THE LETTER OF THE LAW AND THE SPIRIT OF THE LAW

Namely, some early thoughts on how to obey the letter of the Cuomo gun ban while simultaneously spitting in the face of the spirit of the law and confounding it at every turn.

The first step is realizing what the people behind this law are really after. The claim that it is a response to the attack at Sandy Hook elementary school is, of course, dishonest. This isn’t about protecting children, it is about exploiting them, and their murder, to advance the political agenda of the Democratic Party.

Democrats want to disarm you because they don’t trust you, and because they don’t respect your rights.

Their ultimate end is to take away your guns. Period. That is the lone and ultimate objective of Democrat “gun control.”

The Cuomo gun ban is intended to 1. Strip you of weapons that could be used in a revolt against an oppressive government, 2. Limit your ability to defend your home and person, 3. Take away your ability to own modern semi-automatic pistols.

How can you defeat those objectives without violating the letter of the law and getting into trouble? How can you be a safe and secure gun owner without going to jail?

If you own an AR15-type rifle, you are required to register it and yourself with the state within a year. That is, if your gun continues to be an “assault weapon” as defined by New York State.

Many ARs can be reconfigured around the ban by the removal of the pistol grip. In California, where a similar ban exists, a product sold by MonsterMan Grips is popular for this purpose. To avoid having to register, you may want to simply consider buying a MonsterMan Grip, swapping out the pistol grip, and creating a rifle that no longer triggers the New York assault weapon definition.

The sale of assault rifles has been banned in the state, with the intent of keeping tactical weapons out of the hands of free Americans. If you want a rifle that could be a useful tactical weapon, out think Cuomo’s list.

For example, the Ruger Mini 14, often called a “ranch rifle,” is a very nice firearm that shoots the same round as the AR15 and does so quickly and accurately. It is not designed like a modern infantry rifle, but it is very reminiscent of the infantry rifles of World War II, which seemed in their day to do a pretty good job. It’s not scary looking, but it can lay down fire, and the Democrats in Albany are too stupid to realize that.

Another option would be any of the bolt action rifles of World War I, or the solid and friendly-looking Browning Automatic Rifle.

These are all war guns that are street legal. They lack pizzazz and they don’t look very Hollywood, but great-grandpa got the job done with them, and so can you.

Protecting your home is, thankfully, a simple affair and is best done with a one- or two-gun combination.

First and foremost, a pump shotgun. Twelve gauge is the favorite, but 20 isn’t so bad either. Simple, common, innocuous, and deadly as hell. This versatile gun ought really to be everyone’s first buy. You can hunt deer with it, you can hunt birds with it, you can hunt rabbits with it, you can cut burglars in half with it.

The Cuomo ban will take away the flashier guns, and it will take away some of the bells and whistles, but the good-old pump shotgun is the householder’s best friend and it is just as legal as it has ever been.

The second gun worth having is a simple .22 rifle. Unfortunately, the rotary magazine on the Ruger 10/22 may run afoul of the New York law, but the tube magazine on the Marlin Model 60 – and a bunch of others – is specifically exempted.

The Marlin Model 60 is very accurate, holds 14 or 18 rounds, fires very rapidly, and is fun and inexpensive to shoot. You can plink yourself silly, and in a worst-case scenario it could be an adequate service or self-defense rifle. The same is true of other plentiful, legal and inexpensive .22 rifles.

Were you defending your home from an exterior threat with .22 rifle fire, you could maintain a high rate of fire with a legal tubular magazine by simply having two people and two guns. One fires while the other reloads, swapping when the firing gun empties. It’s an ad hoc procedure, and it might take a bit of practice, but on a really bad day, it would be an option.

The intent of the seven-round magazine limit is, clearly, to take modern semi-automatic pistols out of the hands of New Yorkers. Unless manufacturers or the aftermarket start making seven-round magazines, you will be able to buy a new pistol in New York, but you won’t be able to shoot it.

Look at the venerable Model 1911 in 45 ACP. It went to four wars for the United States and remains a popular, reliable and powerful handgun. The design is 100 years old, but the stopping power is second to none.

Those who carry pistols for self-defense can also adapt to the ban by getting in the habit of carrying a couple of extra magazines. Many companies offer devices that let you carry a couple of extra magazines on your belt. That takes your gun from seven rounds to 21, and that equals the biggest pre-ban magazines.

If you have fewer rounds, you have to hit harder with the rounds you have, and anything with the word “Magnum” in its name is going to hit pretty hard. Another benefit of revolvers, they don’t jam.

Though the state hasn’t worked out how it will perform background checks on ammunition buyers, or how it will record and track their purchases, being methodical about your bullet purchases can help keep you below their radar.

Later, when they get their Big Brother system in place, buy small and methodical. Maybe a box or two of shells every payday. Split purchases up between you and your spouse. Build up a stock of ammunition for a rainy day.

And if you go driving on vacation out of state, see if you can’t find somebody on the far side of the state line to sell you some rounds in larger quantities.

If nothing else, you’ll be saving money by buying ammunition whose price is only going to go up.

The hope of the Cuomo gun banners is to discourage legal gun owners, and make it difficult for them to buy and feed guns.

A person who chooses to obey the letter of the law can still circumvent its spirit.

This may be a little off tangent except using loopholes. Here are several instances

- quite a few years back, I worked for MCI in Colorado Springs in the mid-1990’s. MCI being an East Coast company, the executives out East came in one day and issued a decree that no one was to wear blue jeans to work anymore. What everyone did is switch to like black jeans and then they added a caveat that no denim was allowed, period. I can see NY doing a similar thing.

- back in college, I was in a fraternity and the administration would issue edicts and our house and a different one had the reputation of “driving a semi through a loophole”. Of course the administration didn’t have enough intelligence close the loopholes.

Governor Cuomo needs to be voted out like his dad.

I think it would be more helpful for 100,000 NY AR owners to March on Albany in defiance of the law on its first day, fully armed and loaded, with 30 round mags in their ARs.

Tell the lawmakers that they refuse to have their civil rights violated by majority rule and defy the police to do anything about it.

You won’t get 100,000. You might get a few dozen, if their wives didn’t make them get rid of the AR’s before then. But it would still be instructive. The slaughter of those protestors would hopefully demonstrate to conservatives what I’ve been trying to tell them for some time...that somewhere around 90+% of law enforcement will blindly follow the orders of whoever is holding their leash and signing their paychecks. And the other 10% aren’t going to put themselves between the other 90% and the public.

There is no Spirit of the law...... there is only the letter of the law. The letter of the law is undetermined and decided by every session of court.

Whatever laws are passed, I will comply with the letter of the law only, and only until such time as I can do more for our country by following another path. At the top of my preparations list is to (1) buy one or more spare unthreaded barrels or standard, non-folding/non-telescoping stocks as required to avoid the registration requirement in case my (borderline-socialist) state passes a law similar to the unconstitutional NY law, and (2) find other ways of working around similar requirements. I do not wish to be locked up; prisoners cannot do much to defend freedom. But I also do not wish to comply with any commands of an evil dictator that make it easier to take other God-given freedoms from American citizens. Since the firearm is the receiver, so long as a threaded barrel or folding/telescoping stock is not connected to any receivers I might own, I will not not have any so-called "prohibited" semi-automatic firearms with a military cosmetic feature.

Note to any FFL holders: The 20 year requirement for maintaining records could prove problematic, given our accident-prone natures. A "boating accident" with the file cabinet might be a stretch, but it would be a shame if a series of pipe-ruptures or other water accidents caused those records to become unreadable and unrecoverable at the first sign that the feds were starting to collect or subpoena those records to crosscheck registrations. Mold can grow very quickly, particularly if those papers are stored in a continuously damp environment seeded with other molding papers, so I hope every FFL holder will check that their storage is appropriate for the proper maintenance of these records.

> “Note to any FFL holders: The 20 year requirement for maintaining records could prove problematic, given our accident-prone natures. A “boating accident” with the file cabinet might be a stretch, but it would be a shame if a series of pipe-ruptures or other water accidents caused those records to become unreadable and unrecoverable at the first sign that the feds were starting to collect or subpoena those records to crosscheck registrations.”

Many years ago, I asked an FFL what he was going to do with the books he keeps after he retired. He said he kept them in a hen house and it might catch on fire.

However, when Bill Clinton increased the cost of an FFL approx 20 times over, the number of FFL’s in this country dropped like a rock. I do not remember hearing about unfortunate hen house fires all over the county at the same time. I don't remember hearing about any kind of unfortunate occurrences of any kind. I believe that probably 99% of the FFL’s who dropped out turned in their books and they are now in a database somewhere.

As soon as I could I left NY State, back in the 90’s. As you can see it’s only gotten worse as the ne’re-do-wells infest every regulatory body with political connivance.

I wrote this a few months ago, and believe it’s pertinent to this discussion: (p.s. I left it at Bob’s too)

*Legal* is the rule or regulation created by a valid legislature, and applied through the judiciary and administrative edicts of that society, also known as statutory law.

*Lawful* is the authority those rules and regulations have from and on that society, also known as common law.

The first is “the letter of the law” - the second is “the spirit of the law”, and they should, in a *just* society, be equivalent.

We’ve seen countless edicts issued, especially since the 1900’s, that directly undermine the precepts of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, yet all have been labeled as legitimate per the judiciary. Dred Scott, Roe v Wade, Kelo, et al — were all ‘legal’ decisions, but not ‘lawful’.

Defense of one’s family and hunting for food were universally accepted rights at the time of our founding, and are still the retained rights we have today. The Second Amendment was written to preserve the right of citizens to oppose tyrannical government with the same military arms that soldiers might use to oppress them, which is why we had the ‘Kentucky Rifle’ along with the ‘Brown Bess’ musket. The Second Amendment is not a check on crime or hunger; it is a check on government tyranny. Only tyrants fear the private ownership of weapons.

shortstop said: "To avoid having to register ..."

Once you register a particular rifle as an "assault weapon" in Kalifornia, it becomes an assault weapon forever. You must transport it as if it were a concealable weapon.

I decided I didn't want to own a rifle that Kalifornia was going to treat as if it was a nuclear bomb. I also didn't want to give up the ability to take easily detachable normal-capacity magazines, so the MonsterMan Grip was the answer for me.

Some people chose to use the Bullet Button, a device which locks in a ten-round magazine and requires a tool (like the tip of a cartridge) to detach the magazine. This evidently satisfies the law.

The problem with either of these approaches is that it would be very easy to earn a conviction for "manufacturing an assault weapon" by accidently configuring the rifle in an unacceptable manner.

We're waiting on a court case involving a man who has been arrested TWICE for being in possession of an unregistered assault weapon. And TWICE it was eventually determined that the rifle in question WAS NOT an assault weapon as defined in the law.

This law, like the law which allows the police to confirm that an openly carried gun is unloaded, is another infringement of the Second Amendment that pits police officers against citizens. This is a very bad situation and cannot end well.

For any New Yorkers who are faced with being subjected to this law, I would become familiar with www.calguns.net.

These great folks created a flow-chart which can be used to determine whether any particular configuration of rifle is an "assault weapon" under Kalifornia law.

Since the law in New York will be different, including the number of cartridges permitted in magazines, a different flow-chart would have to be created.

It's my understanding that the AR-15 used in the Newtown shooting WAS NOT an "assault weapon" under Connecticut law. That, of course, wouldn't stop the anti-gunners from wanting more gun laws.

I posted on a different thread that I think New York has done us a favor by choosing SEVEN rounds rather than ten as in Kalifornia or FIFTEEN as I believe it is in New Jersey. These jurisdictions will one day have to explain how they all felt a compelling government interest in limiting magazine capacities, but all managed to come up with different numbers.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.