Doesn the Crime Bill explicitly protect my right to own over 650 different sporting firearms?
In a word, no. At some point during the Bill’s progress through Congress, someone came up with the bright idea of adding a list of guns that wouldn’t be banned. The final version of the Bill does contain this list, and it does contain more than 650 different firearms. However, its actual effect is non-existent. First, only 86 of the firearms on the list are semi-automatics, leaving 575 that cannot, by definition, be “semi-automatic assault weapons.” Second, the listed firearms are exempted only “as manufactured on October 1, 1993”-that means they can’t be modified and retain their exempt status. Of the 86 semi-automatics on the list, the number that would have been banned but for the list is (drum roll please) Zero! The sole purpose of having the list was to provide sound-bite fodder about “protecting the right to own over 650 types of sporting firearms.” By the way, nothing in the Crime Bill prevents those firearms from being banned by other legislation, either.
