My kind of tea party.

I have been a libertarian, to varying degrees and levels of enlightenment, for all of my adult life and probably most of my childhood as well. There is not really a defining event I can point to as a road to Damascus moment regarding politics. If there is one thing, however, that I can hold up as a shining example of why I believe that government is inept, corrupt, and generally full of more shit than the third member of the human centipede, it is the National Firearms Act. The NFA is quite possibly the worst law in America. It simultaneously violates the constitution, endangers human health, gives bureaucrats massive power, places unreasonable burdens on civil rights, bans or heavily restricts otherwise common products, and does all of this while not actually performing any useful function. Add in the fact that we have had this dumpster fire on the books for over EIGHTY FUCKING YEARS and the prospects for recovery are grim. In order to keep this post out of the novella section, I won’t go too deeply into details, but the cliff notes version is that rifles with barrels less than 16 inches in length are considered ‘short barreled rifles’ and are a royal pain in the ass to buy and make. They cost an extra $200 dollars per gun to register and registration can take up to a year. Silencers are also similarly restricted because… reasons? I honestly don’t know. I guess they just hated gun owners so much they wanted them all to blow their eardrums out. If you want to know more the Wikipedia page is linked above.

The gun on the left is considered a short barreled rifle, subject to heavy regulation and a federal felony for unlicensed possession. The gun on the right is an AR pistol, legal almost everywhere with no special permits.

Fortunately, like most bad laws, the NFA is complex and poorly written. This allows freedom loving capitalists to find loopholes to exploit for fun and profit. And exploit them we have! Using just a bit of technical understanding and a careful reading of the law, some clever individuals have found suitable workarounds for most of the restrictions that the NFA has created. The most common of these available are AR/AK pistols. As I stated before, if you have a rifle with an overall length less than 26 inches or a barrel less than 16 inches, it is considered a sbr. If the gun does not have a stock, however, then the ATF has decided in their benevolence that this is a pistol. I wrote about these kinds of pistols in my last post so I won’t repeat myself too much, but these can be extremely fun and useful guns if you need something handy and compact with lots of firepower. By themselves, these guns are fairly awkward to handle, but if you attach a single point sling or an arm brace (more on that below), they become extremely viable systems. They are very common and affordable. You cannot, however, just take a normal rifle and cut it down. If you make a pistol out of a rifle, then by law you have made a SBR or AOW even if you remove the stock. It has to come from the factory as a pistol or you have to build it as a pistol from parts. You can take a pistol and make into a rifle though, and then take that rifle back to a pistol with no problems. The other thing you cannot do is attach a vertical foregrip to a pistol, ANY pistol. Doing this makes the gun an AOW in the eyes of the ATF and you go to prison. Angled foregrips, however, are completely kosher. I told you this law was retarded.

I mentioned before that a SBR is a gun that has a barrel length less than 16 inches or an overall length less than 26 inches. What if you have a gun with no stock, a barrel length less than 16 inches and an overall length greater than 26 inches? Is it a rifle? Nope. Is it a SBR? Wrong again. Is it a handgun? Not that either. What you have is a class of weapons known simply as ‘firearms’. This is a relatively new breed of gun that first came to the forefront when a company named Franklin Armory debuted their XO 26. It is an AR with an 11 inch barrel, no stock, and a foregrip. Normally foregrips on this type of gun are verboten, but because it is longer than 26 inches it is beyond the purview of the NFA as long as you don’t put a stock on it. The vertical foregrip doesn’t sound like much but it actually does make a gun like this a lot easier to shoot. Plus it’s a nice fuck you to the gov, which is a reward unto itself. You don’t have to buy that version, you can make your own if you like. As long as the gun was not originally a rifle, it can be made into a firearm. Just make sure the overall length is greater than 26 inches. 

The remake of 'Hobo With a Shotgun' looks kind of lame.

Dual wield for extra DPS.

Okay, so a foregrip on an AR is probably not the most exciting thing ever. How about a short barreled pistol grip shotgun? As I said before, a shotgun must have a barrel length greater than 18 inches. Unlike rifles, there are no pistol loopholes in regard to smooth bore guns, so you can’t simply build a stockless shotgun and call it a pistol. BUT, if you have a shotgun with an overall length greater than 26 inches, a barrel length less than 18 inches, and no stock, you officially have a ‘firearm’. Enter the Mossberg Shockwave. This is a pump action 12 gauge with a 14 inch barrel. The secret is the shockwave birds head grip. The grip sticks out almost inline with the barrel, unlike a traditional pistol grip. This grip is what gives the gun the overall length needed to beat the NFA and escape regulation. They still lack a stock so they are not the most stable shooting platform, but they are definitely useful at close range, and they are short enough to be holstered like a large handgun. They would make an excellent car gun or even home defense weapon. I plan on picking one of these up when prices level off.

Now let’s get into some really fun stuff. How do you get around the machine gun ban? When you get right down to it, the functional difference between a semi auto gun and a full auto one is simply a matter of how fast you can pull the trigger. Some of you may be familiar with a technique known as bump firing, in which you hold a gun in such a way that the recoil of the gun causes your finger to bump the trigger, resulting in what appears to be fully automatic fire. A company figured out a way to design a stock that slides freely and allows you to bump fire the gun while actually controlling and aiming it. Enter the slide fire stock. They make models for ARs and AKs that start around $200. It is a bit gimmicky and it takes some practice to get used to it, but it does work. It’s still more than I am willing to pay for such a device, but anything that make gun grabbers shit their pants can’t be a bad thing. 

So slide fire stocks are a good first step, but let’s take things to the next level. The legal definition of a machine gun is any gun that fires more than 1 bullet per motion of the trigger. The ATF considers pulling the trigger and releasing the trigger as two separate motions. Some clever guy decided to make a trigger that fires when you pull the trigger and then fires again when you release the trigger. The result looks something like this:

That is not a full auto AR. It is a binary trigger. It is completely legal and stamp free. I can hear you creaming your panties from here. They are pretty expensive though, coming in around $400 for just the trigger pack. It is considerably less expensive than even the cheapest full auto gun, however, and much more accessible. Franklin Armory was the first company to come out with a binary trigger (I think their unofficial slogan is ‘We love to fuck with the ATF’) but there are now a few of them on the market.

Now it’s time to talk about a slightly more controversial topic: pistol arm braces. These caused quite the stir when they were released a few years ago. They are designed so that a person who is disabled or has weak arm strength can put a brace on an AR pistol, slide his or her arm into the brace, and hold and fire the pistol more easily. If you remember my last post, I showed you a picture of one. They look a lot like a stock. They also work a lot like a stock, too, if you shoulder them. When these first came out, the ATF issued an opinion letter that stated that these were not considered stocks and would not make your pistol into a SBR no matter how you used them, as long as they were not modified. Thousands of these braces were sold, most of them probably not to disabled veterans. People declared it the death of the SBR. Videos popped up showing smiling people happily shouldering and firing AR and AK pistols while wiping their asses with the ATF logo*. The world was at peace. Then people got a little reckless. Other companies came out with their own, more stock like designs. People started modifying the braces, increasing their lengths, making them collapsible and foldable. The tipping point was when a company called Black Aces Tactical actually put one on a short barreled shotgun and got it declared as a firearm. The ATF took the unusual step of specifically articulating that people were not allowed to shoulder these guns. Why were these guns singled out? Well, they weren’t. A few weeks after that declaration, the ATF sent out a new open letter stating that, in their opinion, touching a gun equipped with an arm brace to your shoulder was redesigning a pistol into a short barreled rifle, and that anyone doing that was making an unregistered SBR. Was the ruling arbitrary, capricious, completely devoid of legal backing, and nigh impossible to enforce? Of course it was, it’s the fucking ATF! Despite this, few people wanted to risk their freedom over such a thing, and the pistol brace craze was over… until recently. Last month, in a stunning bout of clarity and common sense, the ATF reversed their reversal, and once again you can shoulder your arm brace like a boss. Being the ATF, they may change their mind again at any point, so buyer beware.

Silencer? What silencer?

The last thing on this list requires a bit of explanation. Say you’re an environmentally conscious gun owner. I mean a really environmentally conscious one. You only use lead free, shade grown ammo, you only buy guns made from non old growth forests, and you ensure your targets are made from 100% recycled paper. Yet that still is not enough to soothe your aching guilt. Well, my friend, you need a solvent trap. Simply thread one of these cylindrical tubes full of tiny cups onto the end of your rifle and it automatically catches all 8 drops of the used, contaminated gun cleaner that washes out of your barrel during cleaning, ready for proper disposal at your nearest hazardous waste facility. What’s that? It looks like a silencer? Gee… I guess it does. Huh, that is one strange and completely uncanny coincidence. It can’t be a silencer, though.. I mean, you would have to own a drill press and at least 1 extra long drill bit to make it into a functional silencer, and everyone knows that kind of technology is far out of the reach of your average yokel. Okay, okay, fine, how bout this: For a more heavy duty option, you can buy one of these handy adapters that let you thread a common automotive filter right onto the end of your gun. That thing will hold enough solvent to last a lifetime, and there is simply no possible way that an oil filter could be used as an effective silencer. Nope, no way at all.

All kidding aside, don’t fuck with these. You can probably bullshit your way through even the most flagrant violation of one of the other rules listed above. It’s not like cops are going to pull out a tape measure and check your barrel length if they see you at the range. But there is no way on God’s green earth you are fooling anyone into thinking that big fucking can on the end of your gun is anything other than a silencer. You can buy these online and at most large gun shows, but ffs just say no. Assuming the republicans pull their heads out of their own asses sometime in the next 18 months (asking a lot, I know) we might even get silencers off the NFA list. Until then, you’re just going to have to wear ear plugs and deal with it like we all have. Oh yeah, and for the record, I am not a lawyer so don’t take anything I just said as legal advice.

*Not really.