Dr. Faulken — who grew up in Oklahoma, where hunting rifles and shotguns are common — explains how gun legislation turned him into One of Them™:
Our rifles were used to hunt deer or shoot predators on our property. Our shotguns were used to hunt ducks and other birds. Oh yeah, and milk jugs. Them’s dangerous.So why is it, with the exception of the .22 rifle given to me by my father, are all of my guns people-hunting related? I have no inclination to hunt animals, unless we fall into an apocalypse and I’m forced to shoot cats or mongeese for food. The same types of guns I grew up with are in my house: shotgun, rifle, pistol, but they are designed for person-to-person combat. What happened?
By the time I was old enough firearms of my own, and had enough financial wherewithal to afford them, the political landscape of the United States had changed. Sparked partially by the shooting of White House press secretary Jim Brady, firearms and gun ownership was different than in the days of my childhood. Some of the laws, such as a seven day waiting period, hadn’t changed since the 60s, but the Brady Bill, coupled with the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, placed strict regulations on the type of firearms a private citizen could own. By the time I was old enough to buy my own handgun — 1996 — I was restricted to a firearm that could hold no more than ten rounds in a detachable magazine.
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Prior to all of this legislation, the gun industry was concentrated on making the biggest, baddest, most awesomest Hollywood style weapons it could. [...] The Striker, and the idea of Bigger, Badder, Badass guns were soon slain outright or in principle by the one-two punch of the Brady Bill and the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. [...] The gun industry began to shift away from the 3Bs and gravitate towards smaller, more concealable weaponry. Why make a full size pistol or rifle if you don’t need a larger frame to accommodate more than 10 rounds? Handguns shrank, and then shrank some more. By the time I was 21, gun manufacturer Glock was about to break open the concealed carry market with the first sub-compact handgun that fired “full size” ammunition.The Glock 26/27 (9mm and .40 caliber, respectively) was the very first semiautomatic pistol made by a major manufacture with concealability in mind. Sure, there were cheaply made “Saturday Night Specials” that fired .22 or .25 caliber cartridges, but unless you were a mafia hit man or a jealous wife you couldn’t rely on either of those calibers to take down an assailant. There was also the Walther .380 PPK guns made famous by James Bond, but even those guns shrank during this period of time. Anyway, the Glock 27 was my first handgun purchase, and I bought it strictly because if I couldn’t carry more than ten rounds, I might as well get the smallest gun I could carry.
That last part is important. It’s the direct tie between the then-current legislation and my decisions in buying a firearm. I lived in Virginia at the time, and I was eligible for a concealed-carry permit. I specifically and purposefully bought a handgun that was easier to conceal and carry because I couldn’t buy a high capacity larger-frame gun like my brother’s 10mm or my uncle’s Beretta 92F.
It’s almost small enough to fit in my hand. In fact, when I hold it, my pinky finger won’t fit on the grip. To put this much firepower in a such a small handgun runs counter to the spirit of the laws that produced it. The spirit of the Brady Bill and the Violent Crime Control bill was to keep lethal weapons off the street. One of the byproducts of those laws was to create more portable weaponry, which allowed lethal weapons to be carried more easily on the street than ever. Proof in the pudding? I wore two handguns to work every day in Virginia for almost five years and no one ever knew. I even packed to a wedding once, but that was mostly by accident. Try that with a Striker 12.
The Law of Unintended Consequences strikes again:
The purpose of the legislation was to reduce person on person crime. However, the effect of the bill was to spawn lightweight, concealable handguns that resulted in the demand and sale of more lethal ammunition than ever offered to the civilian market. In a twist of irony, citizens were carrying bullets originally designed for law enforcement and the military because of a law created to ban paramilitary style weaponry.
It goes well beyond handguns, of course:
Fear of current guns being banned also spurred my firearm purchases. I never, ever thought I would buy an AK-47 or other paramilitary rifle until I heard that the Bill Clinton was going to ban their importation in 1998. I bought one for $300, a 100% increase in price before the ban was announced, I also bought five thirty-round magazines made and imported before the 1994 ban on high capacity magazines. I bought a thousand rounds of Russian military-grade ammunition, and they are mostly stockpiled in a tupperware bin in my house to this day. Compared to my Glock, I hardly ever shoot the AK. I have put well over 2000 rounds through my Glock, but the AK has probably been fired less than 300 times, mostly by friends interested to see what an AK-47 shoots like. The AK a curiosity and a specialized tool in my firearms toolbox. I didn’t buy it because I wanted to shoot up a mall. I bought it because I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to buy one ever again. Just like my desire to own a small-framed handgun, other gun owners felt the same way about buying a potentially banned weapon. AK sales soared right before the ban.So instead of buying a foot-long hand cannon for fun at the range and a lever-action 30.06 rifle for hunting, gun legislation guided me towards two easily concealed handguns and a rifle solely designed to kill other people.