Most of the transferrable Uzis in the US are not factory original guns, but rather semi autos that were converted and registered as machine guns in the US before 1986 (when such activity was legal). There were several different ways to do this, with the two main ones being the registered bolt route and the registered receiver route. Today we are looking at what these different methods were, and what someone looking to get an Uzi ought to know about them.
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What I learned from this presentation is that that the ATF and the NFA simply have to be made to go away.
Life choices can be rough. Having the foresight to become wealthy should have occurred to those who dreamed about machine gun ownership. If only those meddling kids from the government hadn’t become involved then we would all be on easy street.
Wait for the howls coming from all the collectors if the whole regime of machinegun regulation gets taken down… It’ll be epic, and schadenfruedally delicious.
The whole basis of current firearms regulation relies upon the solemn agreement that the 2nd Amendment doesn’t mean what it says. Take that away, and the whole house of cards collapses. And, I suspect that there are going to be more and more people supporting that outcome, as time goes on.
I mean… What difference does it make, to have machineguns regulated into non-existence for the average person, while simultaneously refusing to properly deal with criminals? Criminals who pay no attention to such laws?
Do note the practical effect of those so-called “Glock switches” becoming ubiquitous on the open market: Ain’t nobody on the “bad side” of the law paying attention to the rules, so why the hell should anyone else?
Have you seen anyone actually prosecuted and given significant prison time for owning or using one of those switches? I’m unaware of any; they usually plea-bargain those charges away, so what’s the point of going after guys like Larry Vickers for violations of the law if you’re going to led Homey da Crip slide…?
The whole shoddy edifice is about due to collapse from the inherent internal contradictions in it all, and I, for one, won’t be a damn bit sorry. If you’re not going to enforce the law evenly and fairly, then why do we tolerate that law in the first damn place?
I expect a “softening” at first. Like maybe three-shot burst control being OK but full-auto still being verboten.
Expect to get the kludged-up triburst cam setup of the M16A2. Which actually is probably the least-worst one in terms of mechanical reliability.
Yes, it’s was designed by an effing dimwit, but at least it is consistent in its dimwittery.
clear ether
eon
The latest issue of the American Rifleman magazine is pointing out that the NFA was created as a taxing scheme by FDR and his cronies. The recently passed “One Big Beautiful Bill” has removed the tax for silencers and short barreled rifles but they still remain regulated. In the inevitable court challenge, if silencers and short barreled rifles are removed from the NFA in light of the zero tax logic, will machineguns and other “non-zero-tax” NFA items remain regulated? I predict Supreme Court Justices (if the case were to get that far) would be happy to maintain the incongruity of allowing the NFA to remain in place.
We have very little choice, between cancel culture, debanking, and an FBI weaponized against domestic dissent. Even right wing publishers and websites pretend we can vote away what had become a defacto police state
Every empire ever is a police state.
The real question is where the policing takes place: In a functional society, the majority of the “policing” takes place in the minds of its members, who willingly follow the guiderails set up by their culture and upbringing. In a true “civilization”, the actual civilization wells up from within its membership. You simply cannot impose it from without; you try, and what you wind up with in the end is a bigger mess than you started with when you set out to do it, once you remove the external coercion.
It’s only when those internal things aren’t present that you need to bring in “external policing”, and the degree to which you have to do so is revealing about what is actually going on in that society. You need draconian social controls, with extensive policing? Then there isn’t much in the way of actual internal impulse control or governance in the population you’re discussing.
Likewise, when you see a society transitioning from high levels of internal self-control to a true external police state, there’s usually a bunch of crap going on like we see present in today’s Britain, where they’re arresting people for “wrongthink” while ignoring child rapists.
The imposition of external policing via gradual destruction of the social norms and values is a leading indicator that the people running things in a given society have lost the bubble, if they ever actually had it.
@Kirk;
In Futuropolis his book on architecture do’s and don’ts, SF author Robert Sheckley defined a police state as one in which if the authorities make a mistake, they apologize, but if you, the citizen, make a mistake you end up dead.
He rather overlooked the history of such states that 86’d their own citizens to cover up the state’s mistakes.
The one thing that no dictatorship or police state can afford is to appear to be anything less than perfect.
Once they look error prone, it’s “Emperor with no clothes” time and the State is probably doomed.
Depending on how high a casualty count they are willing to create to retain power, that is.
clear ether
eon
@eon,
All too many of the people I ideate as the “idjit class” are the sort of magical thinkers that believe you can impose civilized behavior on entire populations, or somehow change that behavior across those populations absent doing the difficult work of imparting civilizational standards and behaviors through careful parenting. This sort of magical thinking was on display back before the last financial crisis, when the Bush administration made believe that you created middle-class values and behavior by making it possible for everyone to buy a home…
In the military context, it’s on display with that utter felching moron Shinseki, who apparently believed in magical black berets that would somehow make every supply clerk and trucker over into Rangers, without the intermediary steps of careful selection and difficult training that challenged people into being the paragons of soldiering that every Ranger supposedly represented…
The real deal is that the majority of what makes for a civilized and cultured society actually wells up from within, from the participants. The participants aren’t actually the sort of people demonstrating what you see as civilized behavior? Then, they’re not actually going to display that behavior, once you take away the armed guards. Those bastards in prison are being who they are, mostly; reform is an illusory ideal, unlikely to be achieved by more than a tiny percentage. You’d be far better off just doing what the old-timey Brits did, and either hanging or transporting everyone displaying poor impulse control.
That’s actually what I think was the true reason that Britain was this little green bastion of civilization all those years: All the troublemakers were sent away or killed off. Gonna be interesting to observe what the descendants of all those who managed to pass the test make of what’s going on currently. I suspect that Merrie Olde Englande is in for some “interesting times”…
@kirk 2
Shinseki was the flip side of Slim.
Slim understood “soldiering” and what it took to make a soldier. Shinseki didn’t have a clue, and neither do any of his “contemporaries” like AF Gen. Brown, USA Gens. Hamilton & Milley,
USA Col. Vindman, etc.
I still maintain that any O-6 or higher whose left breast pocket has a billboard of ribbons worthy of Idi Amin should be retired immediately for the good of the service.
cheers
eon
@eon,
I have this thesis that nobody actually running our military or a lot of other institutions in this country (or, any other, for that matter…) really, truly understand how those institutions work.
Examples abound… Witness the Army’s attempt at a Regimental system. Or, COHORT.
Both were akin to ideas half-understood and copied badly, as though they were institutional M60 machineguns. Who the f*ck took even a cursory look at the benefits and disadvantages of the British Army’s regimental system and then thought “Yeah! We ought to do that!!”, and then aping only the very surface forms of the whole thing and somehow managing to make things worse. Same with COHORT; how the hell are you going to take a system meant for a long-term conscript force where the brigades are going to be kept together for life, through all the careers of the participants, and then think “Yeah, this is just the thing to manage our long-service volunteers…”
Neither of those two things worked worth a damn, and just like the black beret fiasco? Come up with and implemented by people who shouldn’t have been put in charge of a gang-bang at a brothel.
Yet, somehow… They were.
Maybe so. But it’s sheer bad manners for the state to sneer ‘All the Big Brothers do it!’ At least give us a Snickers bar OK?
@Martin Tyrsegg,
I suspect that we’re witnessing one of the unexpected outcomes of “the elites” outsmarting themselves.
Note that there is a worldwide “birth dearth” occurring right now, and that the proles aren’t breeding the way the elites have come to count on. Oddly enough, you make people miserable, they don’t want to have kids. So… They don’t.
This is all the result of the elites failing in their function as the leaders and managers of society; if they were doing their jobs, then you wouldn’t have fertility rates hovering around 1.4, and people would be happy to have kids. As it is, they’ve set the conditions such that nobody wants to, and… Here we are.
It’s going to be ugly, but it’s also going to be darkly humorous watching it all eventuate. The former Soviet Union is likely to be the first major casualty of it all, as Putin seems to be in the delusional mindset of his Communist and Romanov predecessors, believing the lies about Russia having endless manpower. Guess what? Even Russia couldn’t sustain the Communist loss rates, not over the time span we’re talking. Observe what happens over the next few decades in Russia; it’s my estimation that the million-plus casualties of the Ukraine adventure are going to be the final millstone around the Russian nation’s collective neck, and you’re going to observe the whole shambolic wreck finally spin into destruction. It’d be one thing if someone in Moscow recognized that sucking all the wealth out of the countryside was a long-term loser of an idea, but… They still don’t get it: All those shattered wooden villages and towns across Russia? Those are the leading indicators for where the whole enterprise is going, and just as the Romanovs sucked Novgorod dry and beggared the wealth of that entire region, so too will go the rest of Russia.
World-wide, the same things are happening everywhere. You can’t mandate unhappy people to form families and raise kids, and until someone figures out how to build artificial wombs and successfully raise human beings in creches like so many battery-farm chickens, the various “elite” assholes are in for a bit of a shocker, much as the feudal overlords of Europe were, after the Black Death.
Which, the more I think about it, was actually a good thing that perversely enough led to much of our modern civilization. Breaking the aristocrats did more for human advancement than anyone would like to admit… And, I see a lot of parallels with today’s birth dearth. Some day, not that far off, the elites are going to try and saddle up for a major war, and then they’re going to realize that the manpower just isn’t there for that.
Take care of your people, and they’ll take care of you. This was the essential lesson of my military career, and it’s also what is most critically lacking thing in the hearts and minds of the assholes we’ve foolishly put in charge of it all. They’re going to learn a lot of hard lessons in a very short time, I suspect.
Kirk, western misantrophic capitalist establishment is not worried about having less workforce, as they are relying on importing sufficient number of “brownies” from asiatic impoverished, but population inflated states. It is happening in Europe drastically already, I see it every day on the street, and only 6,7 years ago there was none of it. If the domicile population (eventually) starts compalaining, they can and will always pit the two groups against each other.
Which is what are they doing now with all the “woke” and similar BS that is aimed at destroying the “nuclear” family and proliferation of dysfunctional, unhappy and aimless individuals who are by themselves weak and dependent. Thats the police state of 21st century for you.
As for the future of Russia, unhappy as it is, one could only agree with all these analysis. Even if the war is stopped, rus. people would be faced with grim prospects that all of their aggresion was in vain as there will not be an economic miracle as what countries like Germany and Japan had, just more poverty and misery and licking the wounds of so many lost for negligible gains (sorta like what happened with germany after ww1)
Then, options on the table will be of; starting an internal revolution to change the system and redistribute the internal wealth (like in 1917) or starting a new, renewed war of aggression, stabbing westward to now finally gain the flawless victory that will lead the glorious (but already much battered) russian people to wealth and happines. Which of course (victory) is not gonna happen, and would drag whole Europe into a war, when EU countries start posting the troops into Ukraine as a safeguard. Maybe or probably (afraid to think about it) even a combination of these 2 would happen.
@Kirk: I hope you are as good a prognosticator of geo-political events as are are a sage of the use of machine guns. Personally I envision outcomes far darker. I would just as soon be wrong.