Why New York's 'Assault Weapon' Ban Didn't Stop the Buffalo MassacreThe problem is not sneaky entrepreneurs who sell accessories; it's legislators who ban guns based on functionally unimportant features.
JACOB SULLUM
5.16.2022
The suspect in the mass shooting that killed 10 people at a Buffalo grocery store on Saturday used a rifle that was widely described as an "assault weapon." With certain exceptions that don't apply here, that category of firearms is illegal in New York. Yet The New York Times reports that the shooter legally bought the rifle from a gun dealer in Endicott, New York. How is that possible?
It turns out that the rifle, a Bushmaster XM-15 ES, was not an "assault weapon" at the time of the purchase, but it became an "assault weapon" after the shooter tinkered with it. The details of that transformation illustrate how arbitrary and ineffectual bans like New York's are.
Under the New York Secure Ammunition and Firearms Enforcement (NY SAFE) Act, a 2013 law that was hurriedly passed in response to the December 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, "assault weapons" include semi-automatic rifles that accept detachable magazines and have one or more of seven "military-style" features. If we can trust the photograph in the online manifesto attributed to the Buffalo shooter, the rifle he bought had a pistol grip, which is one of the prohibited features. So why was the sale legal?
The manifesto says "the person who had this [rifle] before me" made it compliant with New York law by installing "a Mean Arms magazine lock, which fixed a 10 round magazine" to the gun. The fixed magazine meant that the rifle no longer qualified as an "assault weapon." But the shooter easily reversed that modification so that the rifle could accept detachable magazines, meaning it was once again an "assault weapon" when he used it in the attack.
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Source:
https://reason.com/2022/05/16/why-new-yorks-assault-weapon-ban-didnt-stop-the-buffalo-massacre/