And a sweet HK51K for P141

Registration began in 1934 and closed in 1986 so that is 52 years worth of time.

There were maybe ~200,000 transferable machineguns in the registry in May of 86.  Divide that by 52 and you end up with ~4000 per year on average being registered.

The reality is that probably 10% of that 200,000 total  were registered in the final weeks leading up to the ban as thousands of conversion sears were registered, so you are probably looking at more of an average of 3500 registered per year if there were 180,000 in say January 1986.   Throw out the huge number of 1968 amnesty registrations and your actual yearly average mean probably drops even further into the 3000 range.

Overall machineguns registrations and transfers were pretty rare given there are a couple million firearms made and imported each year .   Say on average 3000 machineguns registered per year vs. 3 Million normal guns manufactured would work out to be one tenth of one percent.

You know it doesn't count if you post stack yourself to the top.

I have no idea if your estimates are accurate, but if so the pre amnesty rush number is 8.2 registrations every day for 52 years. Hardly seems rare to me.

And that would be even with the "chilling effect" of the NFA. Before the ban, an M16 cost about $400 new. Then the $200 stamp, the hassle of fingerprints, signoff, wait to be contacted by an examiner (which if the ATF was processing less that 10 per day for the entire USA, you would not think you would have to wait weeks for that), and then see if you were approved. Not to mention there was a great deal of reluctance just to fill out 4473s on the part of many gun owners, and you have a atmosphere of "not worth the hassle". Obviously, this was less of a deterrent for having a $2500 M60, but back in the day a $25 Thompson ......  It had its intended impact of reducing the numbers of automatic weapons in private hands via a tax mechanism. As Judge Wiener pointed out in the Ardoin appeal, once the tax revenue collection of the NFA ceased for automatic weapons, its Constitutional validity ceased with that, assuming the NFA did not violate the 2A in the first place.

Pre-internet, no one knew even how to Form 1 an SBR. Everyone just assumed that they were illegal.
Given the rampant fear of the ATF and 'having your name on a list' during the 1960's, no one even asked.

Of those 200,000 NFRTR machinegun registrations prior to May of 86, probably 50%+ of them were Form 2 registrations  made by just a handful of large established manufacturer (Colt, H&R, S&W, Ruger, etc.) and with the vast majority of all of that production originally intended for and initially transferred to Law Enforcement.  Obviously over the years some portion of that LE inventory has come back to the civilian side post-86 as transferable machinegun prices rose and departments figured out they could trade a 20 year old M16 to a dealer for 10 new M4s.  Others guns like those owned by Chicago PD will never see the light of day in the civilian commerce stream.

The biggest batch of F2 registrations where a significant portion was originally destined for the civilian market would probably be the "MAC" manufacturers of the late 70s/early 80s (MAC, RPB, and SWD) and they made probably 20 to 30% of the total guns registered.  (SWD made ~20K M11 SMGs themselves alone.)   There were also a sizeable number of amnesty registrations in 68 as well as bringbacks from WW2 and Korea that had proper registration/capture paperwork.  Individual F1 registrations are probably single digit percentages and it wouldn't surprise me if they were low single digits.

If you are trying to estimate the pre-86 machinegun registrations population  destined for the civilian/consumer market to include F1 registrations, the bulk of the MAC registrations, all the dewat/bringbacks, the semi-conversions by smaller C2s who catered to the civilian marketplace (Fleming, Wittstein, Smith, Ceiner, Farmer, PAWs, Group, etc.), plus all the conversion sears made by the same, I think it would be generous to say it was 50% of the total number of machinegun registrations prior to 86.

Even averaging in the large 68 and 86 registration influxes to the yearly mean, 50 years / 100K civilian commerce stream destined machineguns out of 200K total = 2000 per year or ~5 per day.   Divided that by an average population during that time of 175M folks would be one for every 35 million civilians per day.

The original 1934 NFA worked as intended as most people during that timeframe (34 to 86) were just not interested in ponying up $200 in tax for a machinegun and going through the paperwork/CLEO hassle.  

The big bulk of civilian destined machinegun registrations happened in 68 (amnesty with no tax due),  the late 70s/early 80s when the $200 tax had finally been eaten away by inflation, and eventually the final weeks leading up to the ban when the writing was on the wall.  Even then, that huge bulk of guns registered in May of 86 still took a decade plus for most all of those guns/sears to be sold off to individual owners as there was limited demand.

In the early 2000s it took Vector the better part of 5 years to sell 3000 Group Uzi's at $3K each which means they were able to sell about 2 guns per day over the course of 5 year.   It took S&H probably close to 20 years to sell out a similar number of FNC conversion sears at $2000 each.  

As to whether civilian based machinegun registration/production was a rare event or not prior to 86, its debatable depending upon your definition of "rare".

That said, if the registry was opened back up, I suspect we would see a much larger number of civilian machinegun registrations.   1. The interest in military type firearms is much greater today that it was 30 years ago  2. The $200 tax isn't a lot of money anymore 3.  Trusts and eFile registrations have dramatically eased the paperwork overhead, 4. The internet has educated the masses on how to go through the process.

Good.  That decision was crap.

Give them a verbal beat-down!!

Damn I was born too late.

Be honest, you wrote that months ago didn't you?

I thought that about MAC-11's when a local guy was selling a bunch for $300 a piece back in the mid 90's.  They were brand new too.  I was just getting into guns and was under 21.

Hopefully it goes better for you than for those poor bastards in CT. When the took their state AWB court, the judge basically said, "yup, this is definitely an infringement on firearms protected by the 2A, but the gov't has a compelling interest in protecting the children, so fuck it, it stands!"

Compelling interest...there's that phrase again. It's almost as if its the bullshit-button the gov't punches whenever they wanna do whatever the fuck they want.

It's merely anecdotal, but I know of at least four just in my local area...

First one, local couple bought a house from the estate of a recently deceased WWTwice vet, knocked down a wall during a remodel, and discovered a cosmo'd MP-40 and a shitpot of mags. Course, the dumb fuckers didn't even check to see if it was papered before they called the cops. If it had papers, that probably would have fetched a nice sum.

Second one, another WWTwice vet called the PD I was working dispatch for at the time, asking to turn in a grenade. Turns out, he had a handful of each of pineapples and German potato mashers, plus a bazooka rocket. All live. Guy just threw the shit in his foot locker when he came home after the war and forgot about it for 60 years. The statie EOD guys had fun with that, as I guess some of that stuff can get pretty twitchy.

Third one, guy found a WWI maxim mg-08 in someone's attic. I don't remember all the particulars, but if memory serves, he torch cut it since it was unpapered, then used the parts to repair a fucked up legal (registered) one he picked up on the cheap.

Last one, again while I working for the PD, some guy called in a big-ass contractor trash bag he thought might have a body in it (somebody else found a chopped up body in a similar bag in our town about a month prior). Turned out to be a "US PROPERTY" marked M-16a2, couple of mags, and a bunch of M855 and 9mm. Never heard what happened with that one. ETA: trashbag machinegun was discovered in the woods just off the interstate.

So yeah, I'm willing to bet there's a shit-ton of off-the-books stuff floating around out there (MGs, frags, Christ alone knows what else), in attics, basements, under floors, behind walls, etc. It honestly wouldn't surprise me if it outnumbered what's in the registry by at least half an order of magnitude.

I know a bunch of folk in a ban state, who once they decided to not register, pulled pinned stocks, welded comps, and naked FSBs, started replacing them with folders, flash suppressors, and bayo-lugged ones. If you're going to the slam anyway for having two or three banned "features", and you won't get in more trouble for having 8, fuck it, why not?

Me too.  They are around $12K now.

Some very interesting comments on one of the Ardoin dissenting opinions, I highly recommend further reading:

http://www.titleii.com/bardwell/us_v_ardoin.txt

Since the enactment of FOPA, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco
and Firearms (BATF) "has refused to approve any application to
make, transfer, and pay the $200 tax on any machine gun made after
May 19, 1986." [Footnote 7]  Yet the BATF continues to arrest and
convict citizens like Ardoin under the NFA for not registering and
paying taxes on their machine guns-even though it is legally im-
possible for them to do so. [Footnote 8]  Because I do not believe
that a statute which was enacted to tax a legal activity can
legitimately be mutated into a statute that criminalizes that very
same activity, and because I believe that convicting citizens for
violating laws with which they cannot possibly comply is funda-
mentally unfair, I respectfully dissent.

Until the enactment of section 922(o) of the FOPA, a citizen
could legally make, transfer, or possess a machine gun, as long as
he complied with the relevant registration and tax provisions of
the NFA.  Simply put, since 1934 the NFA has said to such a citi-
zen, "You may manufacture, transfer, or possess a machine gun if-
but only if-you register and pay taxes on it." Then along came
section 922(o) of the FOPA-some fifty-two years later-and declared
to that same citizen, "You may not manufacture, possess, or
transfer machine guns-period."  What sense does the NFA make now?
The BATF operates as though Congress has passed two separate laws
each criminalizing the mere possession of machine guns, leaving the
BATF with the discretion to prosecute citizens' possession under
either statute (or both).  But that is not-and cannot be-the case.

There is no evidence that Congress ever adverted to the effect
that the enactment of section 922(o) would have on related provi-
sions of the NFA.  But undeniably the enactment of section 922(o)
did affect the NFA enormously.  Because the NFA forbids the BATF to
register and accept taxes for illegal firearms, [footnote 13] the
enactment of section 922(o) which basically made the mere
possession of machine guns by private citizens illegal rendered the
extensive registration and tax provisions of the NFA essentially
meaningless.  Indeed, the NFA's regulation of machine gun-ownership
by private citizens was made instantly obsolete by the advent of
the FOPA.  There is no longer any place for those provisions in the
present legislative scheme for regulation of most prospective
machine gun-owners.  Their vestigial existence on the statute books
analogizes perfectly to the human appendix: no useful function
whatsoever, but unlimited potential for insidious mischief.


The obsolescence of the NFA provisions at issue here is also
exposed by the fact that although expressly enacted to raise
revenues from private citizens-those provisions no longer raise any
revenue from the possession, transfer, and making of machine guns
by private citizens.  The suggestion that a tax measure can somehow
have continued vitality when it no longer taxes certainly tests
one's imagination. Although implied repeals are disfavored, I
firmly believe that the sections of the NFA at issue here are so
utterly irreconcilable with section 922(o) of the FOPA as a means
of regulating private ownership of machine guns that they were
impliedly repealed by FOPA's passage: with respect to the
regulation of machine guns, the latter has superseded and
supplanted the former.

There should be a procedure for correcting mistakes in the record Nolo. But I am sure you know that... :) I noticed a few myself. I want to say I kept seeing the wrong year for Hughes Amendment cited over and over again.

Incidentally, I am told court reporters biggest complaint about lawyers is they talk too fast. May God help me when I finally go to court.

Nice to see there are some judges capable of applying logic.

On the section above, does it really repeal NFA though? Or is it merely a new statute in conflict with the existing one?  Seems to me that the "right" way to deal with this is to order the Congress to resolve the conflict between NFA and 922(o) - one of them has to go.  922(o) would be our obvious choice for repeal.

Speech recog is always going to fare poorly with things like proper nouns, so in the reference mistake it wouldn't have helped.

Well today was the first day of drafting the opening brief for Watson.  We'll keep you updated as this brief gets worked on.

Think of what the Treyvon Martin trial transcript would have looked like if done by speech recognition.

Court reporters are not going away. Someone needs to certify the transcript is accurate and the judge doesn't have time to do that.

I could see both systems being used in parallel so as to cross correct them as needed.

Do work

Google gave up on Google Voice voicemail speech recognition for a reason.  Impossible since there is no baseline.  
 

Nolo is our friend. He fights for FREEDOM.

You should have been around when they used Shorthand. Try finding someone that can read another person's Shorthand? What a pain in the ass.





Ed



 

when are you going to post the appeal? I just saw the notice.

Noticed that. I also noticed a whole bunch of syntax and spelling errors in the oral arguments record.

Is there some mechanism to correct that? Also, why don't they just mic all the players and record audio?

I still love you. No homo.

Does that apply to the entirety of the NFA, SBR, silencers and SBS or just to the machine guns?

So what would happen if NFA went away, but most state laws say SBR, silencers, SBS are illegal unless complied with NFA? Still illegal? or law is invalid since its impossible to comply with?

not my pic, but appropriate.

Nolo,

 
Are any further fundraising activities going to be required?

In

For  the  reasons  articulated  above,  we  hold  that  Watson  has standing  to  bring  his  constitutional  challenges  to  the  NFA and GCA. But we will nevertheless grant the Government's motion  to dismiss  his  complaint  because  (1)  the  Second Amendment does not protect the manufacture and possession of  machine  guns,...



Horseshit!, yer' honor.





 

TL:DU (too lawyery : didn't understand )?

Basically just brought the results of the PA Case to the attention of the TX Court?  And filed jointly with both the Prosecution and Defense?

Do you get a chance to brief / explain why it this is BS / argue in front of the judge, or is that up to her?

When do you get to call "Horseshit!, yer' honor." as said above?