• commandar@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    That excellent quote of the text you provided spells out that any modifications to a gun that allows any more than a single shot is to be prohibited.

    Incorrect.

    It prohibits any conversion to a machine gun. The previous sentence has just defined a machine gun. The “by a single function of the trigger” language is what’s critical to this case and you’re completely ignoring it. When reading laws, you use words however they’re explicitly defined if a definition provided, not how you think they should be defined or would be used in common speech.

    Like I said, Gatling guns are pretty highly analogous. They produce what most people would consider automatic fire. They’ve also consistently been ruled to not meet the definition of a machine gun going back to at least the 1950s because they don’t meet that single function of the trigger definition.

    The solution is to change the text of the law.