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How the RPG-7 Actually Works
Virginia gun owners just got another reminder that when anti-gun politicians talk about “public safety,” what they often mean is more control over peaceable citizens.
Governor Abigail Spanberger has signed HB40 into law, adding Virginia to the growing list of states targeting so-called “ghost guns,” the media-approved label for privately made firearms (PMFs) and unserialized frames or receivers.
Under the bill, the Commonwealth is moving to ban the manufacture, transfer, sale, importation, and eventually even possession of unserialized firearms and unfinished frames or receivers unless they are brought into the government-approved serialization system. Most of the law takes effect January 1, 2027, while the possession ban takes effect July 1, 2027.
For generations, Americans have made their own firearms for lawful personal use. It is part of the country’s history, part of the gun culture, and part of the broader understanding that free citizens do not need government permission to build lawful arms for themselves. HB40 tries to end that.
Virginia’s new law goes well beyond banning guns that anti-gun politicians love to talk about. It creates a new section of law targeting unserialized firearms and unfinished frames or receivers.
The bill makes it unlawful to knowingly import, purchase, sell, transfer, manufacture, or assemble covered items without a valid serial number, and it separately makes possession of an unserialized firearm or covered frame or receiver unlawful once the delayed possession provision takes effect. The bill also lays out a process under which a federal firearms licensee can imprint a serial number and retain transaction records.
The political sales pitch is “traceability.” The practical effect is forced serialization, mandatory paper trails, and another step toward turning a traditionally private activity into one that passes through a regulated intermediary. In plain English, Virginia is telling gun owners that if they want to keep a privately made firearm, it has to be registered in a system the government can inspect and track.
Forced serialization is not really about engraving numbers on metal. It is about forcing privately made firearms into a government-legible system.
Once the state knows what you have and where it is, confiscation becomes much easier to enforce. That is why gun owners have long viewed registration schemes not as harmless bureaucracy, but as the foundation for future confiscation.
What makes this law especially dangerous is that it does not truly grandfather in the older, privately made firearms that law-abiding Virginians already own.
Rather than leaving existing guns alone, the state is forcing owners of those firearms into a serialization and record keeping scheme if they want to remain on the right side of the law. That means this is not just a ban on future conduct.
It is a retroactive-style crackdown on possession, with only a narrow set of exceptions for antiques, certain pre-1968 firearms, some nonresidents, law enforcement, and new residents who comply within 90 days.
Under the Supreme Court’s modern Second Amendment framework, the government cannot wave around public-safety talking points and call it a day.
If the plain text covers the conduct, the burden shifts to the government to show a historical tradition of analogous regulation. That is where Virginia has a real problem.
The right to keep and bear arms necessarily assumes a right to acquire arms. And acquisition is not limited to buying from a store. Americans acquire firearms in a few obvious ways: they buy them, inherit them, or make them. A law that directly burdens the lawful making of firearms for personal use is burdening conduct that sits very close to the core of the right itself.
The state will now have to explain where, exactly, this Nation has a historical tradition of forcing peaceable citizens to serialize personally made firearms and place them into a recordkeeping system simply to keep them lawfully in the home. That is a steep hill to climb.
As Mark Smith of the Four Boxes Diner highlighted in his latest video, Virginia’s law also collides with the deeper American tradition of private gunmaking. As Joseph Greenlee explains in the NRA’s amicus brief in Bondi v. VanDerStok, early Americans were not treated like suspects for making their own arms. Private gunmaking was widespread, lawful, and often encouraged in a nation that understood an armed citizenry had to be capable of acquiring arms independently.
That history cuts directly against modern laws that force homemade firearms into a serialized and traceable government-readable system. In other words, Virginia is not preserving an American tradition here. It is breaking with one.
The immediate takeaway is simple: this bad law is on the books, but the key compliance dates are still ahead.
That gives gun-rights groups, affected gun owners, and potentially the Department of Justice time to decide whether and how to challenge it. Gov. Spanberger announced the signing on April 10, and the law’s staged effective dates mean the legal fight may start before the possession ban fully kicks in.
Virginia Democrats are not just regulating criminal misuse. They are targeting the idea that a free American can still make a lawful firearm outside a state-managed chain of custody.
Once the government gets the power to demand serialization and records for homemade firearms, nobody should pretend the fight ends there. The same political faction that says it only wants “untraceable guns” off the street has already shown, over and over again, that it is willing to push through any gun control it can when it has the votes.
Virginia’s HB40 is not just a “ghost gun” bill. It is a challenge to the tradition of private firearms manufacture in America and another example of lawmakers treating the Second Amendment like a regulated privilege instead of a constitutional guarantee.
Gun owners should pay close attention to what comes next, because this law is exactly the kind of measure that could become a serious Bruen test case.
And if the courts are willing to apply the Second Amendment as written instead of as hostile politicians wish it read, Virginia may have a hard time defending this one.
About Duncan Johnson:
Duncan Johnson is a lifelong firearms enthusiast and unwavering defender of the Second Amendment—where “shall not be infringed” means exactly what it says. A graduate of George Mason University, he enjoys competing in local USPSA and multi-gun competitions whenever he’s not covering the latest in gun rights and firearm policy. Duncan is a regular contributor to AmmoLand News and serves as part of the editorial team responsible for AmmoLand’s daily gun-rights reporting and industry coverage.
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22 Creedmoor Vs ALL 22 Centerfires
Images courtesy of Pedersoli Firearms
Mention the words “Baker Rifle” and one image comes to mind: Richard Sharpe, the main character in Bernard Cornwell’s series of historical novels and the BBC television series it inspired, and his band of green-coated riflemen.
Until recently, to get your hands on a Baker Rifle like Sharpe’s you had to choose between a rare original, a custom-built replica or an affordable, but less authentic reproduction that often lacked the Baker’s key feature—its rifling. That has changed with Pedersoli’s introduction of its 1805 Baker Rifle.
The flintlock Baker Rifle was made in seven different versions and served the British Empire from about 1800 to 1837. Pedersoli’s Baker follows the 1805 pattern. Its overall design shows the influence of the German Jaeger rifles that inspired it, with its full walnut stock and brass patch box.
The rest of the features are authentic, from its sling mounts to the bar for mounting a sword bayonet at the muzzle. The rifle has an overall length of 45.44 inches and weighs 8.4 pounds. Most importantly, the rifle’s 30-inch Pedersoli Match Grade, tapered round barrel has the proper .625-inch bore and seven-groove rifling with a 1:120-inch twist rate. The company is also selling a bullet mold to cast the proper .614-inch round ball.
While the Baker is most associated with the Napoleonic Wars, the rifle also has a connection to American history. British troops carried the Baker during the War of 1812 and quantities of the rifle were also sold to Mexico and were used in the Texas War of Independence, including at the Battle of the Alamo.
The Pedersoli 1805 Baker Rifle has an MSRP of $1,995. For more information, see the company’s website.
Some things aren’t just tools. They’re carried.
The first thing Earl Briggs did every morning was reach for two things: his coffee and his Zippo.
Not his phone. Not the remote. His Zippo.
It was a 1968 classic brushed chrome, worn down to raw brass on the corners where his thumb had worked it ten thousand times. His father brought it back from Vietnam with three words scratched into the bottom panel in uneven letters:
still standing here
Nobody knew if the old man carved it himself or bought it off some kid in a Saigon market. Didn’t matter. It said what it needed to say.
Earl set it on the kitchen table next to his mug every morning the same way some men set out a Bible.
He ran a small gunsmith shop outside of Zanesville, Ohio — the kind of place that didn’t advertise, didn’t need to. Word got around.
A hand-painted sign above the door read:
BRIGGS FIREARMS — REPAIR & CUSTOM WORK
We don’t call 911.
The regulars loved that. Earl had put it up as a joke fifteen years ago and never took it down.
Most days it was trigger jobs, action smoothing, the occasional stock refinish. Sometimes a farmer would come in with a Model 94 that hadn’t been cleaned since Reagan, and Earl would spend a quiet afternoon bringing it back.
He didn’t mind.
His apprentice, a twenty-three-year-old named Danny, noticed the lighter on the bench one afternoon while Earl was fitting a new barrel.
“That thing got a story?”
“Everything worth keeping has a story.”
Danny picked it up. Turned it over. Read the scratched letters on the bottom.
“Your dad’s?”
“Mm.”
“What’d he carry over there?”
“A 1911 and that lighter.” Earl didn’t look up from the vise. “Said the lighter never let him down. Said the same thing about the 1911.”
Danny sparked it. There was that sound first — that sharp, solid snap when the lid swung open, a sound so specific and so clean it belonged to nothing else on earth. Then the wheel, and the flame came to life. The butane fumes drifted across the bench — that smell, faintly sweet, faintly chemical, the kind that lands somewhere between a memory and a warning. Earl caught it without looking up and something in his jaw relaxed, the way it did every time.
“How old is this thing?”
“Fifty-six years older than you.”
Danny set it back down with a little more respect than he’d picked it up with.
On Saturdays, the gun shop turned into more of a clubhouse.
Men came in who weren’t there for gun work, or not only for gun work. They drank Earl’s terrible coffee, argued about loads and legislatures, and solved the world’s problems before noon without anyone taking notes.
That particular Saturday, the talk turned to a bill moving through Columbus.
“They want to make us register everything,” said Hoke, a retired deputy who owned more guns than some departments. “Registration’s just a list they make before they come take ’em.”
Earl listened.
He had opinions — strong ones — but in a room where everyone already agreed, the useful thing was to listen for what wasn’t being said.
What wasn’t being said was this: most of these men weren’t angry.
Not really.
Underneath the politics and the noise, they were protective. Of their families. Of what they’d been handed, and what they intended to pass on.
The guns were real.
But they stood for something else — a simple idea:
I am responsible for my own.
Earl picked up the Zippo. That snap cut through the chatter like a period at the end of a sentence.
He lit the propane torch he used for solder work, and for just a moment, the smell of butane hung in the air over the coffee and the gun oil, familiar, grounding, like the shop itself was exhaling.
When Danny closed up that evening, he found an envelope on the bench with his name on it.
Inside was a Zippo — brand new, still in the box.
On the front, laser-engraved, the Second Amendment.
Below it, scratched in uneven letters:
Now you carry it.
Danny stood in the empty shop for a long moment, reading the engraving in the last light through the front window. Then he opened it — that snap, loud in the quiet — and sparked the wheel.
The flame rose clean and steady. The smell curled up soft and sharp at the same time, the way it always did, the way it always would.
He stood there a moment longer than he needed to.
Then he closed it, slipped it in his pocket, and walked out into the evening.