2025-06-05

I read a great post from fellow SDFer, stug, about his experience
buying an air pistol in the UK.

gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/stug/phlog/20250505.txt

It is always interesting to hear about how different countries have
different laws about the same manufactured and engineered objects
that are sold around the world.

I figure I would write a quick post about the firearm topic in the
USA. But first, I do have to present a very very big caveat. The
US is made up of 50 states and thousands of municipalities. There
are probably thousands of laws that govern firearm ownership and
usage in my country and it would be impossible to enumerate every
single difference. I am going to mostly focus on my home state of
Texas which is considered a very gun-friendly state.

It goes without saying that airguns are not considered firearms in
my home state of Texas. For example, stug's Gamo P900 air pistol
is listed on amazon.com right now for about $62 and it can be
delivered to my door with amazon prime, free shipping and returns
included.

I won't really go into how to buy a modern firearm because honestly,
there's a ton of youtube videos about that and it's not really that
interesting.

what's more interesting is the class of firearms we have in the US
called antique firearms!  What are antique firearms? Well in Texas,
this means any firearm manufactured or designed before 1899 that
uses an ignition system such as matchlock, flintlock, percussion
cap, or other system in use before 1899 that does not use modern
centerfire or rimfire cartridges.  The firearms don't actually have
to be genuine antique firearms that are 100s of years old. This
law also includes any replica of any of these antique firearms as
long as they can't be easily converted to use a modern ammunition
or ignition system.

Antique firearms are not covered under the laws that govern modern
firearms which means they are treated as non-firearms for the
purposes of purchase and sale. Huh?

Yup, this means that you can buy any percussion cap black powder
revolver and have it directly shipped to your home like an airgun.
So any black powder percussion cap revolver or any muzzle-loader
rifle/pistol from the US civil war or the Franco-Prussian war is
fair game to be shipped to your home since they aren't considered
firearms.

Pretty cool right? What's interesting is that some of the best
black powder replica pistols are manufactured in Europe and imported
into the United States.  The italian manufacturer Uberti is a well
known replica manufacturer and they make beautiful replicas of old
west revolvers. I particularly like the 1858 New Army Revolvers.

anyways, maybe next time I'll talk about the modern firearms purchase
process and a lot of the myths/truths around their purchase in the
US.