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Man Orders TV On Amazon, Gets Shipped Assault Rifle
First time accepted submitter InfernoApple writes "Seth Horvitz, a Northeast D.C. resident, thought he had ordered a new high-definition television a few days ago through Amazon.com from a third-party merchant. When the package arrived yesterday, however, Horvitz opened the oddly shaped box to find something completely different. Instead of the flat-panel TV he had bought to enjoy with his wife, who is pregnant, Horvitz opened the long packaging to discover a Sig Sauer SIG716, a high-caliber, semi-automatic assault rifle capable of mowing down, well, just about anything."
I'm not sure what the DC one did, but the one in Chicago just got rid of the handgun ban. Chicago and Cook County still have very strict gun ban codes that make AR's illegal unless your local municipality has specifically preempted the county "Assault Weapon Ban". Other rifles are illegal too, and it doesn't have much to do with how they operate. Weird criteria like, "Hand guard that goes around the barrel" and "designed to look like a military rifle" get passed out on a sheet by FFL's when you buy a lower receiver in a nearby county, as a warning.
The joke of all this is that nobody can tell you, universally, what an assault weapon is. It used to have a strict ATF definition, but now it's just a scary political phrase that changes to suit whatever legislation someone is trying to pass.