Alphabet Bois Pt III
The ATF needs a safe space
I’m rather hard on Grandpa SniffyHair, to be sure, I confess that I find his particular brand of idiocy particularly odious. But worry not, dear reader, I have contempt enough for politicritters of all stripes going back to, well, the dawn of time.
Or, at least, back to Thomas Jefferson, who, of all people, knew that, as President, he didn’t have the constitutional authority to engage in The Louisianian Purchase, but did so anyway under the long established legal principle of “I wonna”.
Power attracts the corrupt and the corruptible, trust not those who seek it.
In a lot of ways our story today starts with the passage of The Eighteenth Amendment to The Constitution, which gave us such wonderful things as:
The Prohibition of Alcohol: Because banning things, especially things people can easily make at home with readily available materials, always works out well.
Federal Reliance on Income Tax: The resulting vast reduction in sin tax, previously a huge part of federal income, had to replaced somehow.
Large Scale Non-Governmental Crime: Markets gonna market, and The Mob had a product people wanted.
Vastly Increased Law Enforcement Numbers and Powers: Government hates competition.
Great job improving society, Progressive Karens of the 1900s.
Anywho, after the repeal of Prohibition via the Twenty-First Amendment to The Constitution at the end of 1933, the government decided, as governments are wont to do, that the easiest way to get rid of that pesky left over Competition, referred to as The Mob, was to disarm them.
Because mobsters were for sure gonna turn in their Tommy guns and violin cases if the feds made ‘em illegal, right?
Enter the NFA, the National Firearms Act of 1934. Despite it rapidly approaching a hundred years old, containing numerous historical oddities that make no sense, and being a clear infringement on the Second Amendment of The Constitutions — You know, the one that says “shall not be infringed”? — the NFA remains the basis of much of federal firearm law to this day.
The NFA sought to limit availability of things like machine guns, explosives, suppressors, and any weapon that could be readily concealed. Weapon types were arbitrarily defined in the NFA, which required ownership of certain kinds of weapons to be taxed, registered, and controlled.
Originally that list included pistols and revolvers, but since the NFA never would have passed with those included, they were dropped, leaving the historical oddity of easily concealable pistols and revolvers not being NFA items, but far less easily concealable SBRs (Short Barreled Rifle) or SBSs (Short Barrel Shotgun) being NFA items requiring special permission from The Crown.
Violation of the NFA is punishable by 10 years in clubfed and up to a $250,000 fine for an individual, $500,000 for a trust or corporation (NFA items are often held in trust).
The problem, of course, is figuring out what may or may not be a violation of the NFA.
At the top of the Alphabet Bois’ naughty list is the machine gun. The ATF really, really gets excited by them to the point where if you stand in front of a mirror and say “Autosear” three times an ATF agent will appear.
Since 1986 you can only own an automatic weapon as an FFL with the right paperwork, or as a private citizen, you can buy a pre-1986 automatic weapon if you can afford one, one goes on sale, and you jump through the proper NFA hoops. Otherwise, no bueno, if it even looks like something that could possibly be a machine gun, the full force of the federal government is going to land on you like a bloated hippo with a very bad, even for that species, attitude.
Mind, the ATF at one point declared a shoestring to be machine gun for legal purposes — no, I’m not kidding — the ATF doesn’t exactly play fair here, and their favorite tactic is to try and entrap people into a technical — or, often, imaginary — violation of the NFA in order to gain leverage or flat out take out people or groups they don’t like.
I confess that I find Fedbois obsession with machine guns rather confusing. In my, granted, somewhat limited experience, full auto is mostly a way to waste a lot of ammo in a short period of time.
More deadly than semi-auto? No, sorry, far less so under most scenarios.
There’s a reason that everything since the M16A2 to today’s M4 block II has a burst mode.
The other thing is that it’s dead easy to convert most semi-automatic weapons to full auto. You can 3D-print a Swift Link or Auto Sear for an AR or pistol in a few minutes. People have been making them for years out of coat hangers:
So now we get to the part of the story where I’m hard on someone other than Grandpa SniffyHair.
Cast your mind back, if you will, back to 2017. A time when President OMB (Orange Man Bad) still infested the White House. A time when we were frequently assured that President OMB would be forced to do a perp walk any day now because the walls were surely closing in. A time when mean tweets still soiled the pristine landscape of social media most holy.
On October 1, 2017, 64 year-old Stephen Paddock opened fire from a hotel room window on a crowd attending a music festival, killing 60 and wounding 411.
You can be forgiven if you’ve forgotten about this incident, it has was memory holed so quickly people watching got whiplash. As with many such incidents, it doesn’t take much reading to realize that there are a whole lot of details missing and the details that are presented don’t quite add up.
Regardless, after the shooting there was a lot of demands for the feds to “do something”. There inevitably is, and rarely is much thought given as to whether the “something” would make any meaningful difference and what the unintended consequences of that “something” might be.
In the aftermath of the Las Vegas shooting Bump Stocks became The Devil du jour. Paddock had used a Bump Stock, which were legal and ATF approved at the time, and many argued that the only way he’d been able to fire so many rounds, reportedly over 1,000, was because of the Bump Stock.
This makes no sense if you know what Bump Fire is.
Bump firing is the act of using the recoil of a semi-automatic firearm to fire multiple shots in rapid succession, which very crudely simulates the discharge of a fully automatic firearm. This process involves holding the foregrip with the non-trigger hand, releasing the grip on the firing hand (leaving the trigger finger in its normal position in front of the trigger), pushing the rifle forward in order to apply pressure on the trigger finger from the trigger, and keeping the trigger finger stationary. During a shot, the firearm will recoil considerably ("bump" back) and the trigger will reset itself; then the non-trigger hand would naturally force the firearm back to the original position, pressing the trigger against a stationary finger again, thereby firing successive shots.
You don’t actually need a Bump Stock to Bump Fire, it just makes doing so slightly easier.
The problem is that Bump Fire, whether done with a Bump Stock or not, is extremely inaccurate and fairly dicey to maintain, requiring a fair amount of practice and an unnatural grip and positioning.
The same shooting, sans Bump Stock, would have been far more accurate, only slightly slower, and very well may have been far more deadly.
It didn’t matter. Something had to be sacrificed on the alter of public outrage, and Bump Stocks made a good sacrificial lamb.
In 2018 President OMB banned Bump Stocks via executive order, turning what had been legally considered ‘accessories’ into ‘machine guns’ overnight.
A lot of people in the gun community weren’t all that upset by this. It was better than a lot of what had been demanded, and in general Bump Stocks weren’t particularly popular among gun owners, being mostly seen as a pointless range toy — which, frankly, is mostly what they were, and also why banning them was so bloody damn pointless and stupid.
The problem was twofold.
The first was that it was the ATF camel’s nose under the tent. If an accessory could be turned into felony possession of an NFA item overnight, well just imagine the possibilities.
The second was that this was ex post facto; people possessed items that were perfectly legal when bought, but were now illegal to own and could not be sold, only turned in to the government or destroyed.
We aren’t supposed to have ex post facto laws, but, much as with mandates not counting as mandates as long as they pad the stick they intend to beat you to death with if you don’t comply, tortured reasoning allowed for ex post facto laws as long as they called them ‘rules’ and a bureaucrat wrote them instead of an elected official.
Gives you that warm and cozy feeling, don’t it?
It certainly does for the ATF, who clearly intended to use ex post facto rule changes in the future.
The ATF is nothing if not good at going with what works, and calling things a machine gun works really, really well for them.
The above chunk of metal is something called an AutoKey Card. There were several versions, but they were sold as novelty items. They are a piece of roughly credit card sized metal laser etched with a design that, if machined out, bent, and assembled, could be used to make a Lightning Link, which could then be used to convert an AR to full auto.
It is literally a drawing on a metal card, but the ATF has designated it an illegal machine gun. The original designer/seller, Kristopher Justin Ervin was arrested and his web sites seized in March of 2021. More recently, Matthew Hoover of the YouTube channel CRS Firearms was arrested at the end of January, 2022 on various related conspiracy charges.
Mostly, it would seem, conspiracy to make the ATF look bad.
Not that it needs any help in that department.
I’m no lawyer — there are some depths of depravity even I will not plumb — but it seems to me that this all falls under the legal heading of ‘bullshit’. There are clear First Amendment issues involved, not to mention the question of just how far removed does something have to be before the ATF can decide it’s illegal?
One could easily argue that a coat hanger is as much an autosear as an AutoKey Card is a lightning link.
Then again, I shouldn’t give them any ideas.
Fact is, it doesn’t matter. If the ATF can find a judge that will convict, and, given the state of today’s judiciary, that wouldn’t surprise me too terribly much, they get their way and anyone having an AutoKey Card in their possession is a felon. If they can’t get a conviction, well the process is the punishment and they will have effectively bankrupted and ruined the lives of people they consider The Enemy.
Either way, it’s win-win, just the way government parasites like it.
The two newest players to the ATF party are Rare Breed Trigger’s FRT-15 and Big Daddy Unlimited’s Wide Open Trigger.
It’s necessary to understand that terms like ‘AR’ and ‘AK’ don’t refer to specific rifles, but to platforms. An AR is a general design specification for a set of parts put together in a certain way, much as a PC is a general descriptor for a set of components that can vary greatly, but when assembled make a computer that is roughly compatible with any other PC. The same is true of the AR platform, there are literally thousands of variations you can buy and assemble.
With a Mil-Spec AR trigger each squeeze of the trigger fires a round, cycling the BCG (Bolt Carrier Group), you cannot fire another round until you let the trigger reset by releasing pressure on it. Once the trigger has reset, you can fire another round. With very little practice you mag dump in seconds, but the speed is still somewhat limited by that reset point.
The FRT-15 and Wide Open Trigger operate in a similar manner, sufficiently so that Rare has sued Big Daddy over a patent dispute. That lawsuit is the least of either company’s issues now, though, as the ATF has decided that they’re both making machine guns.
Both triggers are drop-in replacements for a Mil-Spec, both will work with most ARs as long as they’re using a Mil-Spec BCG. Both work by essentially resetting the trigger for you. Rather than having to release pressure on the trigger to reset it, the trigger is reset by the BCG during cycling, meaning if you continue to hold pressure on the trigger it will fire as quickly as the weapon can cycle.
In other words, it allows you to convert an AR to fire in a manner that is very similar to full auto.
But does that make them machine guns? The ATF says yes, and, despite ongoing legal proceedings on the matter (or possibly because of them) is apparently taking action against them and planning further action.
Rare Breed, on the other hand, says they are not making a machine gun, and it would seem that under the law they would appear to be correct.
The NFA legal definition for a machine gun is:
any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger. The term shall also include the frame or receiver of any such weapon, any part designed and intended solely and exclusively, or combination of parts designed and intended, for use in converting a weapon into a machinegun, and any combination of parts from which a machinegun can be assembled if such parts are in the possession or under the control of a person.
The operative phrase here is “by a single function of the trigger”. The law says nothing about trigger reset, only that each round require a pull of the trigger.
In full auto fire you depress the trigger and keep it depressed until either the ammo is expended or you wish to stop firing. The trigger doesn’t reset between rounds and there is only one trigger pull regardless of the number of rounds fired.
In a force reset trigger, the trigger is resetting and will only fire again if you pull it. If you maintain pressure on the trigger it will reset, pushing your finger out, and be pulled again for each round fired. Unlike full auto, there is a trigger pull for every round fired.
That is a critical difference, given the legal language, even if the end result is roughly the same.
There is arguably some ambiguity here, but that is a large part of the problem. The ATF believes it has the right to decide law by fiat, ignoring any ambiguity or the Rule of Lenity.
In the past the ATF has avoided going to court at any cost, likely exactly because of these issues and the likelihood that a court would not friendly towards their creative and convenient interpretations of law. But in the last couple of years, especially with Uncle SniffyHair needing a win and having made so many gun control promises to his base, they have gotten much more bold.
And, honestly, why not? No one holds them accountable. If they win against AutoKey Cards then the ATF gains a powerful bludgeon to use against gun owners and gets to send some people to jail. If they lose, they’ve still ruined the lives of a couple of people they intensely dislike (to be fair, the feeling is clearly mutual) and scared the crap out of anyone who would dare think about making a similar product.
The same with forced reset triggers.
Win or lose, they can and will continue to narrow the window of what is acceptable with no real risk of blow-back. They know it, and are getting increasingly bold about using their power as a bludgeon.
So thanks, President OMB, you emboldened the ATF’s over reach with a compromise that achieved nothing.
A compromise that achieved nothing.
An apt epitaph for his administration.
