Chris shares with us some of the Reasoned DiscourseTM, and notes:
As a side note, I’m not a huge fan of hand grenades, personally. I just don’t see an epidemic of hand grenade crime, they are already highly regulated, and I really doubt that you can just go to a gun show and buy one over the counter.
Not something I’m chomping at the bit to get my hands on either (unlike, say, something belt fed), but I think it’s interesting Ms. Japete believes we can just pick them up at any local gun show. Nothing could convince me more her entire field of knowledge about gun shows comes from scary crap she’s read from the Brady folks, and their like.
I’ve never been to a gun show that didn’t have law some law enforcement presence, with the exception of some smaller ones. Who would have guessed a place where people are buying and trading valuable items that criminals want to steal, the promoters might want a cop or two around.
So how, exactly, does Ms. Japete think that a highly contraband object is being sold at gun shows where there is likely to be law enforcement presence?
Hand grenades – the OTHER gun show loophole :)
Just for fun, imagine what would happen if you asked anyone in a booth at a show where you could get some RPGs…
I’ve seen RPG’s and rockets at gun shows. I’ve even seen them for sale in Sportsman’s Guide.
They were movie props and dummy rounds.
Perhaps Ms. Japete is getting her information on hand grenade sales at gun shows from Jimmy Carter’s parapsychologists. When the information is convenient, leftists don’t look at the facts too closely – they’re snakes like that, which would merely be a nuisance, if they weren’t hell bent on owning us.
http://johnrlott.blogspot.com/2010/10/jimmy-carters-psychics.html
Let’s think about the theory that hand grenades are easily available with just a little bit of common sense.
First, with the number of anti-gun activists attending gun shows trying to find a violation of the law; don’t you think this would be trumpeted on the 9:00 p.m. news if grenades were available?
Second, with the large number of gun owners who don’t like ‘evil black rifles’ or ‘don’t see a need for ‘fully automatic’ weapons and are willing to speak up about it; don’t you think they the pro-gun side would also be speaking up about something as dangerous as grenades being sold?
So with just a little bit of common gunsense — we can determine a.) either grenade dealers are so well hidden no one can find them or b.) there just isn’t an issue here.
Like guns, hand grenades lose all their sexiness with familiarity. They are also remarkably simple little weapons that have been in use for centuries. And, unlike in the movies, their kill radius is generally 5 meters or less. They don’t go off like suitcase nukes.
Thirdpower: Hell, a real one at a very large gun show might not surprise me.
I’ve seen NFA dealers are gun shows, and a real RPG or hand grenade is just a Destructive Device, legally.
Same paperwork and transfer fee as a machinegun, yes? (Per round, for things that go kaBOOM, no less.)
I have to wonder when she searched for grenades at that website if she even looked at ANY of the things they were selling. Just posted the link thinking she was right. Or if she knows that search pulls up nothing but butane lighters and lamps. Then expects people to believe her at face value. Either way she’s making a mockery of herself.
“Same paperwork and transfer fee as a machinegun, yes?”
For NFA purposes, yes.
However, explosives are regulated under a whole other set of laws, and explosive destructive devices fall under both the NFA and the Safe Explosives Act. This means you have to meet the requirements to possess explosives, and they’re much more stringent than for any kind of firearm (must have approved storage magazine subject to annual inspection, must have Federal Explosives License, subject to DOT restrictions on transport, etc.), so you are highly unlikely to find a live explosive DD at any gun show.
The idea that there are legal grenades for sale on every streetcorner becomes more insane the more you know about the reality of the law. (I would not be surprised if there were lots of illegal ones floating around, since they’re not uncommon south of the border and they’re pretty easy to smuggle in either overland or by sea, but these are not going to wind up in the hands of your average person or average gunowner, more like gangbanger or actual terrorist. There are also some pre-’68 grenades no doubt still around, since they were totally unregulated until 1968, but after half a century or more I would not trust them to go off when you want them to – or to not go off when you don’t want them to.)