And I will be damned if that isn’t a fact Unless you are an Uzi guy it would be hard for you to tell which of these is a selective-fire open bolt gun and which isn’t:īoth of these firearms share many cosmetic and superficial parts in common, they fire the same cartridge, they utilize the same magazines, and they were both made by the same manufacturer! One of these guns is a Group/Vector SMG (one of about 3,500 on the registry from what I understand) and the other is a Group/Vector SBR (not a factory SBR but a gun that I bought as a carbine and put on a Form 1 and had the barrel turned down). The Macs, Uzis, and Thompsons you see today in stores fire from a modified closed bolt system that is so dissimilar from the weapons original design that they share little in common aside from their external appearance. In the ATF’s defense, Thugs could take an over the counter mac 10 or tec-9 and easily (and I do mean easily) convert it to fire full auto, so they got banned. The reason so many American shooters are unfamiliar with the way open bolt guns work is because the ATF made a ruling in 1982 that semi-automatic open bolt weapons are “readily convertible to fully automatic fire”, therefore such weapons manufactured after the date of this ruling got classed and controlled as fully automatic weapons (weapons manufactured prior to the ruling are grandfathered and are still considered semi-automatic but bring big money as curios). Nowadays instead of explaining how an open bolt gun works I just say “it’s fine, just pull the trigger” and people will shrug it off and dump a magazine. Hell, I have been to competitions where the range officer was insistent upon me walking around the range with the gun’s bolt open in the ready to fire position, even though I explained how the bolt closed with no mag in it is correct and that to render the gun completely safe I would have to remove the magazine and walk the bolt forward.
I used to simply say “oh, it fires from an open bolt,” but that typically led to more confusion, even among people you would assume would be familiar with that type of action (including military folk and police officers). Since I got into machine guns one of the most unusual things I have noticed is that an astounding amount of people who shoot most commonly available submachine guns will get ready, anchor their feet into the ground, cock the bolt to the rear, and then look at me confused and say “it won’t cock” or “the bolt won’t close”.
0 kommentar(er)
