I first read of this on Michael Bane’s blog. His somewhat incoherent posting is here. I don’t fault Bane; he tends to post quickly based on info coming in from his vast network of sources, and here his original source seems to have changed his story over time.
A better summary is on Arms and the Law:
Michael Bane is reporting a major danger to gunsmiths.
Essentially — for GCA purposes, “manufacturing” a gun means making the receiver.
But there’s also an 11% excise tax on manufacturing a firearms — payable to Pittman-Robertson funds, which are used to support wildlife management. For purposes of this statute, what is “manufacturing”? Historically, it’s been viewed as more than making the receiver, something along the lines of “putting the gun together.” Last year Congress exempted makers of fewer than fifty firearms a year (I’m none too comfortable with that, simply because the exemption largely covers expensive custom guns, whose buyers can better afford the tax than most of us).
ATFE, Bane reports, is now construing it as including making any substantial changes to a firearm, and is hitting up gunsmiths for changing hammers and rebarreling firearms, and demanding back taxes and penalties.
I actually hadn’t heard of this exemption before; here’s ATFE’s own FAQ on it. Enraged posters seem to be confusing ATFE’s definition of “firearm” under the Gun Control Act for the purposes of firearms sales (basically, the frame/receiver is the firearm in most cases) with the different definition, under a different statute, for purposes of this excise tax on manufacturing. The way I read this, as stupid as the different definition is, it looks to me as though it’s been in place for a long time. It’s quite common in the law for a word to mean one thing in one statute and a slightly or entirely different thing in another statute. That seems to be the case here. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that ATFE is NOT expanding their definition of “firearm” under the Gun Control Act. If they did, it would sure stop my Encore barrel purchases on ebay!
The key language, for my money, is from ATFE’s FAQ:
Q. May I apply this exemption to transactions that occurred prior to October 1, 2005?
A. No, you may not.
Jerks. Some bureaucrat got a nice attaboy for setting this one up in the face of an explicit “STOP THIS” from Congress. Very clever. The solution is for some Congresscritter to introduce and pass into law a one-line amendment to a bill that exempts transactions prior to 10/01/05. That should stop this nonsense.
Â
Congress doesn’t need to. The Constitutional Convention, and the legislatures of all 50 states, when they ratified said Constitution, already did.
Article I, Section 8: “No…ex post facto Law shall be passed.”
If the ATF(U) has previously said that ‘manufacturing’ a firearm, and now has changed that definitition, in such a way that gunsmiths across the nation are suddenly guilty of not paying taxes at points in the past, the ATF(U) has effectively enacted an ex post facto law.
In other words: “X wasn’t taxable before, but now we say it is, and you have to pay taxes on all the X you’ve done in the last 7 years.”
With no control over “assault weapons” anymore, the BATFE must keep up it’s harassment and intimidation image, so this is the result.
I guess that in thier feeble corporate mind they think that every gun person who is capable of changing a hammer on a lever gun is capable of milling the new parts to convert a semi-auto rifle into a machine gun.
What they don’t know is that they needn’t bother. There may be a few idiots out there manafacturing Class III parts, one got convicted in these parts about 10 years ago, but that’s not going to stop anyone when the balloon goes up.
When the gummint tramples sufficient of our liberties to convince us to take the field against them, we will simply ambush and kill enough of the Feddle Class-3-carrying wankers to have a good supply of Class III weapons (and ammo). That’s how almost every revolutionary force in the history of armed conflict got their weapons, and there is no reason for it to be any different the next time.
BTW, failing to secure the weapons of Saddam’s defeated Iraqi Army is quickly proving to be our undoing in Iraq. Rumsfeld gets the credit for that one, with his “small, lightning force” that was incapable of properly occupying the territory it drove the enemy from.
Whether the “insurgency” turns into a “civil war” or not, almost all of the US AND Iraqi casualties have been caused by weapons garnered by the bad guys AFTER we supposedly conquered the country. Not securing the armories or destroying their contents as soon as we chased Saddam’s Army out of them is our fatal mistake.
It’s rapidly turning out that this war will not be won on our terms, if at all, and yes, dear readers, it HAS turned out to be a “boots on the ground” issue.
Rummy lost this one for us.
Back many years ago when I bought my second firearm (an American Derringer M1 in .45 ACP that I later traded in for my Ruger Security Six) at Whitebear Guns in Concord, CA, I had some very interesting discussions with a member of the San Jose PD. This gentleman was a Russian emigrant who was there to purchase an AR-15 before the ban went into effect. (He said his father had used some of the old S&W .44 Russian export guns in Kamchatka, presumably in law enforcement capacity.) In those days, from California’s vantage point, it seemed just a matter of time before every state adopted California’s gun laws, so this was definitely a hot topic of discussion, and the cop was no exception, but he was quite cheerful about all this impending doom. His point was that as long as they don’t outlaw the .22 LR, there’s really no problem because it’s actually the ideal weapon — quiet yet still lethal from atop a roof — to permanently disarm individual goons to acquire their weapons for one’s self. As you might imagine, my jaw dropped. THIS WAS A COP saying this! I think his background as a very recent emigrant from the still-collapsing Soviet Union played a major part in his attitude towards armed government employees. Still, it was quite amazing to hear this sort of thing coming from a uniformed officer.
(This guy even showed me where to find the post-ban date stamp on his Sig high-cap magazines so that I wouldn’t accidentally purchase something that might get me in trouble.)
I miss Whitebear (it closed sometime in the mid-’90s, I believe). It was a pretty damn exhilarating place for a newbie gun enthusiast to soak up wisdom.