Only A Few Bump Stocks Turned In To Police Despite Massachusetts Ban. That's the latest news from the Bay State, where a new ban on possession of bump fire stocks went into effect on February 1. But a funny thing happened on the way to mass confiscation. Lots of gun owners decided not to cooperate.
Essex Police Chief Peter Silva held up a bump stock that someone turned in this week as the Massachusetts ban on the devices went into effect. “To my knowledge, this is the only one that’s been turned in to date,” he said.
State Police said they received three bump stocks and one trigger crank, as Massachusetts now becomes the first state in the country to make the devices illegal.
We're willing to believe that there are far fewer bump fire stocks and trigger cranks in Massachusetts than there are in, say, Missouri, Georgia or Arizona. But we also have to believe that there are far more than only four of them there.
Which means that while some owners of the stocks no doubt never heard about the new law -- despite a letter sent by the state to all registered gun owners -- far more bump fire stock owners decided to raise a virtual middle finger to their betters in Bean Town and will hang onto their stocks.
Chief Silva says the one man who surrendered his bump stock in Essex this week explained why most are not likely to let go. “He was a little frustrated because of the fact that he’d paid a little over $250 on this piece here, and there was no redeeming value for him on the other side to recover that money.”
(Stop Handgun Violence head John) Rosenthal says that should not be an excuse to hold on to an illegal device.
Right. We can't let a little thing like the Fifth Amendment get in the way of passing a new law that makes criminals out of hundreds, possibly thousands of gun owners without just compensation for their confiscated property.
So lots of Massachusetts owners of these newly-prohibited items have chosen to risk being jailed for 18 months to life if they're caught with a bump fire stock. That's not unlike about 81,000 New Yorkers who decided they prefer not to register their handguns with the state and comply with Andrew Cuomo's latest ploy to disarm lawful gun owners make New York safe again.
As of the deadline, more than 81,000 people – or 20 percent of affected handgun owners in New York – haven't responded to the state's request. But New York State Police spokesman Beau Duffy argues that concern about this gun database has been overblown. He said felony charges are off the table for now. "We're not going to take criminal enforcement action, particularly with those people who were unaware of this re-certification process," Duffy said.
Because enforcing a law would be silly. Not to mention that the State Police will likely find it difficult to round up enough officers for confiscation duty. Following up with those 81,000 gun owners who have refused the state's "request" to register their handguns could get...interesting.
And those 81,000 are only the law-abiding gun owners the state knows about. How many criminals do you think came forward, out of an abiding sense of civic duty, to register their handguns in time to comply with the state's deadline?
So it seems there's a healthy dose of Irish Democracy at play in both Massachusetts and New York. You can be sure there's plenty being practiced in other anti-gun locales like New Jersey, California and Maryland, too. It's almost as if gun control laws are more about the control than they are about the guns. How well has that worked out for them?
Or CT black rifle owners, or a whole sub-group of CA AR owners who made theirs from 80% blanks.
The statists keep up the mantra about registration, poking fun at the "paranoia" shown by lawful gun owners. This type of 'this is now illegal, turn it in or we are coming for you' is yet another example of why gun owners of any stripe should be wary of any registration scheme.