Were you there? I was there, and I saw at least 10 militiamen in full camo with assault rifles.
No you didn’t. At least, it’s incredibly, ridiculously unlikely that you did. Assault rifles are those capable of automatic fire, weapons which have been severely regulated since the National Firearms Act of 1934, the manufacture of which (capable of civilian purchase) has been banned since the Hughes amendment to the Firearms Owners Protection Act of 1986, 31 years ago. The only legal assault rifles in civilian hands are those manufactured before 1986, of which there are 473,644 as of 2–24–16 per the U.S. DOJ. Of those, only 175,977 are legally transferable.
The transferable subset is the one we would be dealing with here, unless your militia men were at least 49 years old, meaning they were at least 18 years old 31 years ago in order to have legally obtained an assault rifle pre-ban. Now, there are no official numbers of guns in the US, but the ATF estimated it at around 357 million in 2013. So that’s 175,977/357,000,000, which gives us (rounded up) five hundredths of a percent of the total number of guns. Some of the men may have been older than 49 and possibly have one legally, so let’s see 473,644/357,000,000, giving us a whopping one tenth of a percent.
Also, like any other good where demand is held constant, restricting the supply of an item increases its cost, and this can be seen with a vengeance in the market for legally obtained assault rifles. Since there’s only 175,977 of them in existence, you‘re not going to find one for less than $10,000, and that would be an absolute minimum as they skyrocket up from there. That’s assuming they paid the mandatory NFA tax and had the transfer approved by the ATF.
So, what do we think the likelihood is that one of these militiamen happens to have showed up with his/her $10,000+, 31 year old rifle that make up at most about one tenth of a percent of the nation’s firearms, to an event where if anything actually happened that resulted in shots fired, by anyone, the rifle would probably be confiscated? Especially considering they could just go spend $500 and get a bargain AR-15 like this.
The only other alternative is that they were illegal assault rifles, which would be even less likely to be feloniously sported around in public.
Best not to make assertions if you actually have no idea.
Yeah, i couldn’t agree more. That’s why i called you out on it in the first place. Maybe it’s best not to make snarky comments.
