ATF classifies Chore Boy pot scrubber pads NFA firearms

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Firearms Technology Branch has deemed “Chore Boy copper cleaning pads, along with fiberglass insulation,” a firearm, subject to registration and a $200 transfer tax, an official letter obtained recently by Gun Rights Examiner reveals. The response to an attorney inquiry by John R. Spencer, Chief, Firearms Technology Branch, offers one of the more creatively restrictive assessments since ATF declared a shoestring to be a machinegun.

The rationale Spencer uses:

A silencer is a firearm per U.S. Code, subject to National Firearms Act registration and transfer tax requirements.

“ound/gas absorbing materials manufactured from Chore Boy copper cleaning pads, along with fiberglass insulation, constitute a silencer…”

Therefore, it is illegal for an individual to replace deteriorated material within an already- registered suppressor without an approved ATF Form 1, ‘Application to Make and Register a Firearm,’” along with a “$200.00 making tax” and “a ‘no-marking’ variance…since there is no viable area in which to apply a serial number to the sound-absorbing material.”

More here: http://www.examiner.com/gun-rights-in-national/atf-classifies-chore-boy-pot-scrubber-pads-nfa-firearms

More nonsense from the ATFE.

Oneshooter
Armed and Livin in Texas

This is akin to requiring you to pay a vehicle registration fee every time you have a repair done on your vehicle.

I suspect the policy behind this is "extract as much money as possible from as many people as possible."

Just because.

Try finding a source that's not fascist RW propaganda.

Take some responsibility.

It is not my responsibility to find sources that YOU agree with.
So quit yer bitchin and find it yourself.

Oneshooter
Armed and Livin in Texas

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please refrain from posting any of their lunacy.

Color me unsurprised...

Elsewhere I saw this with a PDF including official letterhead. Would that be enough for you?

Possessing steel tubing and fender or Belleville washers could get you into a heap of trouble as well. The law prohibits possessing silencer parts, or parts which could be assembled into a silencer. They simply added pot scrubbers to their list of possible silencer parts.

It is the same attitude which assumes anyone who possesses a $70,000 a "London's Best" Holland & Holland shotgun is just itching to saw it off with a $1.29 Chinese hacksaw from Wal-Mart hanging in the garage.

The ATF is hard to pin down. Consistency, clarity, and common sense have never been a hallmark of ATF rulings. Yes, back in 1996 the ATF did rule a boot-lace was indeed, a machinegun.

When the question was asked again in 2004, the ATF reiterated its position a boot-lace was still a machinegun.

"We already told you a bootlace is a machinegun!" Letter Note closely the metal tag with the serial number on the shoestring.

they don't want deteriorated silencers replaced in guns without proper registration.

What they said is you cannot replace the stuffing in an already registered silencer without re-registering the thing and giving them another 200 bucks.... and since you cannot easily mark a serial number on the new stuffing, you have to ask for a variance to reuse the serial number of the worn out silencer you are fixing.

Does your brain hurt yet?

Unless you are a teenager who like loud pipes on her car. When I was in New Zealand they were sold over the counter for fifty bucks, no paperwork, to minimize the noise. Keep from disturbing the neighbors, damaging the shooter's hearing, any number of benign reasons.

To assume that there are only sinister reasons for possessing a silencer is as demeaning as assuming all women pedestrians at night are streetwalkers.

So I could keep my family indoors. I would think hunters would also like to know when there's another hunter in the area.

Your analogy with women and streetwalkers is really disturbing.

The hollywood portrayal of the effectiveness of a 'silencer' (really a 'suppressor') is about as accurate as anything else they produce.

Ive even seen shotgun 'silencers' that, in use, might actually qualify as 'loudeners'.

Wow.

My apology for being unclear.

We don't have any silencers, however.

..does not mean you're not anti-gun.

Many of the most vocal gun control advocates do own firearms. They just don't want "the wrong kind of people" to have them. "Wrong kind" defined as anyone not just like them.

I don't think psychotic people should own guns. Or people with drug addictions, or records of violent felonies. Not because they are different from me, but because there is a greater risk they'll use a gun improperly.

it has also been the law since the 1930s (for felons) and 1960s for adjudicated mental incompetents and addicts.

to be an all or nothing situation.

If someone is adjudicated insane, then I have zero problem with him having his rights restricted. However, he should also be under someone's care.

Drug addictions? That's a touchy one. If they are actively in jail, obviously they are unarmed. Upon release and upon being clean, why not? We don't take firearms away from known alcoholics.

Violent felons? They should be in jail. Again, obviously disarmed.

Those are not gun control issues. They are issues dealing with criminal penalties. The fact that they cannot own a gun is incidental.

So yes, supporting gun control does by definition make you anti gun.

Deny the negative inference you made, " What is the justification for a silencer, anyway?" Your nasty inference that only criminals would want a silencer got the snark it deserves in response.

Silencers in real life are not like they are depicted in the movies. Just like your muffler dosn't not make you car as quite as an electric car. The gunshot still sounds like a gunshot just not quite as loud.

As for, "So I could keep my family indoors." unless you bought one of those surplus missile silos in North Dakota, your house is piss-poor protection

by an neighbor's errant bullet would be greater if they were outside than in -- but you're the expert. I didn't realize it would be that easy to accidentally hit something as big as a house.

If you are troubled by once a year city slicker road "hunters" out in the country the problem is different than if your neighbor is a crack dealer involved in a business dispute.

Then again, if your children are wont to trespass on neighboring farms during hunting season, perhaps keeping them restrained is prudent.

Flippancy aside, if there is a neighbor who regularly shoots where you live it is likely a place with a backstop, a hill, a berm, something where he can be pretty certain the bullets are stopped.

Similarly, hunters I grew up with knew the lay of the land they lived on and hunted. That knowledge included which directions were safe to shoot and which directions had unseen houses or livestock to consider.

Rifle bullets will routinely defeat building brick. Pistol bullets will spectacularly shatter concrete block. A couple sheets of drywall or a wall stud won't stop much. As it happens, some bullets will penetrate better after they have traveled 200 yards than they will at 20.

Can allegedly modern educated adults be idiotic, unthinking, clueless, and dangerously irresponsible?

Ask yourself that the next time you encounter someone with presumably a functioning brain, licensed by the state, and in all likelihood a college degree, texting merrily away at 70 mph, and hopefully not oncoming in your lane.

...has no bearing on what others do.

that requires them in some areas. Many shooting ranges in France do as well. Like New Zealand and Norway, they are completly unregulated there too.

They have it right -- keep your guns in your home unless hunting or actually target shooting.

From Cracked.com, "5 Ridiculous Gun Myths Everyone Believes (Thanks to Movies)"
I would draw your attention specifically to the first item listed.

It's all well and good to wear hearing protection for yourself, but it's hard to pass out enough ear plugs to every person within earshot.

They do not 'hide' the firearm/shooter. They simply reduce the decibel level to a range that is less likely to cause hearing damage.

If someone is shooting with one of these things, you'll still hear it.

is not enough if someone is ripping away with a .45 - 70 Government round. Also, some European nations require the use of so-called "silencers" (really noise-suppressors) when hunting so as not to disturb other wildlife and people living within the hunting area.

I understand the argument against silencers (being able to hear poachers/illegal shooters), but many poachers already use .22s, some with make-shift suppressors, to escape detection. I think noise suppressors would be a good thing for both range shooting and hunting.

For example, if you owned a registered legal suppressor and a part inside failed or deteriorated... you could just "replace it" with something of your own design or installation. Nor could you duplicate the part and subsequently replace it - even if you had proper material, skill, machines and tooling to do so.

Only the manufacturer of the suppressoror or a registered SOT manufacturer can refurbish or repair it.
This ruling from the ATF is consistent with previous stances.

only the manufacturer can replace a damaged receiver and serialize it.

Most all of the full auto stuff in the hands of collectors is World War One and Two military surplus. There is some late Cold War stuff and if you damage your registered M16A2 you can return it to the factory for a replacement receiver.

On the other hand Vickers is unlikely to have any interest in supporting a gun that went out of service in England in 1968. You probably couldn't convince Rock-ola to replace a damaged M2 carbine receiver.

It used to be that the company provided a new receiver with the same serial number and returned it to the owner... same number, no new tax/paperwork needed.

I'm pretty sure that is no longer doable because some SOTS were basically building new MGs using old pre-86 numbers from the ATF database (numbers from lost, destroyed, or unaccounted) and selling them. I think what really PO'ed the ATF was when numbers didn't match the model of the machine gun... like using the registered number or receiver of destroyed gun "A" to build gun type "B". Some silencer companies were doing that recently too - using different serial numbers to rebuild suppressors into different silencers altogether.

when very few of the manufacturers still exist. I have an M1A/M14 suppressor built by PAI. They have been out of business almost 30 years. Westinghouse makes no BAR parts. Vickers will not fix a receiver. Savage won't repair the Lewis gun. Colt will replace the lower on the XM16E1 but it won't be a partial fence early lower, nor will it have the "United States Property" marks as it is a 1968 amnesty gun.

As an investment they have done better than gold. I have had some of them for 40 years or longer. Most of them were bought when the $200 tax was considerably more than the price of the gun.

I did read something about some guys in Arizona(?)running some kind of scam where they took the serial number of some registered piece of crap like a Cobray MAC-10 and somehow turning it into an M1919 belt-fed Browning.

"Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence." ...easy to believe that Napoleon had dealings with the ATF.

I've got a nice little pre-86 Cobray M-11/nine with a sten mag conversion. I love it.
Sten mags used to be dirt cheap (built like bricks too) so I've got a bucket of mags for it.

If anything ever happens to it, I'll just pound it back into shape and reweld it. ;-)
They might be cheap, but nothing throws lead quite like a M-11. It's little buzz saw!

I heard, as recently as a few years ago, that Ruger would replace & reserialize AC-556 rifles with new guns.

I remember back in the '60's when Mitch WerBell would sometimes show up on the MTU's practice range at Benning with car trunk full of exotic hardware. The handlebar mustache he sported was damn near a trademark. He founded Sionics which made what were really high performance suppressors at the time. The relief valve made suppressing full auto practical, as I recalled he teamed up with Ingram for a time

He had to be in his fifties then, veteran of WW2, the OSS and had been all over southeast Asia. He'd be over on his end of the range, whispers about who he was and rumors of what he'd done, but we never spoke to him.

Individuals would buy ALL the parts (separately) and then just stuff them into a homemade tube. Basically, you could manufacture a commercial grade silencer illegally at home thus bypassing the registration and tax system. Since then, the ATF has ruled that ANY part of a suppressor (even a spare part) is a suppressor itself and requires a serial number and taxatoin if possesed separately from a complete serialized suppressor assembly. In short, no more spare parts are allowed to be bought or possesed outside of the registration system.

The only loophole that exists is for the possesion of spare "wipes" for cans that use disposable wipes integral to their design... which makes sense because wipes are designed as a disposable part of the suppressor requiring replacement every few dozen shots.

rather than encouraging it by allow guns to "walk" and stop wasting so much effort on honest citizens rather than criminals, the bureau would have a far better reputation with gun owners.

I believe the agents on the ground are good law enforcement agents interested in doing a valuable service to our society. Unfortunately, the ATF has often been hampered by incompetent management who often have advanced to their positions because of their willingness to treat honest gun owners and gun store owners as criminals and to pander to politicians who oppose gun ownership by any citizen.

Probably doesn't have a hair on his ass either