coinneach sed:
“A few months ago, some Federales were at my indoor range with 14″ shotties. Every time they fired a volley, heads turned. Every time someone walked in, they would ask “What the HELL is going on back there?!”
Now cut that barrel down to just barely longer than the shell itself. No, thanks.”
How about a shotgun with a 3 1/2″ barrel? I have one; of course it shoots 3″ .410’s, but it’s still shooting shotgun ammo. Look at Bond Arms derringers. Something you evidently don’t realize about barrel length is that the shorter the barrel the less time and distance there is for the powder to expand, therefore less recoil.
Get a grip — an extended grip — one that gives your little finger something to do — and shoot away with the derringer.
I am going to buck the trend and say that I can see at least SOME role for the Judge and Governor. Mostly as a nightstand gun or a driver’s defensive gun. At the distance from the average bed to the average bedroom door, the multiple projectile loads like the Winchester one should pretty well fill a doorway. Across a car, through a passenger side window, they should be fairly effective . I have yet to see any test information, but I suspect a hollow based lead bullet would upset to fill the shallow rifling better, possibly allowing halfway decent accuracy.
And for those in snake country, a .410 shotshell is more effective than a shotcapsule in a standard pistol cartridge.
A CUSTOM Hamilton Bowen Paradox pistol would be even better, but would not allow standard ammunition.
And the fourth wall as well, apparently. 🙂
Welcome to the wonderful world of loopholes!
People have minds?
And of course, the Circuit Judge shotgun.
I bought one of those just to have a .45 Colt carbine. Shoots pretty good.
Though I note it has the strangest firing sound of any firearm I’ve ever heard!
Actually, they exist because the NFA was passed in 1934 (if you believe John Ross’s explanation in Unintended Consequences, because they had to find SOMETHING to do with all those revenooers that the Treasury Dept had hired!) and this country seems to have a galloping allergy to repealing laws, even rotten ones.
Well, that, and because people are pretty darned clever at trying to get around existing laws.
The NFA was passed to restrict ownership of SBS & SBR, as well as various other items (machine guns included). In order to put some kind of hurdle in place to ownership of these items, the government decided that a $200 tax (or $5 for those pesky sword canes) would suffice. In theory, criminals would balk at the extra $200 and registration of their short barreled weapon and decide not to use those items to commit crimes.
In the real world, criminals laughed at the law, chopped their barrels, did what they wanted to and ignored the laws. Law abiding citizens then shouldered the additional burden on the exercise of their rights, because the only people affected by this tax are the law-abiding (by definition).
Now you tell me what’s fair. If you don’t understand yet, here’s a quick analogy for you:
Jimmy brings gum to school every day. He keeps putting wads of gum in Suzie’s pony tails. Last week they had to cut part of her pony tail out to remove the gum. The school has decided that any kind who brings gum to school has to have a note from their parents and pay $10 (as a damage deposit). Jimmy doesn’t give a shit and brings gum anyway. Who is harmed/affected by this rule? Sally, Tommy, Robert … but not Jimmy.
The problem with arguments that start “laws restricting X only affect law abiding citizens!” is that the counter argument becomes “then why have any laws in the first place?”
That’s not so much a counter argument as a point of discussion for any law: what is the purpose in having this law? (Or as an examination after the law is in place, are the effects of this law actually those which were intended?) It’s not an argument against having any laws at all so much as being open to an examination of actually purpose and results.
The question is “why have laws in the first place?” And the answer is “to set guidelines and punish behavior that is harmful to society.” The answer is not “to try to ban items that might or might not be harmful to society.” A person choosing to harm another person is antisocial; laws exist to deter and punish such behavior. An object has no will and cannot itself be antisocial; laws targeting it are obviously missing the real problem.
I desperately wish we could have a mandated periodic review to see if laws accomplished what they were set to do; maybe six years (one Senate term) after their implementation they could be checked for both effectiveness and side effects, with the law needing to be re-passed at that time to remain in effect. Of course, I’d also like to see the existing code of laws examined and cleaned up, but that’s obviously implausible.
I agree. CongressCritters seem to think their job is to PASS LAWS. IMO it is actually to be there in order to pass laws IF NECESSARY. I would FAR rather see them go through the existing mountains of laws and repeal the obviously badly written, stupid, moronic, insane, or out of date ones. THEN they could think about new ones that might be needed.
Making laws that ended the vast majority of the “Administrative rules” and such that are created by the Bureaucracies in order to enforce the laws Congress makes would be a good start.
When the IRS is NOT RESPONSIBLE for any advice their own staff give to taxpayers, even if it is in writing, THAT is a sign that their Bureaucratic code is far too complex. It is imo a sign of several other things also, but…
No, you are engaging in ‘reductio ad absurdum’.
What people are saying is why impose laws that only penalize the lawful? Since there are alreadfy laws that cover harming people outside of defined self-defense, laws about the length of a weapon are redundant, absurd and useless.
They’re not useless. They were the camel’s nose necessary for the federal government to worm its way into the gun regulation game.
Heh, touche.
The issue is that anything over 1/2″ bore diameter requires a “sporting purpose” exemption to avoid being labeled a “destructive device.”
IOW, it’s the GCA of 1968 rearing it’s ugly head again. The only way you’ll see a change in this status quo is major reform of federal gun control statutes.
“The only way you’ll see a change in this status quo is major reform of federal gun control statutes.”
How about they stay within the confines of the constitution? 2nd Amendment says ‘shall not be infringed’… 10th amendment (paraphrased) says that only those powers written in the constitution are given to the Feds, all other powers to the people and the states.
Since the Constitution does NOT specifically enumerate the power of the Feds to regulate firearms within the country, I hold that the 2nd and 10th Amendments make all federal gun control laws null and void as they violate the constitution.
There is your Federal Gun Control reform.
However, the SCotUS has long held that regulation per se does not automatically equal infringement.
They could declare 680nm light to be the color blue, and it would still be red.
Another court decided once that any such laws which offered partial infringement were unacceptable because SEVERAL laws could each offer partial infringement, where the combination would manifest as complete bans, and no single law could be held to blame… So they struck down a partial infringement as being unconstitutional. I wish everyone had Georgia’s views on guns, if I recall the state correctly.
AND, since it has a rifled barrel and chambers a round that ISN’T a shotgun shell, it EXACTLY meets the statutory definition of a “handgun”, and DOES NOT meet the statutory definition of a “shotgun”. The fact that it can ALSO chamber a “shotgun shell” is irrelevant.
Just as the fact that you can make shot shells for handgun rounds doesn’t transform every handgun into a sawed off shotgun.
Hell, there are a few shotgun shells that are based on RIFLE cartridges, meaning that any rifle (or, say, a T/C Contender or Remington XP100) chambered for those rifle rounds can also fire the shotgun shells.
Nor does it change the fact that the Taurus Judge is simply stupid. 😉
Longtime reader, first time commenter. Working at a gun store, I can say that nearly all of the comics you do that center around visitors to a gun store are 100% true. We get lots of bubba types wanting to get the Judge/Governor for concealed carry or for their wife for home-defense. “It’s better than that 637 Airweight I got yew huney. Yew don’t even gotta aim wit this wun!”
The Judge and all its variants are trash, both in design and build quality. The S&W Governor is just trash in design. The guns are nothing but novelties and god help you if you put 3 inch shells in either one. I agree with yesterday’s sentiment about gun companies dancing on the razors edge of the BATFE. They’ve gone back on decisions before and I really don’t see why they wouldn’t change something like the ‘Arm Brace’ to a prohibited item.
Hell, the gunstore strips are my favorite for that reason as well. It’s been a while since I worked as a gun pimp, but the derp factor is eternally constant. . . 😀
Sorry about the cold. It hit San Diego last month and wiped out my whole office, me included.
Turned me into a snarfling, gurgling, coughing mess for a week and a half.
Drink NyQuil like jagerbombs, sleep hard & pee green.
Legal matters aside, that revolver looks ridiculous.
San Diego? 2014?
That’s no cold, it’s Kellis-Amberlee.
It’s possible, I am a bit of an “Irwin”.
What’s horseshit is that I can’t get one in california
You’re conflating two different things. If the Judge was a 28ga [or any other shotgun over a half-inch bore] then it would be an AoW or SBS. If it was a smoothbore, it would be an AoW. It’s not. It’s a centerfire handgun with a rifled barrel that can chamber a round capable of firing a multiple-projectile round. Just like every other common-caliber handgun.
I don’t think there’s any conflation going on. The point is how broken the law is.
The fact that…
A centerfire handgun with a RIFLED barrel that can chamber a round capable of firing a multiple-projectile round = O.K.
-while-
A centerfire handgun with a SMOOTH barrel that can chamber a round capable of firing a multiple-projectile round = NFA
…is dumb.
Except the comic starts with “shotgun” which is common parlance in the US for “smoothbore, over half-inch bore, fires traditional shotgun shell.”
Now, that under-fitty-cal smoothbores shorter than eighteen inches are AoWs is a different issue, but not really the one the comic directly addressed.
So let me get this straight, firing Stingers from my Beretta is all good, but if I switch to .22 shotshells, I’m guilty of exploiting a loophole in the NFA? Nope, sorry. Doc is right… It’s a centerfire handgun with a rifled barrel that can chamber a round capable of firing multiple projectiles. JUST LIKE EVERY OTHER HANDGUN EVER INVENTED.
And oh by the way, if you choose to use what is arguably one of the worst pistol designs in history in a self-defense situation, you’re STILL not guilty of exploiting a loophole in the NFA, but you ARE an idiot.
I don’t think I like the sound of a shotgun with a four-inch barrel. Short of some ridiculously contrived design, that’s not going to have two grips. Somewhere in the 3 to 4 kilojoule range, firing one-handed? No, thankyou. If you did you’d waste a lot of available power. If there’s a visible fireball at all you didn’t get all the available energy out of the powder and into the lead and I’ve got to assume that even with a low-recoil shell, a 4″ barrel is going to make a visible fireball. Now, H&K’s take on our bullpup AR-18, with a suitable magazine housing, bolt carrier assembly, chamber and smoothbore barrel, firing 20-gauge from replaceable box magazines? In that, I could see the point. It’s got a 16.457″ barrel as is (25.43″ in the heavy version with the legs) so you could stick with that for a compact weapon that’s easy to use indoors and you’d have a really effective way to convince the guy still outside your house that he’s glad he let his two friends go first, with enough left over in case he wasn’t even that smart and neither were his other two friends. 15 rounds in the same magazine length, I reckon.
A 4″ barrel, though? That’s just daft.
I don’t think I like the sound of a shotgun with a four-inch barrel.
A few months ago, some Federales were at my indoor range with 14″ shotties. Every time they fired a volley, heads turned. Every time someone walked in, they would ask “What the HELL is going on back there?!”
Now cut that barrel down to just barely longer than the shell itself. No, thanks.
Hollywood? Naw, it’s what happens when a room full of legislators with zero gun experience (especially with the shoulder thing that goes up, and the ghost guns that fire 30 bullets in a half-second) try to write laws with no respect for the laws of physics and engineeering, not to mention the lessons of history.
Of course, they make their living writing laws that completely rape the laws of economics, so it’s no great surprise.
is it 30 HEAT-SEEKING bullets in half a second, though?
Don’t forget to show him the S&W Governor stainless steel 45 Colt.
If someone shoots another person with a sawed-off shotgun, the feds can’t get them for the shooting (there isn’t actually a blanket federal law against murder. Go ahead, look it up. No, REALLY.), but they CAN get the shooter on federal weapons charges.
This is why the moderates choked down the tax in 1934 – it gave the feds a way to prosecute gangsters who were otherwise not in violation of federal laws. It was a marginally stupid law back in the days when almost all firearms were variations on maybe six different styles, but modern design has moved well beyond the 1930s, and what little sense these laws did make has been absent for many years now. I don’t think people really give much thought to sawing off barrels anymore, and when they do, they are usually small-time enough that the feds aren’t interested in prosecutions.
But yeah, the laws weren’t entirely fucktarded for the entirety of their history. Sorry to those of you with a B&W worldview.
You and I clearly have different definitions of “entirely fucktarded”. What you basically just said is “they didn’t have a law against murder, so they wrote a law against the guns that were being used in murder so that they could charge the suspects with something.” They did this instead of just passing a law against what they actually wanted to prosecute.
In what way is that NOT entirely fucktarded, even at the time it was enacted?
Well, emphasis on the “entirely” part, not the “fucktarded” part. I meant to say there was a sliver of usefulness and/or purpose, rather than being just 100% useless.
As for the laws, there are various arcane reasons why the feds can’t pass generic all-encompassing laws, like burglary, robbery, murder etc. That line has gotten pretty blurry in the two and a half centuries that it’s existed (and yes, things like this are HOW the line got blurry), but the line is between the feds and the states is still there.
18 U.S. Code § 1111 – Murder
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1111
Ah, but that statute only covers “federal enclaves” and other places and cases (for example, killing a federal officer is a federal crime) the federal government has exclusive jurisdiction if they choose to use it.
The feds cannot make a common domestic murder in a state illegal all by themselves — there MUST be a nexus between the incident and some actual federal authority.
Shoot a dude on Fort Myer, and the feds own your ass under 18 U.S. Code § 1111.
Walk right outside the fence and shoot the dude in Arlington County, Virginia, and the feds don’t have a thing on you, unless they can establish some nexus (victim was a federal official carrying out his duty, in furtherance of another federal crime, etc.). But Virginia will merrily put your ass on the table for the needle for violating VA § 18.2-31. . .
Of course. That’s how the bipartite legal system works—separate jurisdictions.
But I’m not sure why the feds would even want to take over a case which was a purely state matter—or why it would want to prosecute a murder which didn’t involve some federal angle.
Power. Empire building. That’s why people keep pushing Congress to pass federal laws for things purely domestic to each state, and why Congress has been justifying it (for the most part) by vague references to “affecting interstate commerce”.
Most people (even those I generally agree with politically) do not realize that, outside explicitly national things (naturalization, foreign affairs, warfare, etc.), the federal government is *supposed* to be pretty weak, and 95% of ALL interactions with government citizens would normally have should be at the state and local level. At least as the system was set up (and with very few exceptions, we haven’t actually amended the Constitution to change that theoretical balance of power).
I’ve never heard of anyone pushing for universal federal laws on violent crimes.
That is a link to the definition of the word.
The point being that while there are a lot of very specific examples where they DO ban murder (murdering a foreign official, murder in a federal prison, etc), there is no broad general law against ALL types of murder at the federal level. If there isn’t some kind of federal jurisdiction in that specific instance, it’s a state issue.
Of course.
Why would the feds want or need to do otherwise? That’s what the states are for.
Coinneach sed:
“A few months ago, some Federales were at my indoor range with 14″ shotties. Every time they fired a volley, heads turned. Every time someone walked in, they would ask “What the HELL is going on back there?!”
Now cut that barrel down to just barely longer than the shell itself. No, thanks.”
How about a shotgun with a 3 1/2″ barrel? I have one; of course it shoots 3″ .410’s, but it’s still shooting shotgun ammo. Look at Bond Arms derringers. Something you evidently don’t realize about barrel length is that the shorter the barrel the less time and distance there is for the powder to expand, therefore less recoil.
Get a grip — an extended grip — one that gives your little finger something to do — and shoot away with the derringer.
Have a blast, I do!
Sorry to derail…. but it would appear twolumps.net is offline? DNS appears broken.
Pulls up fine for me
I am going to buck the trend and say that I can see at least SOME role for the Judge and Governor. Mostly as a nightstand gun or a driver’s defensive gun. At the distance from the average bed to the average bedroom door, the multiple projectile loads like the Winchester one should pretty well fill a doorway. Across a car, through a passenger side window, they should be fairly effective . I have yet to see any test information, but I suspect a hollow based lead bullet would upset to fill the shallow rifling better, possibly allowing halfway decent accuracy.
And for those in snake country, a .410 shotshell is more effective than a shotcapsule in a standard pistol cartridge.
A CUSTOM Hamilton Bowen Paradox pistol would be even better, but would not allow standard ammunition.
At the distance from the nightstand by my bed to my bedroom door, a short-barelled shotgun would kill a Buffy vampire by igniting it with the muzzle flash. From a proper shotgun, at that range the lead would still be inside the shot cup, and birdshot would hit like a frangible slug, making a single ugly crater while buckshot would tear one big, ugly hole through a guy. Even from further than a shot can be taken inside my home, even with a modified cylinder choke, you don’t get doorway-filling spreads. Well, it would fill a doorway’s width if you fired from a shallow angle, almost along the wall, but that’s not an honest way to achieve what people would understand by “fills the doorway.”