It’s like the anti-gunners are getting so desperate, they are grasping at every straw they can to promote gun control.
In this episode of “Let’s Take the Guns,” The Associated Press published a report lamenting the fact that there are very few, if any, restrictions on muskets. That’s right, folks. They want to pass laws to ban antique firearms.
With 165 grains of black powder in the barrel, a .75-caliber Brown Bess flintlock musket like the ones the redcoats carried in 1776 can hurl a lead ball at a velocity of around 1,000 feet (305 meters) per second.
Imagine what that can do to a human body. Now, imagine that it’s almost completely exempt from gun regulations.
How can that be? Well, under federal and most state laws, many antique or replica guns aren’t technically considered firearms. In most places, even convicted felons can own them.
“I suspect the average judge would be surprised to find that out,” says Second Amendment scholar and gun-rights attorney Dave Hardy, himself the proud owner of two Civil War-era long guns.
During a National Rifle Association event back in 2000, the late actor Charlton Heston famously hoisted a flintlock — the single-shot weapon that won the Revolution and was still in wide use a half century after Congress debated the Second Amendment — into the air and said the Democrats would have to take it “from my cold, dead hands.”
A musket from 1776 can fire a lead ball at a velocity of around 1,000 feet per second.
— The Associated Press (@AP) May 14, 2026
Imagine what that can do to a human body. Yet under federal and most state laws, it’s exempt from gun regulations. Many antique or replica guns aren’t considered firearms and even convicted… pic.twitter.com/RBT5ihazdA
The report goes on to explain how old black-powder guns and replicas are treated differently from modern guns because “many antique or replica guns aren’t technically considered firearms.”
The exemption comes from a rule in the 1968 Gun Control Act that covers weapons with older ignition systems. This applies to flintlocks made before 1898 and others. Enforcement of these laws varies from state to state.
The article stresses that “these weapons are still deadly” and brings up how Maryland tightened its laws after a convicted sex offender killed his ex-girlfriend with a cap-and-ball revolver he purchased online. Shadé’s Law, passed in 2019, “now prohibits people convicted of certain violent crimes from buying or possessing such weapons.”
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is what the anti-gunner left has been reduced to. Now that the gun rights debate isn’t quite going in their favor, they are resorting to trying to make sure people have a hard time buying historical firearms.
It’s hard to imagine why The Associated Press, or anyone else, would even bring this up. Violent criminals are not generally running around shooting at people using the same firearms the Colonists used against the Redcoats during the Revolutionary War. It’s almost like this is more about finding novel ways to criminalize people and not about keeping people safe.