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KaiserB wrote:

jimlongley wrote:If it was legal for me to own a particular gun last month, and now it is not, that's ex post facto.

Not necessarily. If it was legal for you to own a gun last month and they changed the law this month, then under Ex Post Facto: They can not bring charges against you for owning a gun last month. They can file charges this month as you are not in compliance with the current law.

Still looks ex post facto to me. If I own a gun, legally, and a law is passed making it illegal for me to own that gun, it is criminalizing something that already exists, and that sounds pretty ex post facto to me. Now if I owned a gun in the past, and got rid of it, and then tried to buy one again after its possession was criminalized, that would be a different matter.

If it was legal for me to own a particular gun last month, and now it is not, that's ex post facto.

SlowDave wrote:Go ahead and call me naive, but I really can't see anyone trying to take away existing guns from gun owners. At the farthest reaches of my imagination, I could see them telling you to turn them in, but if you don't...? You sold it, lost it, it fell in a well, etc. Are they going to come to your house and search it? That's a bit far-fetched for me to buy, but it would be good in the long run, as it would result in the largest membership drive in NRA history and would probably take the Democrats out of the political business forever come 2012. There are a LOT of gun owners and pro 2nd amendment voters in the US, and I think the dems will be much more careful and try to creep up quietly on gun owners with "reasonable" (in their spin) restrictions. As the NRA notes, did you notice that NO ONE, not even the most liberal democrat, was on tv with a commercial touting their intention to ban guns wholesale from the US? Times they have changed, IMH(& naive) O.

Still good to be aware and cognizant of what's going on around us.

I'll second the motion, and call you naive, and add short sighted with limited memory. Do you recall what happened in California? How about NY? In both cases ex post facto laws were passed outlawing already possessed firearms, including "turn in by" dates, and the threat, even if it wasn't followed through on, of searches based on records.

And don't even get me started on MA.

With bambam in the White House, and his people, if not he, already claiming a mandate, there is every likelyhood that the attempt will be made, and that they will count on the long and arduous process of getting such a thing to the Supreme Court to be very long and very arduous.

Remember one old tactic from HCI's playbook - if you manage to eliminate a class or part of a class of firearms from public possession for even a short period of time, the class is going to be replaced at a lower rate. Now this did not necessarily happen in the wake of the expiration of the AWB, but that was a ban that already had been scheduled to sunset, so a lot of us were saving up waiting for the day when we could buy full capacity magazines again. The old AWB generated a backlash, a new one, with no sunset date attached, may not, particularly if SCOTUS has to be depended on to quash it. Particularly if turn ins and confiscations have happened.