‘Yes on 9’ Prohibition Extension Effort Relying on False Authority and Deception
“[U.S. Representative] Jake Auchincloss, assembling a rifle to camera, urges voters to back Question 9 in new ad,” The Boston Globe reported Friday. “In a bid to encourage Massachusetts voters to vote for Question 9 and keep a sweeping gun control law, Auchincloss is putting his own campaign cash behind a new ad in which he assembles a replica rifle in real time during the 30-second spot.”
“As a Marine, I know that firearms demand training, accountability and responsibility,” the “Newton Democrat and former Marine Corps captain who served in Afghanistan,” declared. “‘Yes on 9′ keeps protections against ghost guns and assault weapons in place and helps police solve crimes.”
The law that would repeal Chapter 135 of the Acts of 2024 affects more than that. Per a generative summary:
Massachusetts law updates firearm regulations, including expanding Extreme Risk Protection Orders to school administrators and healthcare providers, and requiring firearm serial numbers, especially for ghost guns. It raises age limits to 21 for certain rifles, enhances reporting and licensing procedures, updates definitions of machine guns and silencers, restricts firearm carry in sensitive locations, and creates data and review commissions.
To put that in context, it allows members of professional groups that are overwhelmingly anti-gun to initiate proceedings that allow for the confiscation of arms from citizens who have not even been charged with a crime of violence, let alone convicted of one.
It requires unfinished frames and receivers to have serial numbers and “includes privately made guns like 3D-printed guns within the provisions governing untraceable ‘ghost gun’ firearms.”
It denies arms to a segment of the population that is old enough to make contracts, marry, serve in the armed forces, and vote, one that, incidentally, is assigned a duty in U.S. Code:
“The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age…”
Auchincloss packs sophistry and outright deception in a brief 30 seconds intended to spook the ignorant and swindle them into ceding not just their rights to the state, but those of their countrymen.
The first is a logical fallacy known as “false authority.” That he served in the Marine Corps has nothing to do with his qualifications to speak with credibility on the subject of unalienable rights and Constitutional law. If anything, it shows he took an oath to support something he didn’t really understand.
The second, that you can order the parts online to assemble an untraceable gun in seconds is just a lie.
“You can NOT order all the AR parts he assembles in the video without at least the lower receiver having to be transferred by an FFL. ATF and federal law only regulate the ‘receiver.’ All other parts are not regulated by federal law,” firearm designer, expert witness and president of Historic Arms LLC Len Savage tells AmmoLand News.
One cannot just order all parts online and slap them together as easily as ordering clothes and school supplies. That’s clearly the impression Auchincloss is trying to plant in the minds of low-information constituents who vote by emotion. They have no idea of the extent and uselessness of existing citizen disarmament edicts and of a well-documented strategy of building on each new infringement to then demand more and eventually all.
No one seriously thinks Auchincloss will be satisfied if Question 9 passes and proclaim that’s “Enough,” do they?
“You COULD order an incomplete AR-15 lower, and if you know how and had the equipment, you could machine the remaining unfinished portions to make a firearm frame or receiver lawfully under federal law,” Savage notes, and adds an important reminder. “Serial numbers were only required for all firearms after the passage of the Gun Control Act in 1968.” [1934’s National Firearms Act required serial numbers on specific regulated firearms, e.g., machine guns, short barrel firearms, and suppressors].
If the Supreme Court’s Bruen standard of text, history, and tradition is to be heeded by inferior courts, one needs only observe Colonial Williamsburg to note the importance of free gunsmithing in the Founding era. As Constitutional scholar Edwin Vieira, Jr. noted in his brief to the Supreme Court in Kolbe v. Hogan:
“This reliance on a permanent private market for firearms guaranteed that most militiamen, through their own efforts, could always obtain firearms suitable for both collective and individual self-defense, and forestalled tyranny by precluding rogue public officials from monopolizing the production, distribution, and possession of firearms.”
“During the American Revolutionary War, gunsmiths were essential to the patriot cause, providing, repairing and maintaining firearms for the Continental Army, Navy, Marine Corps and state militias,” the Department of War’s Pentagon News reminds us. At most there would be a maker’s mark, or military property stamps to track government-owned arms for inventory purposes and as a discouragement against theft. But there were no serial numbers; they were too busy fighting tyranny.
As for Auchincloss’s last contention, that Question 9 “helps police solve crimes,” ask him to quantify that so it can be weighed against allowing government to infringe a fundamental right. He can’t. No one can. ATF does not track homicides with that metric, and offers this standard caveat in its firearms trace data reports:
Not all firearms used in crime are traced and not all firearms traced are used in crime… The firearms selected do not constitute a random sample and should not be considered representative of the larger universe of all firearms used by criminals, or any subset of that universe. Firearms are normally traced to the first retail seller, and sources reported for firearms traced do not necessarily represent the sources or methods by which firearms in general are acquired for use in crime.
Cutting to the chase, the growing popularity of home builds and 3D printing scares the hell out of the gun prohibitionists. They find ubiquitous fraud helps them keep a lid on things, because they know if they just resort to widespread force via mass confiscations it won’t end well for them. In that way, the Second Amendment is still working.
If knowing how to operate a firearm was all it took, gun owners would have no better friend than Lon Horiuchi. If being a “war hero” was the benchmark, the name Benedict Arnold comes to mind. If the hallmark of that is being a Marine, well, so was Lee Harvey Oswald. And as for being a “dad,” there is no shortage of teenagers who can make the same claim but won’t.
About David Codrea:
David Codrea is the winner of multiple journalist awards for investigating/defending the RKBA and a long-time gun owner rights advocate who defiantly challenges the folly of citizen disarmament. He blogs at “The War on Guns: Notes from the Resistance,” is a regularly featured contributor to Firearms News, and posts on Twitter: @dcodrea and Facebook.
