Stokes,
You got it right: this Chris Brady does NOT know what he's talking about, or there was some breakdown in communication. Let me give you a couple of examples.
1. You bought a Colt SP1 in 1985. You still retain your original receipt for buying this gun, dated in 1985. You could have stripped this gun down to a bare lower, and sold off all of the parts, in 1987, and kept the lower. [b]THIS lower is STILL a pre-ban lower by law, and you can *prove* it.[/b] The law neither states or even suggests that this lower could lose it's status by being disassembled. If Chris Brady believes that it does, he's dead wrong.
2. You buy a stripped Bushmaster lower at a gun show, and the dealer claims it was pre-ban, because the guy he bought it from told him it was assembled before the ban, and it's in the 50,000 range. You call Bushmaster, and they can only confirm that it shipped as a stripped lower before the ban. Is this lower pre-ban? [b]ONLY if you can obtain some kind of written proof of it's status.[/b] Even if it was in fact assembled into AW configuration before the ban, if you can't *prove* it, the rifle can only be assembled as a post-ban, even if you CAN prove that the lower shipped and was sold before the ban. In this case, Brady would be correct, but ONLY because of the lack of documentation.
-Troy