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I live in Illinois, but I suddenly have an urge to buy a semi-automatic rifle in an intermediate caliber. No political reason, I'm just a guncel at heart even though I only have 4 guns (pump shotgun, striker fired 9mm, and rimfire pistol + rifle) and my friend activated my wallet-emptying instincts by sending me too many gun auction links.
The best semi-auto rifle is the AR-15. I feel comfortable asserting this. Parts are everywhere, gun does not have many malfunctions, .223 is cheap, 30 round capacity, great accuracy, not very heavy, simple barrel swap to run .300 blackout. AR-15 is preferred, but we'll look at some other options too.
But for Illinois, we have a problem: PICA! Scroll to the bottom for a flow chart. In a more readable form, see this post.
Naturally, we want to get around this. For options you can buy, the go-to is the Mini-14. The "ranch" model has none of the banned features. However... it sucks. It's not as accurate, it takes only proprietary magazines, and worst of all, it's not even cheap, the MSRP is like $1300. I bet an FFL could maybe sell them a bit cheaper, and I found one for $887 on gun.deals, but, yeah.
Another option is the SKS. The good, un-bubba'd, non-Chinese kind have fixed magazines with 10 rounds and are super duper aesthetic. Actually it's incredibly aesthetic. So is the Mini-14, now that you mention it. However, it fires 7.62x39mm cartridges, and ever since the import bans on Russian stuff, those are expensive. Ballistically, they're not as good as .223 in general, though the increased diameter makes them better for hunting medium game, it seems, which is something I want to try someday. And it's difficult to overstate how much the fixed 10 round magazine is not ideal. Also they got expensive too. Everyone wants these bad boys because most ban states (and ban countries, in Canada's case) still let you have them.
Last one I'm considering is the a neutered atrocity AR. The Fightlite SCR is the candidate for that because I'm 100% sure that it's legal. But the price! $1300!! It seems obscure enough that I doubt that a dealer would be able to offer anything lower than that. Everything else about it seems basically fine to me, save that it's pretty ugly. But ARs are already kinda ugly. Sorry, oper8ors of the forum.
Now for the actual question. PICA states the following makes a gun an assault weapon:
This seems like the major sticking point that excludes a workaround I am thinking of: you could theoretically leave the state, build out a lower from an 85%, get it serialized, and then take it back into the state. It's not an AR-15 by name, because you're the manufacturer and you're calling it the Mickey Mouse (Steamboat Willie Version Only)'s Problem Solver Mark I. The only problem is that I don't know what the hell a detachable stock is. What is it? Because you can unscrew the stock from an SKS and pull it off of the receiver. Does that mean it's detachable? SKSes are legal despite this fact. I guess I don't know if the pistol grip would be a problem either:
Help me out, legal eagles. But only help me out by answering the legal question, because it's mostly a hypothetical. Sounds like a bunch of work.
Wasn't Rittenhouse from Illinois? Why was a PICA-compliant AR-15 good enough for him, but not for you?
As I recall it wasn't actually the case that he "crossed state lines" with the rifle -- it was stored by his buddy in Wisconsin or something?
Maybe this is why, it was a pretty normal basic-bitch AR IIRC.
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