Shoulder stocked handguns are illegal.

[RAnb]

Or at least they are according to an article written by Mike "Duke" Venturino in an article published by American Hangunner.

http://www.americanhandgunner.com/
http://fmgpublications.ipaperus.com/...gunner/AHSO12/

On page 73 he says in part;

I'm sure at this point some of you are thinking, "But aren't detachable shoulder stocks illegal?" Well the answer is yes - and no. For modern handguns they certainly are. But the ATF has ruled that some handguns in their curio and relic status can have their shoulder stocks.

What he should have said was that a modern handgun with a shoulder stock is a short barreled rifle and requires routine BATFE authorization to possess, make or transfer as well as payment of a $200 tax unless licensed to do so.

While I expect media like CNN and Fox News to lie about gun control, it is sad to see a gun magazine attempt to convince its readers that any type of firearm in the USA is illegal.

Ranb

[James K]

Correct, but in all fairness, many writers assume (with justification) that their audience is of the lowest common denominator and not interested in details. It would take far more space than the article was alloted by the editor to discuss all the ramifications of the NFA as it and BATFE regulations apply to shoulder stock handguns.

Those with an interest in obtaining or making a shoulder stock pistol can easily learn all there is to know on the subject, while most readers will be satisfied with what was written.

Jim

[Creeper]

Should be interesting to see if this Caracal F can somehow get this into the US, without it being classified as a SBR, or if it is classified as an SBR, what happens when you remove the shoulder stock.



Cheers,
C

[BillM]

What he should have said was that a modern handgun with a shoulder stock is a short barreled rifle and requires routine BATFE authorization to possess, make or transfer as well as payment of a $200 tax unless licensed to do so.

While I expect media like CNN and Fox News to lie about gun control, it is sad to see a gun magazine attempt to convince its readers that any type of firearm in the USA is illegal.

OP--you live in the state of Washington?

Interesting that you would raise this issue when you live in a state where
you can not legally own a SBR.

[RAnb]

Interesting that you would raise this issue when you live in a state where you can not legally own a SBR.

Since when? Who is this "you" that you speak of? With the passage of HB2319 in 1994 possession was restricted to police, military, licensed dealers and those owners that were grandfathered in.

HB2099 will amend the law to allow possession of any registered SBS/SBR. One of the obstacles to getting this bill passed is the far too common attitude that modern SBR/SBS are illegal in the USA, something that Venturino claims in his article.

Correct, but in all fairness, many writers assume (with justification) that their audience is of the lowest common denominator and not interested in details. It would take far more space than the article was alloted by the editor to discuss all the ramifications of the NFA as it and BATFE regulations apply to shoulder stock handguns.

Instead of assuming that his readers are stupid or uninterested in details like you suggest, he could have written that attaching a shoulder stock to a modern handgun requires prior ATF approval. Writing that ATF approval is required is very easy to do, no long explanations needed. I guess it is too much to ask that a gun mag encourages gun ownership instead of acting like the Brady Campaign.

Ranb

[Double Naught Spy]

While I expect media like CNN and Fox News to lie about gun control, it is sad to see a gun magazine attempt to convince its readers that any type of firearm in the USA is illegal.

Well, since you took the dig at CNN and Fox News, the general online pro-gun consensus would seem to be that they are the "liberal media" along with other forms such as Time Magazine. So then by default, American Handgunner is a form of media, therefore the error must be because they are part of the liberal media, right?

Actually, this is a great example. When the media does it, very commonly consider the reason to be intentional and secondarily due to blatant and often wilfull ingnorance, not bothering to sleuth everything about guns before reporting in a 500 word story.

So what happens when such statements are made by pro-gun folks. Those are usually considered to be mistakes, or as JamesK suggested, done intentionally to avoid the whole discussion on the issue by going with the short, less accurate interpretation to save print and $. In other words, they still misrepresented the information for money, if that theory is applied.

The real bottom line is that while various sources certainly may have some biases, this example in the OP and countless online discussions within this very forum indicates just how deep the level of ignorance is amongst pro-gun people in general about all sorts of aspects of guns, gun use, performance, legal aspects, etc. It happens all the time.

Heck, we even have folks, some with police and military experience, who think people can knocked down by bullets and will cite their long experience as proof to their claims, having confused the issues of falling down and being knocked down, but believe the latter despite it generally defying the laws of physics.

I used to love giving my boss at work, and NRA lifer, a hard time every time I heard him refer to a clip for his AK47 and when he would speak about registering guns here in Texas.

Ignorance is a bad thing across the board. Many of our "enemies" in the pursuit of a more pro-gun community are our enemies out of ignorance, but the really scary people are the pro-gun people who are just as ignorant and make equal or worse claims, and they can be just as damaging to our cause as our enemies, sometimes even more so when they are teaching or informing fellow gun owners with their ignorance.

[RAnb]

Well, since you took the dig at CNN and Fox News, the general online pro-gun consensus would seem to be that they are the "liberal media" along with other forms such as Time Magazine. So then by default, American Handgunner is a form of media, therefore the error must be because they are part of the liberal media, right?

Bolding mine.

Wrong.

I have always thought that Fox News was the most conservative of the major 24 hour news channels that include CNN, HLN and MSNBC. With the recent O'Reilly on air melt-down on gun control following the Aurora shooting, I have to classify him with the rest of the gun control fanatics out there.

I do not know enough about American Handgunner to classify them as liberal or conservative. I myself am an independent who thinks the NRA is too compromising and liberal for my taste.

I wrote to the magazine publisher to get an justification of the claim in the article. My opinion of them will be based on their answer.

Ranb

[Double Naught Spy]

Bolding mine.

Wrong.

Why wrong? Very frequently when any media group says something we don't like about firearms or even just because they have in the past, they get called "the liberal media" by default as a derogatory comment, but only because "we" don't like them. Nearly 1000 times here on TFL this has gone on and that does not include all the times where the description was made without the term of "liberal." You may or may now want to fall within the stereotyping I am making on many pro-gun folks stereotyping the media and that is fine, but your statement is a fine example of stereotyping none-the-less. You don't call the media liberal, but you expect them to be liars, LOL. Your stated bias in what you expect which reflects in how you evaluate the source's words.

So when American Handgunner does something egregious like your description of them trying to convince the readership that certain firearms are illegal that are not, you don't classify them with the general media expected liars. You give them a pass of sorts and just say that it is "sad."

[MLeake]

DNS, he disagrees because you referred to FOX as part of the "liberal media."

I think he was deliberately castigating liberal and conservative media alike, for their quick-and-easy attitude toward verifying "facts".

[Willie Lowman]

Seems odd to me. "Duke" owns a collection of vintage WWII submachineguns. He recently wrote an article for Guns about obtaining SBR clones of some old SMGs because they are much much cheaper and in some cases more accurate (closed bolt) than the originals.

The writers of the articles don't do the final editing before they go to press.

Write to Handgunner and tell them how upset you are about this poor explanation of NFA laws, perhaps they will publish your letter in their "whinery" section.

[01SVTvert]

The Carcal F could be imported as a pistol (disassembled) and then the importer here could "manufacture" them by adding on the stock and grip and form 1 them. They would need to be engraved but I do not see how that is going to make it into the country as anything other than a SBR if it comes to the USA in one piece.

EDIT: When you remove the shoulder stock it can be treated like any other title 1 firearm, but if the change is "permanent" ie: you want it out of the registry or want to sell it as a title 1 firearm, then you are supposed to notify the ATF. You could also bring that shooting to another state as long as you dont bring the stock and you wouldn't need a 5320.

[Skans]

Legality aside, I never understood the purpose of a pistol with a buttstock.

[BlueTrain]

Legalities aside, they have been a few pistols that were made to be used with shoulder stocks with the assumption that the pistols would be easier to make hits with at longer ranges. Essentially, it made them into carbines. Such pistols have been made since before the Civil War.

The best known of them was probably the Mauser military pistol, the C-96. I owned one with a shoulder stock about 45 years ago. It was an excellent pistol, I though, but the shoulder stock did not attached very ridgedly and was not as good as it as it might have been.

Lugers, Browning Hi-Powers and a few other pistols have been so manufactured, although I believe not all such pistols ever actually had shoulder stocks made available for use with them.

About the only disadvantage I can think of, other than any possible shortcomings in the actual fit of the stock, is that it makes a one-handed weapon into a two handed-weapon, which may or may not be good. These days, a carbine is more likely to be used instead, especially one with a folding or collapsible stock.

[RAnb]

DNS, he disagrees because you referred to FOX as part of the "liberal media."

I think he was deliberately castigating liberal and conservative media alike, for their quick-and-easy attitude toward verifying "facts".

That is it. Thanks.

Write to Handgunner and tell them how upset you are about this poor explanation of NFA laws, perhaps they will publish your letter in their "whinery" section.

I wrote and managed to keep the whining out of my letter.

Ranb

[Skans]

These days, a carbine is more likely to be used instead, especially one with a folding or collapsible stock.

That was my thinking as well. A pistol with buttstock seems like a solution to a problem that was solved many years ago with carbine-sized firearms.

[BlueTrain]

That may be, only early carbines were quite long by today's standards. Muzzle loading carbines were also something of a handful to reload when mounted. Some mounted troops, not necessarily termed cavalry, carred the same weapon the infantry carried and even had bayonets.

I couldn't find a quick reference on the internet but the army issued a single shot percussion pistol manufactured at Harper's Ferry that came with a detachable shoulder stock. It looks quite handy but I've never seen one in person. It would seem to have all the disadvantages any other muzzleloader would have on horseback with no particular advantage over a regular carbine if used with the shoulder stock. I have read that troops issued the pistol were a little confused as how it was best used. However, some of the early Colt percussion pistols were sometimes made available with shoulder stocks, too. But based on my own experiences of riding under relatively sedate conditions, doing any accurate shooting on horseback is not going to be easy.

[tdrizzle]

Slightly OT, but I have understood that the majority of full auto pistols (G-18, Beretta 93R, Stechkin, and perhaps even the Skorpion) are at their most useful as ambush breakers for use by discreetly armed protection agents.

Agents who can't carry something larger would use them to put a lot of lead back at anyone ambushing their principal, typically between a structure and a vehicle, until they could get to one or the other. I suppose the old MP-5K briefcase model would be useful for this, too, if a little less accurate.

Or maybe I'm off base.

[BlueTrain]

I don't know the origin of most of these full-auto pistols, which have been around almost as long as automatic pistols, but probably most of them were purely commercial ventures on the part of arms manufacturers. There are always new experimental weapons being developed that often as not never see the light of day. Others make it into catalogs or sales brochures, such as the later Madsen general purpose or light machine guns and are produced but basically failures from a sales standpoint, probably because they were introduced at a bad time or otherwise did not represent a significant advance of something everyone already had plenty of.

As an example of the latter, the FN-1949 (as it's generally known) was an excellent rifle produced to a high quality standard. It was adopted and used by some armies but at the time, the Garand rifle had already been widely distributed when European armies rearmed after the war and the FN wasn't significantly better. In fact, the Garand was going to be manufactured for nearly another ten years, which is surprising in itself.

The Mauser C96 and later variations had a following in Russia and the USSR and probably inspired the introduction of the Stechkin. It is a sort of throwback idea, sort of, but was issued for some purposes, but nothing like US M1 carbines were. But in that case, it was no doubt designed to a military specification. In the West, however, most would probably have chosen a UZI instead, if they could. FN made UZI submachine guns, too.

One writer in describing the use of shoulder stocked pistols during the Russo-Finnish wars of the 1940s said they were "almost as good as a submachine gun," and that's good enough for me.

[JohnKSa]

Should be interesting to see if this Caracal F can somehow get this into the US, without it being classified as a SBR, or if it is classified as an SBR, what happens when you remove the shoulder stock.

The Caracal F is already being imported, I have one.

The detachable shoulder stock and the forward grip that attaches to the accessory rail are optional accessories. If they're being imported for general sale, I'm not aware of it. Caracal had a full accessory kit at their booth at 2012 SHOT and it was available for testing on media day, but I don't believe the stock & forward grip are targeted for the U.S. market.

[barnbwt]

Should be interesting to see if this Caracal F can somehow get this into the US

Whoah! And I though Glocks looked like tupperware ! How much does that stock cost? It looks like a clay-thrower

TCB

[SIGSHR]

Ther version I have read says a pistol stock turns a good handgun into a poor carbine. With the cap and ball Colts there is the problem of the supporting hand being too close to the barrel/cylinder gap plus it changes the sight picture too much. Looks nifty though. Supposedly Kaiser Wilhem II used a shoulder stocked Luger because of his crippled left arm.

[Tom Servo]

Let's stop with the liberal vs. conservative stereotyping. It's inaccurate, immature, and unfair. There are liberals who are strong supporters of our cause, and there are conservatives who are not.

Furthermore, let's also stop with the not-so-subtle digs at each other. A guy in a gun magazine wrote something inaccurate. That's hardly the first time it's happened, nor is it the worst I've seen.

For the record, even without the shoulder stock, the Caracal would still be problematic with the forward pistol grip. Even without the pistol grip, it'd still be ugly

[SIGSHR]

I enjoy Mike Venturino's writings, I note that he has never put the initials J.D. or LLB after his name nor referred to his bar association membership, he is simply citing government regulations, which,as many of us can attest to, are often poorly written and arbitrarily interepreted by bureacrats of dubious ability.
Regarding that Caracal, it looks nifty but suffers from the Doubel Whammy of being a non C&R with a shoulder stock and having too short a barrel, hence being classified as a "sawed off rifle." Also as a Steel and Walnut Man...you know.

[death2twinkys]

Creeper if you remove the stock then it is still considered an AOW because of the Foregrip

[Skans]

Even without the pistol grip, it'd still be ugly

Amen!