In a recent post I casually mentioned a phenomenon that gets very little attention anywhere. In fact, the only other person I've heard mention it before is Ron Smith of WBAL in Baltimore. The phenomenon of which I speak is the passage of laws and regulations by Congress that are so vague you could drive a truck through the gaps. These vague laws are then passed to some faceless bureaucracy to implement. Hilarity ensues.
You'd be surprised at how much of our "law" has been implemented by turf-hungry careerist bureaucrats. Let me lay it out for you.
Congress passes the National Everyone Must Be Happy Act. Just as one would expect from the title of the Act, it's more vague than a mime with ADD. There aren't any details to speak of. Just "be happy, damn it!".
The Department of Feel Good is created to enforce this Act. "Happy" Czar C. Brazen Hubris tasks his department heads to define the policy and the definitions of what "compliance" is, the better to reward those who comply and punish those who don't. When their "little" document is finalized (at around 1,300 pages), the "law" resulting from the Act is now complete. Regardless of the intent of the sponsors of the original bill, the law, as implemented, may be 180 degrees different from that intent.
As a result of this little game, Congress get credit for passing "magnificent" bills like the Americans with Disabilities Act, No Child Left Behind, and, of course, the Assault Weapons ban. Note the resultant success of each of these Acts (/sarcasm).
It is the Assault Weapons ban that comes into play here. Of all the federal black hole gawd-awful agencies that could implement this steaming turd of legislative nonsense, it fell to the very worst - the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF). ATF seems to be the place where the very worst of schoolyard bullies eventually end up working. ATF would just LOVE to make criminals out of every gun owner in America. Think I'm kidding? You'll be of a different mind after reading this.
Savage's dispute with the federal agency stems from a recent project for which he sent a gun part he is developing to the federal government for review.Okay, follow me here. Dude invents an add-on part to allow guns to fire cheaper ammunition (great for target practice). ATF puts McIver to work on the gun and part. McIver creates a machine gun. Now dude is a criminal...just because some whiz kid could take additional parts never intended for use with either the gun nor the add-on part and rig a machine gun.
The part is intended to allow a certain type of gun to be used with a different size and less expensive ammunition. Savage, owner of Historic Arms LLC., said his part would convert the caliber of the guns to operate with ammunition that costs 1 or 2 cents per shell, instead of 25 cents or more.
He said such devices are fairly common. But he told WND he was stunned to get a letter from the BATFE stating that not only was his repair part a gun, it was a machine gun.
That conclusion came after the agency's testing bureau added some metal pieces, a length of chain, some duct tape and plastic wires to his gun part in order to make it fire a bullet.
It gets better. There's the case of a poor soul whose weapon malfunctioned and shot three bullets with one squeeze of the trigger. He's doing 30 months in Federal penitentiary as a result.
"A gun that malfunctions is not a machine gun," Larry Pratt, executive director of GOA, said. "What the [federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives] has done in the Olofson case has set a precedent that could make any of the millions of Americans that own semi-automatic firearms suddenly the owner [of] an unregistered machine gun at the moment the gun malfunctions."No matter what the cause.
When U.S. District Judge Charles Clevert imposed the sentence, a commentary in Guns Magazine said, "It didn't matter the rifle in question had not been intentionally modified for select fire, or that it did not have an M16 bolt carrier … that it did not show any signs of machining or drilling, or that that model had even been recalled a few years back.
"It didn't matter the government had repeatedly failed to replicate automatic fire until they replaced the ammunition with a softer primer type. It didn't even matter that the prosecution admitted it was not important to prove the gun would do it again if the test were conducted today," the magazine said. "What mattered was the government's position that none of the above was relevant because '[T]here's no indication it makes any difference under the statute. If you pull the trigger once and it fires more than one round, no matter what the cause it's a machine gun.' No matter what the cause."
Do you still think I'm exaggerating when I say they're trying to make criminals of us all?
