"I think something more nefarious is going on here, like weapons dealers using the run on guns to drive up an artificial premium on firearms and ammunition, knowing that true bans and confiscation will never pass the Supreme Court."
Yes, yes, you're on to the plot. It was actually a gun dealer who killed those 26 people in Connecticut.
And, I have it on the BEST authority that no one actually died -- those kids and adults were spirited away and are being held in the same super secret facility where all of the people from the supposedly hijacked 9-11 jets are being held.
That manufactured a high profile "incident" that the EBRSSSSS (Evil Black Rifle Sellers Super Secret Squirrel Society) used to jam up prices.
"Would you have thrown out all of the good that the FOPA accomplished over that provision?"
Quite a few people would, actually. A lot.
Because it wasn't hard line enough, because it wasn't PURE enough, because if there's ONE IOTA of something with which someone disagrees in that act it means that NRA SOLD OUT AND THEY SHOULD NEVER EVER BE FORGIVEN! TAKE UP ARMS! TAKE UP ARMS!
Yeah.
"The FOPA was also poorly written."
Wow. A piece of legislation that is "poorly written" and has unintended consequences.
That certainly had never happened before in Congress.
Here's a very simple truth that far too many people either can't, or won't, understand...
NO piece of legislation ever passed is free from the ability of some other politician or political entity to bastardize it, twist it, and loophole it in ways that no one could have conceived.
A PERFECT example is the 1994 Assault Weapons law...
By defining an assault weapon in terms of cosmetics, such as a pistol grip and a bayonet lug, it was easy for the firearms industry to obey the letter of the law while continuing to manufacture the exact same firearms, except with out certain cosmetic features such as bayonet lugs.
It took the people who supported that boondoggle a bit to catch on to what was happening, and then it was all crocodile tears about how the gun makers were violating the spirit of the law.
Right.
The salient fact remains that as long as you have politicians quibbling over terminology - I'll remind you of the most famous instance, in which Bill Clinton quibbled over the definition of the word IS - a perfectly clear law CAN NEVER be passed.