Fixing The Unfixable NFA

Josey1

Fixing The Unfixable NFABy Neal KnoxWASHINGTON, D.C. (Dec. 1) - When President Bush signed the 2002 Treasury Appropriations bill Nov. 12, it had no new "gun control" provisions, but it poured yet more new money into BATF. There was one bright spot: $500,000 to correct the abysmal National Firearms Act records. That registration system is so screwed up it can't be fixed without a long-needed amnesty and re-registration period - which BATF has consistently blocked.Many of the machine guns and too-short long guns originally registered under the 1934 law are still in the hands of their original owners - so the records say. Most of those registrants are now 90 to 135 years old - which is statistical evidence that owning a machine gun assures long life.In a May 2000 response to the Treasury, Postal Appropriations Subcommittee, BATF acknowledged that the Treasury Inspector General "indicated some weaknesses" in the registration system and "could not confirm that no NFA permits were inadvertently destroyed, inappropriately added, or do not reflect the licensees were deceased."Yet BATF said they found nothing in the IG report "to justify a statutory or administrative change" and said they have no knowledge of confiscating "a lawfully registered firearm from a legal heir." How would they know? They have no system for identifying legal heirs, but they've sure confiscated a lot of guns that the owners believed were legal.In his testimony last May, writer and researcher Dr. Eric Larson cited specific cases of BATF having seized and destroyed guns that they had improperly registered after the brief 1969 amnesty, or had been legally returned as World War II war trophies "authorized by U.S. Military authorities." Because BATF's records are in such disarray there have been many instances of attempted confiscations - and even prosecutions - stopped only because owners like Curtis Earl had produced valid legal registration papers. If the proof had been lost or destroyed, the legal owner was out of luck.Like every gun collector I've heard tales of supposedly registered guns and legal war trophies inherited by people who can't find 60-year-old paperwork, don't want to give up family heirlooms, and justifiably fear asking BATF if the guns are registered. The influential don't have such worries. Years ago I had lunch in the Senate dining room with then-Sen. Jim Sasser (D-Tenn.), who casually asked what a Reising machine gun was worth. He broke into a momentary big smile as I told him: "$10,000 ... (pause) and 10 years in a Federal pen unless it's properly papered.""Oh, no," he protested. "This gun doesn't work. It's got a bent magazine." I assured him that made no difference, nor did the fact that the Marines had let his father bring it back from the South Pacific as a war trophy - not unless he could produce the paperwork, and that might not be enough. I told him his father's gun was a prime example of why we needed him to sponsor another amnesty.As we left, Sasser said: "And what's a Nambu Light Machine Gun worth?" I never saw those guns but I heard he kept them in a closet in his Senate office and showed them to visitors. He never called for an amnesty, and had the gall to vote for the 1994 "assault weapon" ban.Machine gun collector Curtis Earl, whose Phoenix vault was raided by BATF in the mid-'70's, was found to have had a pile of unregistered full autos - until he produced the BATF-approved Form 4 registration records. Whereupon, the BATF agents one-by-one gently put back in their racks the guns they had thrown into the pile on the concrete floor.When we at NRA-ILA helped arrange the 1979 BATF Senate hearings I made sure Curtis could tell that story. The Carter Justice Department admitted to Sen. Jim McClure that if BATF couldn't find records of such legally registered guns, "the only solution would be declare another amnesty period." But there's been none.Even then the Senators were assured that errors in BATF's records had been corrected. Yet only three years before the then-Director of BATF, Rex Davis, had written an internal memo that said so many records were missing that innocents could go to prison. Defense attorneys tell me that BATF routinely testifies to the accuracy of the NFA registration system every time they prosecute a Class III case. But as the Treasury IG audit and much other evidence have shown, they're perjuring themselves.Perhaps the latest effort to fix the unfixable will force a reasonably long amnesty - which would bring some marvelous hardware out of the woodwork. http://www.firearmscoalition.com/sgn/latest.html