Let's call it, "How Many Guns In My Collection Or Guns I Have Owned Would Be Banned If Sarah Brady Had Gotten What She Wanted From The Klintons."
Via JR comes a reminder of what could have happened in the early 1990s on the gun front had the gun-grabbers not overplayed their hand and gotten their nether regions smacked by the voters: the onerous legislation that came to be known as "Brady Bill II." This is what caught my attention:
"Saturday Night Specials" would be outlawed. They would be defined as:1. A handgun with any parts made of zinc alloy.
2. Any handgun that uses .22 short ammunition. Many guns that use .22 long rifle can also use .22 short, and would thus be banned.
3. Any revolver with a barrel less than 3 inches.
4. Any semi-automatic pistol with combined height and length of less than 10 inches.
5. Any seme-automatic pistol without a "positive manually operated safety device."
That's four of my guns that would be gone right there --
Revolver with a barrel less than 3 inches long: Ruger SP101, 2.25" barrel
Semi-auto pistol with combined height & length of less than 10": Very likely my Kimber Tactical Ultra II -- that's right, friends, that thousand-dollar pistol would have been classified as a "Saturday Night Special."
Any semi-automatic pistol without a "positive manually operated safety device" -- Both of my Ruger P-series pistols.
That's four of my guns gone, and we're not through yet!
All magazines which hold more than 6 rounds would be outlawed. Possession of existing magazines with a larger capacity would be allowed under the same terms as currently applicable to possession of machine guns: a 10-point FBI fingerprint; an expensive federal tax; and possession only allowed if a letter of authorization from the local police chief is obtained.
There would go my other 1911s -- 7-rounders for the .45s, and 8-rounders for the 10mm -- because I'm betting there's no way in hell I could have afforded that federal tax. The smart money says the Bradys would have gotten that tax indexed to inflation, and there's no telling what it could have come to. No doubt the gun manufacturers would have done their best to adapt, but considering the black market that would have come about for guns that could accommodate magazines holding more than 6 rounds, I have no doubt said guns would have been next on the ban 'n' confiscate list. Looks like my current magic number is 7; that's 7 of my guns I'd have had to turn in or face jail time, fines, or whatever those cretins decided the punishment would have been for failure to comply.
And then there are all the taxes and fees that would have come about; Dave Kopel mentions a $300 fee for an arsenal license, where an arsenal is defined as more than 20 firearms or 1,000 rounds of ammunition -- and magazines and parts of the action would have been defined as firearms for the purposes of the bill. This fee would have to have been paid every three years.
Then there were all the various taxes on guns and ammunition, and on another site I saw a mention of fees on range visits as well -- to the tune of almost $100 per visit -- and then there was a mention of no ranges permitted in counties with populations of over 200,000 people. As of 2005, the population of Jefferson County, TX was 243,914 (source). So no more gun club, and Mr. Leger out on Highway 90 would have had to close his range.
Scary stuff to contemplate, indeed, all of it...thank God the voters threw the gun-grabbers out in 1994, as you see what the damn Clintons got through Congress in just a couple of years (the Brady Bill and the AWB). It's frightening to think what they could have done with even another two years.
And, as Kopel says, "It would be interesting to know which, if any, items from the Brady II bill are rejected today by the Brady Campaign or the political candidates which it has endorsed." I'd bet they still support every last one of those items -- they just grew a brain after the 1994 elections and shut up about most of them. Well, most of them grew a brain, that is -- you're still going to find idiots like Josh Sugarmann and the Culturologist with the mail-order degree who think every last one of those items should be the law of the land.
In any event, it's a sobering reminder of what could have been...
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