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NFA scam
SayUncle has the story.
Basically, a guy has a registered, relatively cheap, NFA firearm. Say it's a MAC-10, serial no. 1000. He cuts the serial no. section out, makes a receiver for a high cost NRA, say a BAR, and welds the serial number in. Then he sells it with the assurance it's perfectly legal. BATF will process the Form 4. Serial number and mfr match a registered gun, and so the transfer goes thru. I suspect the processing is by people who know little about firearms, and thus don't wonder why a MAC-10 is in .30-06 with a 24" barrel.
Eventually, of course, the matter comes to light and the gun is contraband.
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well, if a MAC-10 is $3k and a BAR is $15k then the ATF just saved $12k on arming one of their sharpshooters while "justifying their existence."
sherlock holmes: "When water is near and a weight is missing it is not a very far-fetched supposition that something has been sunk in the water."
Wouldn't this just be considered a legal addition of a new caliber to the same gun?
What's the difference between a BAR with a MAC serial plate, versus an extensively modified MAC?
Bill:
This is actually legal to do with stamped guns of the same type and caliber, like let's say the rails on a Uzi are all worn down and the gun is failing to fire (as heat treats can only go so far on shooter guns). Well sometimes they were stamped near the stock, so they lopped off the front part and just installed the serial section on the new 80 percent receiver, the finished out the whole gun. That, IIRC, is legal. That's a repair.
But putting a MAC's serial section on a milled gun wouldn't fly with them I wouldn't think. Shouldn't anyway.
First of all you'd be breaking 18 USC 922(o) by simply manufacturing the BAR. So it was a non-amnesty registered bring-back? Nope, you're still out of luck.
Any way you slice it it's just so they can confiscate guns.
Mucho discussion about this over on the NFA Board of www.subguns.com, which is, IMHO, the absolute best NFA site on the Web.
http://www.subguns.com/boards/mgmsg.cgi?read=660533
This is a very unfortunate situation for the subsequent buyers of these contraband weapons.
Ha!
SayUncle links to subguns. So, the circle of life is shown to be complete, Grasshopper.
This seems like a hard way to make money. It looks like the seller is officially registering his felony fraud with the federal government. Unless of course he told the buyer.
I wouldn't necessarily expect the ATF to look up the make and model from the serial number, but I would expect them to pull the last transfer or registration record just to check real quick that it was the same gun. But I guess maybe they just figured that if the transaction was being registered then the parties wouldn't try anything this brazen, so there was no need to scrutinize.
And by the way. That MAC10 is still out there somewhere buried in the woods. Of course one of these days they'll have the satellite radar technology to find every gun buried on the planet, but that will be a while yet.
I am a daily reader and occasional poster at subguns.
SU:
Being a dumb old lawyer, I never put 2 and 2 together.
By the time satellite technology can find "any gun hidden on the planet" people will know how to defeat the technology...Already it's pretty simple to defeat heat-seeking tech...I'd think disguising the buried objects to resemble common items would be rather simple...They certainly can't dig up all metal just to find one thing
You have to love how the ATF allows these to be transferred, essentially assisting the scam artist, then shows up later to seize the "contraband" that they approved. It's almost like the scam artist had an inside man at the ATF...