Democrat Congressman Wants To Tax And Register Squirrel Guns

By the standards of today’s anti-gun zealots, Rep. Ted Deutch (D-FL) seems at first glance to be aiming rather low with H.R. 1263[1], which seeks to add to the National Firearms Act any “semiautomatic rifle or shotgun that has the capacity to accept a detachable [magazine].” Oh, don’t get us wrong. No reasonable, freedom-loving person would try to impose such a preposterous, constitutionally-suspect burden on such a large swath of America’s firearm owners. But unless you’re actually proposing to ban and confiscate guns, and maybe even to nuke resisters[2], you’re hardly at the vanguard of contemporary Democrat firearm prohibitionists. Only last year, Deutch himself was co-sponsoring legislation[3] to ban America’s most popular centerfire rifles. And even now, he’s trying to ban and encourage the surrender of the types of magazines[4] that are standard equipment on the firearms Americans commonly use to protect themselves and their homes. So what gives? Is Ted going soft on his hatred for firearms? Not really. As usual, the devil is in the details. We all know by now that anti-gun Democrats want to ban AR-15s and other highly popular and extremely common semiautomatic rifles, which is why they generically refer to them as “assault weapons.” Anti-gunners in fact compete with each other in trying to find the most comically hyperbolic terms to describe these ubiquitous firearms peacefully possessed by millions of law-abiding Americans. Deutch himself prefers to call them[5] “weapons of war made for the sole business of killing people.” Heck, “award-winning journalist and … author[6]” Nina Burleigh even tried to one up all gun controllers by tweeting[7], “Almost every single person I’ve ever heard of with an AR-15 has been a mass murderer.” But if anti-gun Democrats are so proud of wanting to ban “assault weapons,” why would one of them settle for the lesser step of regulating them under the NFA, in

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