The SHOT Show, our largest firearms industry trade show, is underway today. Glock just announced their new 30S .45 caliber pistol. It combines the wide-body short frame of the Glock 30SF with the narrow slide of their model 36, in the same caliber. It was reportedly created at the request of LAPD detectives. It’s a cool little gun: I’ve had my pre-announcement sample since November, and it has run hundreds of rounds with perfect functioning. I even won an IDPA match in the CDP division, shooting against full size 1911 .45s, with it in Jacksonville, Florida last month.
And, in accompanying news, if you live in New York you may never actually see one unless a policeman shows you his or you go out of state, because it’s designed for a ten-shot magazine and accepts the thirteen-round magazine of its big brother model in the same caliber, the Glock 21. Today’s newswires announce that the NY state legislature is about to be willingly ramrodded by longtime anti-gun Governor Cuomo into passing a law that will restrict magazine capacity to seven cartridges. http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/01/14/gun-laws-may-soon-be-even-tighter-in-new-york-get-the-details-on-states-tenative-gun-control-deal/.
It’s the most Draconian gun law – and more so, in some ways – since the handgun bans of Chicago and the District of Columbia, both of which stood for a very long time before being struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States in Heller v. District of Columbia in 2008 and McDonald, et. al. v. City of Chicago in 2010.
There are still details of the new legislation to be seen and analyzed. But, in the name of stamping out evil, high capacity, high-powered “assault weapons” this legislation will take away the great majority of semiautomatic pistols and rifles. It can in theory take away every .22 rifle except single shot models, since the tube magazine versions all hold more than ten of the stubby little .22 cartridges, and the box magazine types are all capable of taking a more-than-seven-round magazine.
The old, retired GI’s or Marine’s 1911 .45 service pistol is now banned: they all accept commonly available eight-and ten-round mags, and longer ones that go back to World War I. More recent generations of American armed service personnel who bought the Beretta 92, the civilian version of the M9 service pistol they were trained on, are SOL; no less-than-ten-round magazine has ever been manufactured for that gun in its standard configuration, and they can all accept the longer ones.
In an ironic highlight to the cluelessness that has so long driven the gun-banning movement, we have the picture here of vehemently anti-gun New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg holding one of the AR15s he and the Governor want to ban their constituents from owning. He apparently thinks it’s the epitome of the super-lethal death-dealing assault weapon.
Look carefully at the ejection port and compare it to the Smith & Wesson M&P 15-22 pictured below.
The rifle Bloomberg is holding has an ejection port far too short to handle a .223/5.56mm rifle round, itself so weak that most states forbid its use for deer hunting. The Bloomberg AR15 appears to be chambered for .22 Long Rifle, a target-shooter’s cartridge generally considered so feeble as to be inhumane for hunting anything much bigger than a squirrel, a rabbit, or a close-range groundhog.
…and here, note standard S&W M&P15 with proper ejection port and bolt for .223 caliber/5.56mm. It appears that Hizzoner’s exemplar of a deadly assault rifle is in fact chambered for the little .22 rimfire cartridge.
Massad Ayoob
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