With high caps officially a “no no” and a registration requirement for AW weapons it will be interesting to see who will and will not turn them in, who might actually fight and if LEOs are willing to round them up for prosecution for non compliance.
Given their recent willingness to put it to out of state visitors who incorrectly believed their CCW would be recognized in NY, I think they will gleefully go full gestapo on their own citizens.
I doubt we will see any major backlash, but there might be a couple sparks.
They were talking about confiscation but probably realized they need them all registered first so they actually know who has them. Give it a few years, and once they get their list together they will just wait for another shooting to have an excuse to go get them.
This is why you don’t register what you have. They ARE talking about confiscation but registration has to happen first.
Please excuse my ignorance, but most guns are already registered, thats what’s the BATF (forgot exact nomenclature) paperwork is for. I think it is naive to believe that this info hasn’t been logged into a database to be used when deemed appropriate. I wonder how many dealers are going to practice civil disobedience and destroy firearm records?
Some will register, some will not. Some have no clue about the new law; some don’t care.
Nothing will be enforced unless someone gets arrested for something else, and the DA simply adds the charges. Essentially, there won’t be bands of LEO’s going after unregistered AW and people who load more than 7 rounds at the range.
Remember the Left. This is simply feel good legislation. They passed it, they feel good, now they can go on to do the next perverted act that feels good.
You would be incorrect, except of course for states like NY which have some form of state registration.
ATF has no idea who owns what and once a dealer sells it to Person A if that person sells or trades it that’s the end of it.
ATF has no idea which one of my customers owns what, that is because this information has never been provided to them.
If a gun is used in a crime, ATF has to start with the manufacturer, they tell him what distributor it went to, that distributor tells them what dealer it went to and it may go to three or four FFLs before it is sold to a retail customer requiring a 4473.
ATF will then request that SPECIFIC 4473 and will contact that person and inquire as to what became of that firearm.
If they still have it, obviously they are a good candidate for a suspect.
That person might have also sold it to a guy named “Fred” they met at a shooting club and they may or may not have contact info.
The firearm may have already been reported stolen and that ends the trace.
But there is no magic database like on tv shows. The only time ATF has physical records is when a FFL goes out of business and the bound book and 4473s are turned over to ATF.
The storage requirement for 4473s is 20 years so in theory they can be destroyed after that although ATF would really, really, really prefer that you didn’t.
It is a crime to deliberately destroy 4473s prior to that 20 year requirement.
So if you want to guarantee your 4473s can be shredded, make sure your FFL is still in business 20 years later.
I am talking about the rifles that previously did not need to be registered which now have to be registered.
They are making, after a year, possession of magazines over 10rds a Class B felony which has a minimum sentence of 8 years and a maximum of 25 years. Those magazines were grandfathered but now they are being forced to get rid of them anyways.
They will ‘ungrandfather’ assault weapons, too, that were legally owned prior to this bill.
4473’s are not as good as a central database but they are going through dealer’s records looking for people who have bought multiple semi auto rifles and handguns then paying them a visit wanting to see the persons firearms.
They also enacted multiple long gun reporting on Southern border states by regulation they drummed up out of nowhere. The multiple handgun reporting requirement was in the 68 GCA…so why did they need a law for handguns but not for rifles?
Yes…the 4473’s are not tied to the current owner, per se, but they ARE using them right now. They are certainly far better to the ATF than having nothing to go on at all.
You are correct and I am aware of the few related incidents recently cited. But these things are also regional. ATF is far more aggressive in certain zip codes than others.
I have some serious collector customers who have bought more guns than I’d care to say and ATF has never copied 4473s for that individual and certainly never made contact with them. I did have one inspector ask me about the person during a compliance inspection and I simply described them as an advanced collector with good income and that was the end of it.
Now if I was a FFL in NY, CA or on a border state things might have gone differently.
ATF could attempt some massive effort to have all manufacturers report every qualifying firearm that was sold in NY and then attempt to trace each and every one to the final user. This of course could prove to be a massive effort and that is why they prefer to implement a registration where you come to them.
The problem is if you do NOT register a rifle you have contraband. You can’t take it to the range anymore because the range will want to see your paperwork. If you go out shooting in the woods and somebody calls the cops, they are going to want to see your paperwork. If you get pulled over and the rifle is in your trunk, they are going to want to see paperwork. You basically become outlaw and have no place to shoot your guns that you went outlaw for in the first place.
This is basically what CA did. You either registered them or became a criminal. And then it was just a simple matter of every time they came across an unregistered firearm the arrested the owner. It’s no different from being caught with a kilo of cocaine but it’s a lot less lucrative and drug dealers are generally shown more consideration than gun owners in CA and NY.
Additionally as FFLs go out of business in NY and turn over their books, I’m sure ATF agents will sit down and go through each entry for regulated rifles and match them against the registered list. But I don’t think NY has the resources to send officers to every FFL and look at every 4473 to try and find people who didn’t register. I’m assuming this would be massive.
Someone that only shoots on private property, where the nearest neighbor is about 500 m away and is gun-friendly, shouldn’t have a problem. Unless I . . . uh . . they get caught with it in-route. But if you obey the traffic laws and know your rights, how could a routine stop turn into a full vehicle search?
“Sir, you have a tail light out. Mind if I search? Pop the trunk please.”
I keep talking about this with people, nobody fucking believes me. “They don’t wan’t to take your guns” Oh really, yeah, true fucking fact huh?
And @ SMETNA, any little thing can set some cops off. I got fully searched by the side of the road in the freezing goddamn cold because a friend of mine smoked cigarettes in my truck and i was underage, the cop was “looking for contraband” o.O
So, maybe the scent of hoppes and gunpowder? a little residue on the cheeks? a loose casing floating around in the car? When the law is expanded to cover so much more, any little thing like that could be probable cause in the eyes of a cop with ill intentions.
I could see (and though it would be terrible for the gun industry, on some level sort of hope for) a spike in the number of protesting FFL’s quitting and having all manner of mysterious fires/accidents destroying their records in the event of a registration scheme on a national level-probably something to do with global warming causing spontaneous combustion.
