Assault weapons ban expires at midnight

Monday, September 13th 2004, 10:22 am

By: News On 6

The federal assault weapons ban expires at midnight, leaving some gun control advocates to worry about the crime and the danger. But one local gun dealer says the ban didn't do much in the first place.

News on 6 reporter Steve Berg says David Stone says very little changed about his gun business over the past 10 years. And he expects very little will change now that the ban has been lifted.

That's because he says the gun ban was full of loopholes. For example, there's a Chinese-made gun that's banned, but he says there's one just like it made in Romania that's legal. The biggest change will be that high-capacity gun magazines will be legal again. But again, a loophole.

He says the ban only applied to magazines made in the US. David Stone: "I have boxes back there of magazines I've gotten from distributors that were made overseas, so we've been selling 30-round AR-15 mags for the last 10 years."

Contrary to what you might be hearing, this ban had nothing to do with fully-automatic weapons, sometimes called Class 3 weapons. Those still have the same restrictions as before and are still very difficult to get certification to own.