H.B. 1022: I'll take "Dumb Laws" for $500, Alex...

Anybody with the reading skills of a five-year old and a modicum of self-honesty now understands that the Assault Weapons Ban (better termed the "Scary-Looking Guns" ban) of 1994 was a complete flop. It had zero effect on crime, affected guns that were hardly ever used in crimes, and attempted to come up with a list of largely cosmetic features by which a gun would be determined to be an "Assault Weapon". Gun manufacturers simply deleted these features, changed the names of their guns, and continued production.

If anything, it spurred interest in these guns. Before 1994, AR15's and FALs were niche guns, while AK and SKS type rifles mostly appealed to plinkers on a budget, due to their low entry cost and the availability of plentiful and cheap imported ammunition. During the ban years, whole cottage industries sprang up around these firearms, now glowing with the electric appeal of forbidden fruit, and these days it is a rare shooter who doesn't own at least one "Evil Black Rifle", possibly one that they have built from the ground up out of a kit.

The ban drew derision from those knowledgeable about the gun industry, since the guns it specifically mentioned by name were obviously selected by grabbing a Gun Digest and picking out the pictures of the most belligerent-looking heaters, without regard for price or actual availability. For instance, it named both the Fabrique Nationale FNC and the Beretta AR-70; both of which had been banned from importation back in 1989, as a result of which only a few hundred examples of each existed in the country, mostly sitting in collector's safes, protected from actual use by their scarcity-inflated four-figure price tags.

Photo courtesy of Oleg Volk

Now with H.B. 1022, it's obvious that they want to try again, only harder. They've expanded their "evil features" list to include the nebulously-defined "barrel shroud", described in such a way that the French Walnut forearm on grandpa's Belgian BAR disqualifies it, since it "partly or completely encircles the barrel" and is there to prevent the shooter's hand from being burned. We're again seeing the results of letting people who know nothing about something try to regulate that very thing. It's as if a guy who's never been to the zoo is writing a bill outlawing elephants, which are defined as "four-legged mammals with tusks".

All questions of whether this passes the Constitutionality sniff test aside, it's stuff like this that really erodes what little faith in government I have, (...and that ain't much, folks.) If they're this astoundingly inept when writing legislation about an industry I'm familiar with, then they are probably also equally clueless when writing legislation to muck up other industries I don't know anything about, such as agriculture or banking. Now that's scary.