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xiphiasI've been having many conflicting thoughts about firearms over the past, well, lifetime tbh, but obviously it's all at the forefront of my mind, now. I'm a gun owner, and a liberal, and I only recently got into shooting, so I'm still learning how things work.
And I thought some of you might want to know. Because I was seeing signs suggesting that people should do things that we in Massachusetts already do. And maybe people in other parts of the country would want to know how it works out when you do them; maybe people in Massachusetts would be relieved to know that these things are already implemented.
My general feeling, as a Massachusetts gun owner, is that we have SOME laws that are probably unnecessary, but a lot of the stuff we do could be reasonably expanded to be nationwide. I figured I'd tell you about what I did earlier this week, and you could see what parts of it you are comfortable with, what parts you think are excessive, what parts you think need to be tightened up. I'm going to try to keep the editorializing to a minimum, but it's me, so I've got opinions and stuff. I'm going to try to keep it to the facts, but the facts include my own emotional reactions to things...
I am a member of a shooting club in Weston, right on the Waltham/Weston border. It's close to Outer Limits comics and Brandeis in Waltham, and to my parents' and grandparents' houses in Wayland, so it's a good place for me to go and do other weekendy-type things, too. It's an indoor range, and you can only shoot pistol rounds there, but, if you have a rifle that shoots pistol ammunition, you can use it there, too.
Two times back when I went shooting, I brought my two handguns, a .22 semiautomatic target pistol, and a .357 Magnum Smith and Wesson revolver. I shot about six hundred rounds with them, which was probably overdoing it, like, a lot. And I gave myself a case of tennis elbow.
The .22 is the lightest and cheapest round commonly used in the United States, so for people who just want to shoot holes in paper, it is the one to use. If you buy it in bulk, it is about six cents a round, and, if you're going to shoot six hundred rounds, that's thirty six bucks right there. And anything else you shoot is going to be even more expensive. As far as practical use goes, you can hunt birds, squirrels, and rabbits with it, but it is generally considered cruel to hunt things larger than that -- you are more likely to painfully injure a larger animal, and, while it may well die, it will suffer, and so it's illegal in most places to try to hunt deer with something that small. A target pistol, on the other hand, is a pistol which is large and chunky and solid, so that, when it fires, it doesn't kick very much.
Even so, shooting that many rounds without taking breaks was a bad idea, and the repeated shock on my elbow was a bad idea. I didn't figure that out for another couple days, though, when I started wondering why my elbow was hurting...
Anyway, this gave me my impetus to get my third firearm. I'd been wanting to get a .22 lever-action rifle, and, since firing pistols is something I should probably ease off on for a couple weeks, I decided it was time to actually go buy the one I'd been looking at.
In a semiautomatic firearm like my target pistol, when I fire a round, it automatically takes out the empty cartridge and puts a new one in for my next shot. It DOESN'T mean that I can just hold the trigger down and spray bullets around -- that would be FULLY automatic, and that's something different. In a revolver, like my Smith and Wesson, like police officers used to carry before Darryl Gates decided to make the LAPD into an occupying military force, there is a cylinder which holds (usually) six bullets, and, after one is fired, the cylinder can rotate to bring another fresh round to be ready. Those are the two ways that pistols usually work.
Modern rifles are typically also semiautomatic, taking care of the extracting and reloading parts on their own, but they can also be bolt-action or lever-action. In those cases, after you shoot, you need to do something yourself to get rid of the old cartridge and get the new one yourself. In a bolt action, there is a little handle-thingy sticking out the side that, when you pull it back, it knocks the old casing out of the gun, and when you push it forward again, it scoops the new one out of the magazine and puts it in the chamber. The lever-action is kind of the same, except the lever is on the bottom. The lever kind of loops around the trigger. If you ever saw the TV Western "The Rifleman", that's what the main character used.
The reason I want a lever action is because I'm a lefty. The bolt on a bolt-action rifle sticks out of the right side, usually, so that you stabilize the gun with your left hand, then fire with your right, work the bolt with your right, and then can fire again. A lefty has to either get theirs modified, or reach over the top weirdly.
I knew which one I wanted, the Henry Golden Boy .22 Repeating Rifle. It's a pretty, pretty gun. Polished wood and brass, easy to fire, and only a few hundred bucks new. I'd been holding off to see if a used one was going to come around, but I'd already decided to get it, so, because of my elbow, I decided to just go ahead and get it now.
I decided to go to the store that Ben Silver had been telling me about, about ten minutes from our house, Four Seasons Firearms in Woburn. It's around the back side of a building, in the lower level. In Massachusetts, gun stores are usually in the sorts of places that are lower foot traffic retail -- places like plumbing shops, and things like that, where you're not really counting on window shopping. This one is right near to the police station, which is also not uncommon in Massachusetts.
As I parked and walked in, I walked past a couple Trump bumper stickers. This is the downside to the hobby. Because the NRA is vile, and, well, they've got their slimy little tentacles wrapped around the hobby. And so, while there are liberal gun-owner groups, we're less common. It's uncomfortable seeing pro-Trump bumper stickers, literature advertising speeches by Sheriff David Clarke, and other such things. And, let's be honest, one of the reasons I wish more liberals WOULD like guns would be to dilute that sort of thing. But, anyway.
The gun stores I've been in have generally had similar layouts. Only employees are allowed behind the counters that are on two or three sides of the room. Rifles and shotguns are in racks along those walls, behind the counters, where customers can't get to them directly. Pistols are usually in the display cases under the counters. Like electronics or jewelry.
In the center part of the room, and on pegboards around the walls that aren't behind the counters, you have accessories, cleaning supplies, maybe spinner racks of magazines, and shelves of ammunition.
I walked in, and I had a pretty good idea what I wanted. I went up to one of the clerks, and asked him what he had in .22 lever action rifles. I handed him my firearms license, he looked at it, and verified that I looked more or less like the picture, and he picked up one of the rifles, opened up the breech, looked into it to make sure it was empty, and handed it to me. He then watched me very carefully, and asked me how I liked various things about it, and I tried handling a couple others. He never had more than one firearm out at once, and was always watching me while I had it. This seems pretty standard -- clerks seem to only help one person at a time, and only one firearm at a time.
I pretty quickly determined that, yes, the Henry Golden Boy was, in fact, exactly what I was hoping it would be, and he sent me over to the kiosk at the other end of the store. This was one of the reasons Ben had suggested Four Seasons to me specifically -- they have kiosks set up where you can fill out the forms on their computers and have it print it out, rather than having to handwrite everything. I entered in a couple screens of data -- birth date, height, weight, verifying that I had no felony convictions, and all those other things. When I was done, I went back over to the counter, and they printed out the forms.
The clerk then took the form, and had me enter my PIN. Other than having my license, I ALSO have to have a PIN that is NOT on the license, so that a person who happened to look like me couldn't just take my license and buy a gun on it -- I have to also have that. He then verified that the information I typed in matched the information on the license, and entered that into the system, with the PIN, and waited.
While we waited, we went and picked up some other things that I would need -- cleaning supplies, a case, a chain lock. In Massachusetts, you must keep your firearms under lock and key when they're not in your direct use, so, unless you walk in there with a lock, they are required to sell you a lock with it.
When we came back, the computer had cross-referenced my ID with the state database, and confirmed that the person with that license and PIN had, in fact, passed a background check, had no felony convictions, violent misdemeanors, domestic violence altercations, history of mental illness of sorts that would make me dangerous, had no pending litigation, and, as far as anybody could tell, nothing had happened since that background check had happened to change that.
I signed a few more forms saying that that background check had come through, and they sent that to the federal database, and I did a bit more shopping.
When that came through saying the same thing, that no other state had any information to contradict what Massachusetts had said, they ran my debit card, and let me have my purchases.
And I thought some of you might want to know. Because I was seeing signs suggesting that people should do things that we in Massachusetts already do. And maybe people in other parts of the country would want to know how it works out when you do them; maybe people in Massachusetts would be relieved to know that these things are already implemented.
My general feeling, as a Massachusetts gun owner, is that we have SOME laws that are probably unnecessary, but a lot of the stuff we do could be reasonably expanded to be nationwide. I figured I'd tell you about what I did earlier this week, and you could see what parts of it you are comfortable with, what parts you think are excessive, what parts you think need to be tightened up. I'm going to try to keep the editorializing to a minimum, but it's me, so I've got opinions and stuff. I'm going to try to keep it to the facts, but the facts include my own emotional reactions to things...
I am a member of a shooting club in Weston, right on the Waltham/Weston border. It's close to Outer Limits comics and Brandeis in Waltham, and to my parents' and grandparents' houses in Wayland, so it's a good place for me to go and do other weekendy-type things, too. It's an indoor range, and you can only shoot pistol rounds there, but, if you have a rifle that shoots pistol ammunition, you can use it there, too.
Two times back when I went shooting, I brought my two handguns, a .22 semiautomatic target pistol, and a .357 Magnum Smith and Wesson revolver. I shot about six hundred rounds with them, which was probably overdoing it, like, a lot. And I gave myself a case of tennis elbow.
The .22 is the lightest and cheapest round commonly used in the United States, so for people who just want to shoot holes in paper, it is the one to use. If you buy it in bulk, it is about six cents a round, and, if you're going to shoot six hundred rounds, that's thirty six bucks right there. And anything else you shoot is going to be even more expensive. As far as practical use goes, you can hunt birds, squirrels, and rabbits with it, but it is generally considered cruel to hunt things larger than that -- you are more likely to painfully injure a larger animal, and, while it may well die, it will suffer, and so it's illegal in most places to try to hunt deer with something that small. A target pistol, on the other hand, is a pistol which is large and chunky and solid, so that, when it fires, it doesn't kick very much.
Even so, shooting that many rounds without taking breaks was a bad idea, and the repeated shock on my elbow was a bad idea. I didn't figure that out for another couple days, though, when I started wondering why my elbow was hurting...
Anyway, this gave me my impetus to get my third firearm. I'd been wanting to get a .22 lever-action rifle, and, since firing pistols is something I should probably ease off on for a couple weeks, I decided it was time to actually go buy the one I'd been looking at.
In a semiautomatic firearm like my target pistol, when I fire a round, it automatically takes out the empty cartridge and puts a new one in for my next shot. It DOESN'T mean that I can just hold the trigger down and spray bullets around -- that would be FULLY automatic, and that's something different. In a revolver, like my Smith and Wesson, like police officers used to carry before Darryl Gates decided to make the LAPD into an occupying military force, there is a cylinder which holds (usually) six bullets, and, after one is fired, the cylinder can rotate to bring another fresh round to be ready. Those are the two ways that pistols usually work.
Modern rifles are typically also semiautomatic, taking care of the extracting and reloading parts on their own, but they can also be bolt-action or lever-action. In those cases, after you shoot, you need to do something yourself to get rid of the old cartridge and get the new one yourself. In a bolt action, there is a little handle-thingy sticking out the side that, when you pull it back, it knocks the old casing out of the gun, and when you push it forward again, it scoops the new one out of the magazine and puts it in the chamber. The lever-action is kind of the same, except the lever is on the bottom. The lever kind of loops around the trigger. If you ever saw the TV Western "The Rifleman", that's what the main character used.
The reason I want a lever action is because I'm a lefty. The bolt on a bolt-action rifle sticks out of the right side, usually, so that you stabilize the gun with your left hand, then fire with your right, work the bolt with your right, and then can fire again. A lefty has to either get theirs modified, or reach over the top weirdly.
I knew which one I wanted, the Henry Golden Boy .22 Repeating Rifle. It's a pretty, pretty gun. Polished wood and brass, easy to fire, and only a few hundred bucks new. I'd been holding off to see if a used one was going to come around, but I'd already decided to get it, so, because of my elbow, I decided to just go ahead and get it now.
I decided to go to the store that Ben Silver had been telling me about, about ten minutes from our house, Four Seasons Firearms in Woburn. It's around the back side of a building, in the lower level. In Massachusetts, gun stores are usually in the sorts of places that are lower foot traffic retail -- places like plumbing shops, and things like that, where you're not really counting on window shopping. This one is right near to the police station, which is also not uncommon in Massachusetts.
As I parked and walked in, I walked past a couple Trump bumper stickers. This is the downside to the hobby. Because the NRA is vile, and, well, they've got their slimy little tentacles wrapped around the hobby. And so, while there are liberal gun-owner groups, we're less common. It's uncomfortable seeing pro-Trump bumper stickers, literature advertising speeches by Sheriff David Clarke, and other such things. And, let's be honest, one of the reasons I wish more liberals WOULD like guns would be to dilute that sort of thing. But, anyway.
The gun stores I've been in have generally had similar layouts. Only employees are allowed behind the counters that are on two or three sides of the room. Rifles and shotguns are in racks along those walls, behind the counters, where customers can't get to them directly. Pistols are usually in the display cases under the counters. Like electronics or jewelry.
In the center part of the room, and on pegboards around the walls that aren't behind the counters, you have accessories, cleaning supplies, maybe spinner racks of magazines, and shelves of ammunition.
I walked in, and I had a pretty good idea what I wanted. I went up to one of the clerks, and asked him what he had in .22 lever action rifles. I handed him my firearms license, he looked at it, and verified that I looked more or less like the picture, and he picked up one of the rifles, opened up the breech, looked into it to make sure it was empty, and handed it to me. He then watched me very carefully, and asked me how I liked various things about it, and I tried handling a couple others. He never had more than one firearm out at once, and was always watching me while I had it. This seems pretty standard -- clerks seem to only help one person at a time, and only one firearm at a time.
I pretty quickly determined that, yes, the Henry Golden Boy was, in fact, exactly what I was hoping it would be, and he sent me over to the kiosk at the other end of the store. This was one of the reasons Ben had suggested Four Seasons to me specifically -- they have kiosks set up where you can fill out the forms on their computers and have it print it out, rather than having to handwrite everything. I entered in a couple screens of data -- birth date, height, weight, verifying that I had no felony convictions, and all those other things. When I was done, I went back over to the counter, and they printed out the forms.
The clerk then took the form, and had me enter my PIN. Other than having my license, I ALSO have to have a PIN that is NOT on the license, so that a person who happened to look like me couldn't just take my license and buy a gun on it -- I have to also have that. He then verified that the information I typed in matched the information on the license, and entered that into the system, with the PIN, and waited.
While we waited, we went and picked up some other things that I would need -- cleaning supplies, a case, a chain lock. In Massachusetts, you must keep your firearms under lock and key when they're not in your direct use, so, unless you walk in there with a lock, they are required to sell you a lock with it.
When we came back, the computer had cross-referenced my ID with the state database, and confirmed that the person with that license and PIN had, in fact, passed a background check, had no felony convictions, violent misdemeanors, domestic violence altercations, history of mental illness of sorts that would make me dangerous, had no pending litigation, and, as far as anybody could tell, nothing had happened since that background check had happened to change that.
I signed a few more forms saying that that background check had come through, and they sent that to the federal database, and I did a bit more shopping.
When that came through saying the same thing, that no other state had any information to contradict what Massachusetts had said, they ran my debit card, and let me have my purchases.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-03-25 10:54 am (UTC)What kind of license do you have?
(no subject)
Date: 2018-03-25 12:43 pm (UTC)As for what is legal in Massachusetts, that's probably worth another post on its own; in my opinion, some of the laws make sense, and some don't. Bump stocks are illegal in Massachusetts, as they should be -- they should never have been legal anywhere in the first place, and I actually wish they'd been banned proactively, rather than in response to the Las Vegas shooting. Magazines which carry more than ten rounds are illegal, unless they were made and brought into Massachusetts before September 14, 1994, but they're really easy to get, because once they said that "next year on this date it will be illegal to bring these into Massachusetts", everyone who manufactured them started cranking them out as fast as they could, and even now, twenty-five years later, there are crates of the things. Even so, I think that the high-capacity-magazine ban makes sense. Anything based on the AR-15 platform is illegal unless it was made before 1994; I think this is incredibly silly, but discussing the AR-15 needs to be its own post. The short version is that it is terribly silly to discuss the AR-15 by itself, since it's a distraction from the actual issues -- the AR-15 is just one of a large range of functionally similar things, and if the problem people have is the function, we should be talking about THAT, but it's not entirely clear that everybody talking about the AR-15 is clear on what the function IS.
I know plenty of people who are against things that work like the AR-15, but they aren't against the AR-15 specifically. But, like I said, that should be its own post.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-03-25 12:45 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-03-27 11:23 pm (UTC)... the more interesting thing would be for you and Ny to both do it and see if you have any difference in your results ...
(no subject)
Date: 2018-03-28 09:26 am (UTC)And then there’s my daughter’s mental health history which absolutely does disqualify us (I’d have to let her therapists know that I wasn’t serious), but I don’t know if they’d even find that in a background check.
*(My son goes to the middle school where the ammo clip was found; best guess is that it fell out of the pocket of someone going to the church that rents space there. When I said “but who wears a gun to CHURCH?” my neighbors laughed at my naïveté.)
(no subject)
Date: 2018-03-25 09:33 pm (UTC)I assume that much governmental wrath would fall upon a gun shop that didn't correctly follow those procedures. How do they monitor/enforce that -- do shops have to register *their* purchases too?
(no subject)
Date: 2018-03-27 11:28 pm (UTC)Like the "all guns are always loaded" thing, I get the idea that there is a general "someone who particularly doesn't like guns and is from the Mass Attorney General's Office is watching me RIGHT THIS VERY SECOND, and they're standing right next to a person from the ATF who has no sense of humor at the best of times and is currently going through a contentious divorce" ingrained response.... they're REALLY persnickety about regulatory details.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-03-26 03:54 am (UTC)Edited to change "concealed handgun permit" to "concealed handgun license" because Oregon is a shall-issue state with a minimal 3-hour lecture class (no firearms experience required).