From The Mercury News: Here’s the lowdown on Reuben Foster’s assault weapon.

Ruben Foster was arrested for domestic violence.  He also had an assault weapon on him.

It’s California.  What did he have?  How bad could it have been?

That is clipped directly from the news article.

Holy SHIT!!!  Really!?!  Did he really have an SBR?  California doesn’t allow NFA items.  No Sheriff signed off on this.

But multiple sources familiar with the investigation told this news organization that police found a single SIG Sauer 516 short-barreled rifle, or SBR. Foster, who was released Sunday after posting $75,000 bail, was booked on a single count of possession of an assault weapon.

I’m still having a hard time believing this.  If he really had an SBR with no tax stamp, being booked on a single count of possession of an assault weapon was a gimme.  That is a “hard time in Federal prison” type offense.

The Mercury News article then goes and does a copy-paste from the SIG website.

The author then poses some rhetorical questions about the SIG.

So is a 516 legal in California? It depends. While the 516 does not appear on the list of illegal AR-15 variants at the California Department of Justicewebsite, that would be because it’s a recent release (the list hasn’t been updated in more than a decade; the 516 has been produced since 2010). State law also includes generic characteristics that make a gun illegal — if it has the capacity to accept a detachable ammunition magazine and at least one of a list of military-style characteristics including, for example, “a pistol grip that protrudes conspicuously beneath the action of the weapon.”

On the sigtalk forum, there’s a discussion about how a Sig Sauer can be modified to make it legal in California — removing the grip is one such modification. Other weapons manufacturers looking to sell in Cailfornia used to outfit semiautomatic rifles with a “bullet button” which requires a special button to be depressed — fittingly, by the tip of a rifle round — to release the clip, to meet the state’s fixed-magazine requirement. But that workaround was outlawed last year by the state Legislature.

Never one recognizing the glaring red flag this is an NFA weapon without a tax stamp.

These numb-nuts spend all their time ranting on about needed more gun laws and they can’t spot a violation of the oldest continuously enforced federal gun law in America when they do a Getty Image search.

Either Foster had a SIG 556 and the Mercury News reporter didn’t know an SBR from a regular rifle – which I think is the more probable event.

Or

Foster really did have an SBR and the police haven’t turned him over to the ATF yet.

Either way, this glaring oversight makes it impossible for me to trust the Mercury News on anything gun related, which puts them on par with the rest of the media.