We have no idea how much Michael Bloomberg pays the electron-stained wretches who toil away for him churning out streams of anti-gun agitprop, but given how entertaining it can be, it’s not enough. Their latest effort feigning panic and impending doom over the Civilian Marksmanship Program’s plan to start selling M14 rifles to the public is, as always, a hoot.
We’re not sure that typeface is big enough. It doesn’t really evoke quite enough of the fear among the uninformed that the article was obviously intended to provoke.
And then there’s that sub-hed, warning that selling the M14s “could open the door for other military weapons.”
LOL. It is to laugh.
News flash: the CMP has been selling M1 Garand rifles — actual military weapons — to the public since 1955 (originally through the military’s Director of Civilian Marksmanship program, then via the CMP starting in 1996). And they started selling M1911 pistols — also military weapons — in 2018.
But machine guns! They’ll be selling machine guns!
If only.
After instilling as much alarm in their low-information readers as they possibly could, The Smoking Gun’s Emily Fedeli got around to acknowledging the reality in the third paragraph.
The CMP says that the M14 rifles will be made “permanently and irreversibly semi-automatic” before being sold, but the sale raises several questions, including who authorized it and if it will lead to more U.S. military weapons, such as M16s and M4s, entering the civilian market in the future.
As you surely already knew, the M14’s that the CMP intends to sell will have been hobbled, ensuring that their full-auto giggleswitches no longer work. Bummer.
As for whether selling semi-auto M14’s “will lead to more U.S. military weapons, such as M16s and M4s, entering the civilian market in the future,” we can only hope so. The more outlets for these guns, the better.
Not that there’s any shortage of non-milsurp versions of those guns available to any law-abiding citizen who wants one. Americans already own about 24 million of them and (as long as they don’t live in one of those states) they can buy one damn-near anywhere (see, for instance, here, here and here).
What has Fedeli’s panties twisted into a virtual Gordian knot of hoplophobic concern is that the M14 rifles that CMP will be selling have serial numbers that originally designated them as machine guns.
In an interview, CMP Chairman and CEO Jerry O’Keefe confirmed that the surplus M14 rifles “were originally serialized as fully automatic firearms.”1 This is important because, according to the ATF, the only way to remove a machine gun from the NFA’s requirements is to destroy its frame or receiver, the gun’s main building block. This is commonly known as the “once a machine gun, always a machine gun” rule.
Yet O’Keefe said the CMP “always felt that there was a legal pathway” to selling the M14s because of the organization’s unusual position under federal law. The CMP is not an ordinary gun dealer. According to O’Keefe, the organization’s federal charter provides it with “significant authorizations and exemptions that no other entity that sells firearms has.” O’Keefe added that the M14 sales were “all authorized under existing legislation and policy,” and “there was no law that needed to be changed.”
The real problem as The Smoking Gun see it is that the M14’s — guns the military no longer has any earthly use for — won’t be destroyed. And because of the CMP’s special legal status, they’ll be allowed to permanently convert them to semi-auto and get them in the hands of Mr. and Mrs. American Gunowner.
O’Keefe said he expects the Army to transfer between 2,000 and 3,000 surplus shotguns to the CMP, and the organization plans to loosen limits on M1911 pistol purchases beginning in 2027.9 For the M14s, the government is expected to retain some rifles for ceremonial and operational purposes but transfer the “overwhelming majority” to CMP, with the final number at “well over 100,000.”10 The CMP plans to price the rifles below $2,000 and allow eligible purchasers to buy two per year, although O’Keefe said the organization will continue to revisit that limit.
Terrifying, no? We can already visualize the lines of MS-13 members, urban gangbangers, and average street criminals forming up at Camp Perry and Talladega, just waiting to plunk down almost two grand to get their hands on a long, heavy .30 cal rifle.
Finally…this warning . . .
As another generation of military rifles begins to age out of frontline service, the CMP and the government have yet to explain how narrowly O’Keefe’s “legal pathway” is confined to the M14, or what, exactly, would prevent it from being used again.
Buckle up, friends. It’s gonna be a bumpy ride.
There is no crime problem with old machine guns. There is no crime problem with new guns converted into machine guns.
But we do have a problem with holding criminals accountable. The elite who are not touched by crime. Support a catch and release policy when it comes to criminals.
And besides the “gun community” has said many times that “acceleration devices” are just a waste of ammunition. They said you don’t need a bumpstock.