I had a conversation recently in the real world with a gun nut friend in which I basically said that gun rights folks were sort of like prisoners. If you’ve ever worked in a prison, you know that the prisoners have nothing to do all day long except plot how to circumvent the rules. And, if you work there, you have a job to do while they figure out ways to squeak out an extra privilege or whatever. And that’s what most did. Why not? Nothing else to do! The folks watching you have jobs to do.

Gun rights folks, while similar in circumstance, are different in motivation. They want to figure out the rules and exactly how they comply with them because they can. Or they want to prove how stupid gun laws are. Or because fuck you.

And gun rights folks also have the occasional person, who’s rather like the prisoner who thinks life is better if you accept your fate and suck up to the guards, that wags their finger when a firearms law hack presents itself.

I was rather surprised that a gun blogger, commenting on the SB-15 and tax avoidance, opined that: But to those people I overheard saying, Yay! Now I can have a short barreled rifle without the paperwork!  I say, Shame on you! This part of the post was as surprising to me as the hideous grammar and spelling.

Shame on me? What on earth for? Those that snatch up a SB-15 for giggles (like me) are complying with the law. And, as the owner of a tax stamp collection, I can tell you it’s a pain in the ass to get your SBR on. I don’t mind paying the tax. I mind the ridiculous bureaucracy-imposed 18 month plus waiting period that has grown substantially worse under the current administration. And I mind the national gun registry that is the NFRTR. And I mind an administration that doesn’t like gun owners very much. Or, I could hop on the internet and have a SB-15 shipped to my house overnight.

For a gun that’s just going to be a plaything anyway, it’s easy math.

So, yeah, from this inmate, I’m cool with anyone dropping their SB-15 on a sub 16 inch gun. Hell, I’m going to build four of them before ATF changes it’s mind or whatever it calls that arbitrary rules making apparatus it uses. And you should too.

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