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Originally Posted by roscoe
I wonder if it has ever really happened in the US. My understanding was that, typically, existing guns were always grandfathered in, to avoid any kind of ex post facto issues. That is what happened in DC, for example, in the 70s, from my understanding.
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That's a generalization that you should not count on.
For example: After the Sandy Hook school shooting, Connecticut changed the language of their assault weapons ban law in a way that made formerly legal "post-ban" AR-15s into assault weapons. They created a window of time, within which all newly-designated assault weapons had to be registered with the State Police. Some time after all that, I was on a jon site with a guy from Connecticut who owned an AR-15. That registration law came up in a discussion over lunch one day. He got a deer in headlights look on his face and told us that he didn't know about the law and he hadn't registered his AR-15. He asked if he should register it. The answer was that he couldn't -- the window had closed months before. His choices were to (a) move the rifle out of Connecticut; (b) sell the rifle out of Connecticut; or (c) keep the rifle and risk being arrested for a felony.
I don't know which he chose. It doesn't matter. That was then, and this is now. I don't think it would be correct to say that existing guns have "always" been grandfathered in. Even if they have
mostly been grandfathered in the past, that doesn't mean they will be grandfathered in any potential future legislation.