What I was saying is that there is a world of difference in a convicted felon making a machine gun from scratch in his garage, and not one but many, ... a crime that has absolutely no justification,...
Meh. I'm still completely of the opinion that one gun is no more or less worthy of being owned by a citizen than any other (machine gun or not) and how many someone has or wants to make is no one's business, and who he or she sells them to or how they are disposed of is likewise a matter for free people to handle on their own, without laws which pretend to constrict their behavior. Owning and making guns needs no "justification."
So that leaves us with the "felon in possession" matter. My thoughts on that one are likewise pretty sceptical. As I don't believe that the situation of having "quasi-free" people walking around in public who are not trusted enough to lawfully have guns is anything more than a laughable conceit we foist upon ourselves, In my world this guy would have to fry or fly based entirely on the merits of the claims against him of violent behavior.
Asinine nit picking over how many inches long the barrel of the gun is, or counting how many rounds it fires when you pull the trigger are blinkered, stupid irrelevancies our supposedly free nation is pointlessly saddled with due to an ill-conceived BAD law and the laughingstock of a bureaucracy that we've propped up to try to enforce it.
... a once legal standard capacity magazine turned into an illegal "high capacity" magazine by stupid politicians in one particular state.... by ex post facto law which is clearly unconstitutional. See the United States Constitution Article 1, Section 9, Clause 3.
Once more: that's not what
ex post facto means.
EPF only applies if someone is being prosecuted for something they did or had sometime in the past, when it was LAWFUL,
but now isn't doing (or doesn't have) any more, now that it is unlawful.
If you sold a gun to your friend in another state without a dealer, back in 1965, and the BATFE tried to come after you for that now, because it is against a law written in 1968, that would be
ex post facto.
Making something illegal, that once was legal, is unfortunately, perfectly Constitutional. It happens frequently. Time was, there was no law against possession of Cocaine. Now that's been made illegal. The fact that the cocaine you had before is now unlawful for you to possess is NOT
ex post facto, and neither is a magazine or gun ban.
To sustain a claim that the CT law is
ex post facto you'd have to show that the CTSP has arrested someone and charged them for HAVING HAD a now illegal magazine sometime last year or five years ago or at some other point in history but DOESN'T own it now. "
Hey, we know you had one a few years ago. Now that the law would make that mag illegal today, we're going to charge you with a crime for what you had back then..." THAT's
ex post facto.