As long as you pay the $200 tax stamp and pass what's probably a year-long background check, you can legally own a fully-automatic weapon. The weapon itself would be prohibitively expensive (probably something like $40k), and finding one at all would be difficult since their manufacture is all but banned, but yes, it is technically possible for an average person to legally own a fully-automatic weapon.
Interesting. I wonder why these weapons are not more available. Surely, they are produced for military use. Why is gun control so effective here? Is there maybe much less demand for automatic weapons (since they provide no added benefit as far as I know)?
They effectively priced out automatic weapons. They knew they couldn’t win a ban on a legal front so they made it prohibitively expensive to be licensed and own one.
Like the other comment said, you can jump through a bunch of hoops and drop fat stacks of money to get a full auto.
Another option is that there are also semi-auto versions of the gun that are the same gun just without the full-auto. These can range from reasonable (semi-auto Thompson: about $1,200) to “Still Need Fat Stacks” (semi-auto M60: about $15,000).
Is an M60 even legal in US and A? Same for some of the other stuff.
I thought fully automatic weapons were not allowed.
As long as you pay the $200 tax stamp and pass what's probably a year-long background check, you can legally own a fully-automatic weapon. The weapon itself would be prohibitively expensive (probably something like $40k), and finding one at all would be difficult since their manufacture is all but banned, but yes, it is technically possible for an average person to legally own a fully-automatic weapon.
Interesting. I wonder why these weapons are not more available. Surely, they are produced for military use. Why is gun control so effective here? Is there maybe much less demand for automatic weapons (since they provide no added benefit as far as I know)?
They effectively priced out automatic weapons. They knew they couldn’t win a ban on a legal front so they made it prohibitively expensive to be licensed and own one.
Like the other comment said, you can jump through a bunch of hoops and drop fat stacks of money to get a full auto.
Another option is that there are also semi-auto versions of the gun that are the same gun just without the full-auto. These can range from reasonable (semi-auto Thompson: about $1,200) to “Still Need Fat Stacks” (semi-auto M60: about $15,000).
Fully automatic weapons are allowed in many states, it's just super expensive.
Cheapest fully auto-weapon I've seen was a fully automatic M-16 for about $15,000.
A regular AR-15 goes for around $500 and many are cheaper than that.