Why Was A Lubbock Man Arrested For Having Machine Guns?

Machine guns bring up a number of questions.

A Lubbock man was arrested by the A.T.F. for possessing machine guns and apparently, parts to convert other guns into machine guns. Now whichever way you expect the rest of this post to go, you're probably not correct.

Here's some background. My uncle was the chief firearms instructor for the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. His claim to fame is he had the world record for the speed at which he could fire six shots from a revolver. I don't remember the time, but during demonstrations, you would only hear two pops and an echo, but sure enough, he'd fired all six shots.

So really what is the difference between a semi-automatic rifle and a machine gun, especially if you have a quick trigger finger? Note, once again, I'm not saying semiautomatic guns should be illegal, or machine guns should be legal, I'm saying the line is very blurry.

So how blurry is the line? Well, Texas, for the most part, prohibits ownership of machine guns, unless registered with the Federal Government (at least in certain cases).

Now let's take things back to the point that at some point we decided that a line had to be drawn somewhere, and that decision almost seems arbitrary. It seems to me that there is much difference between a pistol and a rifle, as there is a rifle to a semi, and a semi to a fully automatic weapon.

I have absolutely zero answers to any of these questions and if I did, I probably wouldn't even express them, because my thoughts on firearms have changed wildly over the last ten years and I can truly see both sides of the argument. As for the situation of the man with the machine guns, he was arrested at a Lubbock motel and I'm glad the authorities will at least have a chance to see if anything else shady was going on.