Part of doing research for making a suppressor is encountering the legal end.
BATFE has long ruled that any part for a suppressor is a suppressor entire.
When you see ads like this on Amazon...
You wonder if the ATF is the actual vendor.
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Firstly, I don't live in or under the jurisdiction of the US or the BATFE.
ReplyDeleteHaving said that, I have long held that, the proclamation of the BATFE notwithstanding, items that could be used to construct a suppressor are NOT in and of themselves a suppressor.
To hold otherwise would mean that a two litre PET bottle, a newspaper, a pillow, or even a potato are all suppressors, and thus subject to a $200 tax, and prohibitions on ownership without a tax stamp. This is prima facie absurd, yet is the natural consequence of the ruling. It doesn't require even the slightest stretch to reach that conclusion, either.
Is there any occasion where that finding has been challenged in court?
The people so convicted and/or fined probably challenged rather loudly.
DeleteBecause the BIG gun organization doesn't give a crap about NFA items, the supposed big NFA organization is mostly concerned with keeping the country club atmosphere alive and the state gun orgs are primarily about carrying... The ATF is pretty much free to do as they will with their regulatory rulings.
We have damn few pro-gun congress critters and as far I know never had an actual pro-gun president in the 47 years I've been creeping about. Thus we don't end up with pro-gun judges. Thus we get damn few pro-gun rulings that aren't pushed HARD by the NRA and state organizations (who don't really care about NFA at this time).
I've never stumbled across that. Who'd have thunk? In the list of "People also looked at", they had this, which looks even more like a set of baffles. Plus a "Maglight solvent trap" threaded in 12-28 and more stuff.
ReplyDeleteSendarius, what you said about soda bottles being illegal is true, but that's not new and not out of character for the BATFE. They declared the threaded adapters for oil filters to be silencers. They ruled a shoe lace was a machine gun. BATFE is not above breaking things to prove you broke the law. Naturally, I can't think of the guy's name who had the AR that broke, and some idiot called the LEOs on him. BATFE spent months trying to abuse the gun into making it go full auto until it did, and the guy spent something like 18 months in prison.
Oh, I know just how inane (and ridiculous) the BATFE can be!!
DeleteI just wonder if a prosecution for "possession of an unauthorised silencer" could succeed where the defendant had ONLY that charge to face, and possessed ONLY core plugs with a hole in the middle (a la that Amazon ad).
My Google-fu is weak, and I don't have access to the legal databases to try and discover if such a case has ever been heard.