Guns across America by Spitzer Robert;

Author:Spitzer, Robert;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2015-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

The Case of New York

I built a gun. No kidding.

On a bright spring afternoon, I visited the home of a friend and colleague, a gun owner and outdoors enthusiast, to build the “lower receiver” of an AR-15. Our goal was to construct a “featureless” AR-15, meaning a weapon that would be legal under New York’s recently enacted law that imposed new restrictions on civilian ownership of assault weapons.

The AR-15 was first produced by the ArmaLite Company in the late 1950s. According to one of its designers, Jim Sullivan, the weapon was “designed for full automatic military use. It wasn’t really designed as a sporting rifle.”1 ArmaLite sold the rights to the gun to the Colt Company in 1959. A few years later, the weapon was adopted by the American military and produced as the M16, where it gradually came in to use during the Vietnam War in the 1960s. Colt received permission to market a semi-automatic version of the AR-15 to the civilian market, but as noted in Chapter 3, civilian sales of these types of weapons only began to expand significantly in the late 1980s. Today, the AR-15 type of weapon is manufactured and sold by over thirty companies, including Smith and Wesson, Bushmaster, and Sig Sauer. According to one longtime gun specialist, “The AR-15 is like Legos for grownups because you can adapt them for different calibers, different barrel stocks, with just a few simple tools.”2 Another gun enthusiast analogized the modular nature of the weapon this way: “This is the man’s Barbie doll—you know, the Mr. Potato Head of firearms.”3 (Both of these children’s toys have been popular because of their many interchangeable parts and accessories.)

The Legos-like modular quality of the AR-15 is what I encountered working on the assembly of this weapon. In less than two hours, we were able to complete the assembly of the lower receiver. This element of the gun cost about $160 and had to be purchased either from or through a dealer with a federal firearms license, or FFL, which calls for completion of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives form 4473. In this instance, my friend ordered the item from an out-of-state dealer, who sent it to a local FFL, where he picked it up and completed and submitted the federal form.

Our assembly efforts included installing the magazine release (a lever that releases the bullet magazine), the trigger guard (a piece of metal that keeps the trigger from being bumped), the trigger assembly (the operation of which actually fires the weapon), and the selector switch and safety (the device that prevents or allows the gun to fire). The significance of the lower receiver of the AR-15 is that it is the component that possesses a unique serial number—the number that defines this as a traceable, identifiable firearm. The other parts, including the “upper” mechanism that feeds bullets, the stock, and the barrel, are essential but interchangeable components that do not change the identification of the weapon. They are, however, essential to how these weapons are treated under New York law.

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