A different way of defining what an assault weapon is

[Always Right]

22. The NFA registry has its own issues

I am not taking a stance on banning anything either, rather I was pointing out that your definition of AW would include many guns not generally considered to fit in that category and I listed one specific military weapon which didn't fit in your category.

As for the NFA registry, it has lots of errors and they seem to be running 1980's technology as it can take upwards of a year to process the paperwork for a transfer and that is with just the present categories of NFA items. Adding many millions of new items to the registry would require an entirely new way to process transfers, not to mention greatly expanding the ATF budget to hire many more examiners. Now I'm not saying that this can't be done, rather I'm just saying that the NFA process isn't as nearly as simple as you think.

In fact, until just last year, all NFA paperwork required the signature of the local chief law enforcement officer. That requirement dated back to 1934 when there was no way for the federal government's clerk doing the transfer to be aware of any local laws that would forbid a person from possessing that item. However, today with computerized systems and instant check, it is easy to know on the spot. As most police chiefs would refuse to sign anything, the vast majority of people were prevented from any sort of NFA transfer. Of course that didn't apply to the rich and connected, they still got their signatures.

The only reason the signature was removed was because people were getting around it through other means and the ATF wanted to stop that as the new method not only opened up a challenge to the existing machine gun ban but actually avoided background checks.

My point being that if you are going to add things to NFA, you will need to fix the NFA process. Given that there are already instant background checks done at the point of sale of regular firearms, there isn't any reason the NFA process can't be instant as well. I suspect that you would see a lot less resistance to making stuff NFA if the NFA system were fixed.

As an aside, the LV shooter had a clean record and enough money that he certainly could have bought a full auto water cooled belt fed machine gun capable of sustained fire so adding semi-autos to the NFA wouldn't have stopped the LV shooting.