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If i were to only stay in one location, in one state could i then, if legal in the state, have silencers, full auto, and other things that federal laws prohibit?
 
Posts: 663 | Registered: August 23, 2009Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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Federal doesn’t prohibit those; you just have to jump thru registration hoops and pay a tax to buy them.
 
Posts: 1178 | Location: NE Indiana  | Registered: January 20, 2011Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Little ray
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No, you still have to comply with the federal firearms laws even if you remain solely in your own state.

I am sympathetic to what your question implies about federalism and what it implies about the 2d amendment, but it doesn't work that way. If the feds can find a justification to criminalize or regulate a thing (which takes far less than it should), then they can regulate that thing for everyone, regardless.




The fish is mute, expressionless. The fish doesn't think because the fish knows everything.
 
Posts: 53121 | Location: Texas | Registered: February 10, 2004Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Freethinker
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Someone with more knowledge please correct me if warranted, but my understanding of Federal regulation of things like NFA firearms is based on the Commerce Clause of the Constitution that permits the national government to regulate anything involved in interstate commerce. A firearm or suppressor might be manufactured in a single state and never leave its boundaries, but something used in its manufacture will undoubtedly have been moved between that state and at least one other. That includes any of the metals in the steel or other alloys in the device, the paint or other finish materials, or, I believe, even the tools and machinery used to manufacture the device. The same is probably true of the company’s activities; advertise or even describe one’s product on the Internet, and you’re involved in interstate commerce, and that’s enough to regulate your products.
That same theory allows the Federal government to stick its fingers in countless other pies that we would think were purely local issues.

It’s hard to believe that the writers of the Constitution imagined in their wildest nightmares that the Commerce Clause would ever be interpreted to permit Federal involvement in so many things at the state and local level, but there it is.




6.4/93.6

“Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something.”
— Plato
 
Posts: 47397 | Location: 10,150 Feet Above Sea Level in Colorado | Registered: April 04, 2002Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Little ray
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Sigfruend is basically right. Congress gets the power to regulate firearms because of the commerce clause, and the asserted effect they have on interstate commerce.

Conservatives believe this grows out of a misapplication of the commerce clause. That reading of the clause dates to the early days of the country (Gibbons v. Ogden, 22 U.S. 1 (1824)). It was greatly expanded during the New Deal as the justification to permit federal legislation that was deemed needed to extract the country from the Great Depression. However, those views ended up eliminating virtually any restrictions on federal power, as almost any connection, however slight, to interstate trade was found to be enough to justify federal regulation of almost anything. There have been some limits found in the last ten or twenty years, but they will not turn the tide on this issue.

So, that is why the feds get to regulate firearms.




The fish is mute, expressionless. The fish doesn't think because the fish knows everything.
 
Posts: 53121 | Location: Texas | Registered: February 10, 2004Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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