Kurt Hoffman finds some ridiculous assertions about the New Jersey ban on .50 caliber firearms. The vote that was scheduled for last night has been postponed to December, according to ANJRPC:
In response to your calls, faxes, and emails, the New Jersey Assembly on November 17 delayed passage of A2116 (banning most firearms of .50 caliber or larger) and instead amended the legislation in an attempt to respond to gun owner concerns. The amended bill could be considered by the full Assembly as soon as December.
The amendments are currently under review and further alerts will be forthcoming. However, no amount of tinkering can “fix” a gun ban, and A2116 remains fundamentally flawed legislation because it bans handguns and long guns based on the size of the hole in the barrel instead of punishing criminal behavior.
Please continue to contact your Assembly members and oppose A2116. Their contact information is available here.
Hopefully they’ll find better things to do, like fixing the gaping holes in the state’s budget.
Don’t forget Bryan Miller’s tour of the State showing how bad 50cals are. Funny how he knows so much….
I haven’t done to much research into who’s fighting this bill, shooter wish, but I think the flintlock/musket/black powder people are all over it.
I can recall reading somewhere in the past that if New Jersey or any state bans the sale of the .50 caliber firearms, the president and founder of Barrett Firearms, Ronnie Barrett, has said that he will refuse to sell his .50 caliber rifles to any law enforcement agency within that state. I wish all the makers of semi-automatic rifles had developed such a policy back in 1990 when New Jersey enacted its “assault weapon” ban. There surely would have been an uproar among the police all over the state if that had occurred.
What I cannot recall reading anywhere yet is how many crimes in New Jersey have been committed with Barrett .50 caliber rifles or ones like them. My guess is that the number would be zero.
I have no doubt that Barrett will do that–it’s exactly what he did in response to California’s passage of similar legislation. Ronnie Barrett is a personal hero of mine.
If that’s not right, it’s only because of something like someone not permitted to have guns being caught with a .50 cal–I would wager every gun that I own that no one has been killed with a modern .50 caliber centerfire rifle in New Jersey, and I’m pretty confident about extrapolating that to the entire country.
This whole .50 caliber hysteria in New Jersey sure seems like history repeating itself to me.
I have this vague recollection going back about 20 years ago, while I was still in my teenage years, when a legal gun owner in New Jersey used his Ruger Mini-14 rifle in some type of self-defense situation. Does anybody remember this one?
I think this story might have even been about somebody protecting his livestock from predators in Burlington County, because I read about this incident in “The Burlington County Times”, which is a newspaper still in publication today. It was either that, or a homeowner shooting at a burglar, but not hitting him, just scaring him off – I cannot quite remember now.
Anyway, it didn’t seem to take long back then before I then began seeing newspaper editorials about how much more “dangerous” firearms such as the Ruger Mini-14 rifle are, and by 1990, New Jersey became one of the first states to enact a law against “assault weapons”.
This seems to be par for the course in New Jersey – a particular type of firearm first gets demonized in the media with half-truths, exaggerations, and outright lies, then the rabidly anti-gun lawmakers in Trenton draft up a bill against them, and then an equally anti-gun governor signs the bill into law.
I think it is about time the assault weapons ban is repealed in NJ !!
Has anybody ever seen a “New Jersey legal” AR-15 rifle before? It’s so stripped down of its features (muzzle brake, magazine, stock, etc) you can hardly even recognize it as being an AR-15 rifle.
With the pending .50 caliber ban in New Jersey, it’s a much more dire scenario. Even my brother’s muzzle loading flintlock would become illegal with this legislation.
This is a New Jersey legal AR-15
Much too dangerous—it’s not a “smart gun.”
I just took a peek at this Bushmaster M4 Type “Post Ban” Carbine from the link which Sebastian provided above. It doesn’t look quite as pathetic as this other New Jersey legal AR-15 I saw once, simply because Bushmaster was clever enough to alter most of the “offensive” characteristics of a typical M4 configuration (muzzle brake permanently welded in place, telescopic buttstock locked in the outward position, low-capacity magazine) without removing them outright, so as to comply with New Jersey’s 18-year-old “feel good” legislation on those evil “assault guns”.