Saturday Morning and NOT Shoveling Snow!

That's because we shoveled about a foot-and-a-half of concrete-heavy spring snow yesterday!

Sigh...

We're about a month out from moving to the new Secret Hidden Bunker, where there is exactly zero snow. Solar goes in next week, along with the rest of the water system. BTW, the well-cistern system cost about twice our worst case projections. Septic is in...propane systems in place and functioning. Haven't even addressed the workshop in the garage yet...my plan is to model it on Jerry Miculek's gun workshop. Jerry's is designed for production of a variety of ammunition...mine sort of grew up around my first Dillon progressive press.

RE: Yesterday's comments that SBR laws are stupid, as a matter of fact, they are! They don't actually make any sense, largely because they are nothing but the vemiform appendix of a larger, much more restrictive law. The 1934 Firearms Act as drafted applied to all handguns and any other firearm that could be concealed, short barreled rifles and shotguns. Except that a huge handgun regulatory scheme/ban was politically untenable and quickly disappeared. Nobody thought or cared that the rules strictly regulating the SBR and SBS remained on the books.

The laws are purely arbitrary. Even though both Marlin and Winchester cataloged 14- and 15- inch versions of their lever guns, the Feds chose a 16-inch barrel length for rifles. The 18-inch barrel length for shotguns was even more capricious...as we noted on GUN STORIES, the really definitive American firearm of the mid-19th and early 20th centuries was not the single action revolver or the lever action rifle, but the lowly double-barreled shotgun.

Unlike in England and on the Continent, where the double-barreled shotgun had evolved into works of art for the landed gentry, the shotgun in America was a proletarian tool, the most common gun on the western expansion and a useful tool in rural America. Most of these shotguns may have started out with Long Tom barrels, but with the exigencies of rural and frontier life, the barrels quickly yielded to the other indispensable tool of rural America, the hacksaw. [Admit it...cant you hear Joe Mantegna saying those words?] An the time of the passage of the 1934 Firearms Act, there were quite literally tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of non-conforming shotguns in routine use in America. They're still turning up in closets, back rooms and forearms collections, often to the detriment of the finders.

So the 1934 Firearms act became the perfect prototype for future gun controllers — it criminalized perfectly legal common weapons that had been in use for decades; the legal standards were purely arbitrary (trust me, there's no difference in the lethality of a 17 3/4-inch shotgun barrel versus an 18-inch barrel), and penalties for violation were draconian. Oh yeah, and law accomplished exactly...wait for it...wait for it...nothing. Plus, it kept all those "Revenue Agents" put out of business by the repeal of Prohibition working at something equally worthless.

And don't even get me started on suppressors!

Since the arrival of the Thompson Center Contender in the 1960s (and the subsequent 1990s Supreme Court decision), the spectacular success of the .410 pistol platform and the rise of the AR and AK pistol platforms, the water is even murkier than before. Keep in mind the Supreme Court ruling on T/C...possession of parts that can be assembled into an illegal configuration is legal if the parts can also be assembled into a legal configuration. By my reading, that means if you have a pistol AR upper, you must have the parts to assembled a legal pistol (e.g., a lower that has been or can be assembled as a pistol). DO NOT have a pistol upper and no pistol lower! Just like no folding Contender/Encore stock unless you are also in possession of a rifle-length barrel.

The intelligent thing to do, of course, is to remove the appendix. Not gonna happen, though.