Rudolf_Ushiromiya said:
Where can I obtain a Winchester 1892 Mare's Leg?
UncleEd said:
As I understand it, they never really existed regarding Winchester... The ones on the market are built as "pistols" and are not cut down 92s which would violate federal law.
Aguila Blanca said:
I don't think Winchester ever offered a reproduction of the television "mare's leg"... The one used in the show was so short that it would today be classified as a short-barreled rifle, which is an NFA item.
Rudolf, since this is evidently your first post, let me give you a little background information.
AFAIK Winchester never made a "Mare's Leg" (+1 UncleEd and AB) and any Winchesters what exist in this form were cut-down from rifles.
In the USA, the National Firearms Act of 1934—commonly referred to as the "NFA" for short—places special taxes and transfer restrictions on certain classes of firearms. One of these is a "Weapon Made from a Rifle", which is defined in 26 U.S.C. 5845(a) as:
...a weapon made from a rifle if such weapon as modified has an overall length of less than 26 inches or a barrel or barrels of less than 16 inches in length...
A "rifle" is, per 26 U.S.C. 5845(c) and 27 CFR 479.11:
...a weapon designed or redesigned, made or remade, and intended to be fired from the shoulder and designed or redesigned and made or remade to use the energy of the explosive in a fixed cartridge to fire only a single projectile through a rifled bore for each single pull of the trigger, and shall include any such weapon which may be readily restored to fire a fixed cartridge.
(My emphasis in
boldface)
Requirements for registering, transferring, and/or building NFA weapons are complex and have been more than adequately covered elsewhere on the Interwebz and on this forum, so I won't attempt to explain them here.
That said...
The key thing to understand is that
modern "Mare's Leg" replicas did not start out as rifles and are thus exempt from the NFA definition of "Weapon Made from a Rifle". They are legally considered to be pistols since they were originally built as such—the stock is short enough that the firearm is not considered to be "intended to be fired from the shoulder". Hence, they can be owned and transferred without jumping through extra NFA hoops.
Yes, at an intellectual level this makes little sense, but the law is the law.
[FOOTNOTE: I'm not aware of the exact details, but as I understand it, the creators of the show inadvertently wound up in legal trouble because they either didn't understand or disregarded the NFA as it relates to the operable "Mare's Leg" guns used for filming, and had to register them and pay the taxes after the show had already aired!
]