I heard of a guy whos grandpa passed and in his grandpas stuff he find a full auto gun that  somone had brought back from ww2 has no paper work or anything.  The guy wants to sale it how could he do so?

http://www.ar15.com/forums/t_6_17/322347_So_you_found_an_MG_in_the_attic______.html

If it's not registered, then it's contraband and any action he takes with it, except turning it into LE, is illegal.

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good advice in there

That right there

Or you could move to Kansas or Alaska where they have a 2nd Amendment Preservation Law.

No restrictions on your 2A rights there.  Been contemplating it myself anyway.

Tony or another one of the knowledgeable guys can tell you best, but there are really only two legal options.

First is to surrender it to the ATF

Second is to destroy the receiver properly. Once properly cut, it is no longer a firearm and the parts can be sold.


BUT!

Until it is cut, it is still an illegal, unregistered firearm. So finding someone to do the work may not be easy.

It's actually illegal to destroy it too. It's evidence tampering.

The only legal option is turn it in.

I hate it when that happens...

Ha, Ha!  iPhone spell checking.  That's one for the books.

"The only legal option is to turn it in."

Well, I knew NFA didn't make much sense, but that takes the cake. Thanks for the info.

That's true of any form of contraband, not just NFA firearms.

ETA:  Depending on the culture of the field office where you live, ATF has in the past allowed such items to be stripped of unrestricted parts due to the family heirloom nature of the gun, but this comes only after they are notified of the MG to begin with. Unilaterally deciding to strip it or destroy it or dispose of it will not foster such good will with ATF.

Excellent first post.

Set your alarm for 0400, leave the door unlocked and board your dog.

I'm skeptical of this idea, I'd love to hear of an actual case where a guy unscrewed a barrel off a gun and then got nailed by ATF for "evidence tampering" after he turned the receiver in.

If you turned in your dead grandpa's MP40 tube to ATF, I'm having a hard time picturing the ATF agents whacking your kidneys with billy clubs and demanding the buttstock and mags.

First of all how would they even know that the gun was stripped, and secondly why would they care?   You can go on gunbroker and buy a torch cut UZI parts kit.

The receiver is the gun, the rest is just spare parts.

They would and absolutely do care.  They want to verify the gun is not stolen or used in another crime before it gets stripped of functional parts or, worse, destroyed.  If you destroy a gun that has evidentiary value, something you couldn't possibly know on your own, they are likely to file charges against you. If the receiver ended up corresponding to a stolen gun or one used on a crime and you had altered or destroyed it, then you may well have ruined a criminal case or at the very least someone else's property.  Now, a contraband gun you know to have been your grandfather's WWII bringback may satisfy you that the gun doesn't have any additional evidentiary value in another case, but by law that isn't your call to make.

In your example, imagine they run the serial number of that barrelless receiver and discover it is actually a murder weapon. Now the value of that evidence is largely compromised because the guy, despite knowing it was a contraband firearm, thought he could take the parts and turn in the "firearm". This is why we have evidence law to begin with.

The point is that the law protects evidence of this nature and prohibits one from doing exactly this.  If you know it is contraband, then altering or destroying it could land you in both state and federal court facing felony charges. It wholly depends on circumstances you wouldn't know because you didn't notify ATF to begin with.

Their not knowing as a reason to do it anyway is the flawed justification that keeps our prison population ever growing.

Read anything official on this subject, nowhere will you ever see "strip it of parts" or "destroy the receiver" as legal options available to you.  All of this is precisely why.

Of course, if Grandpa had already disassembled it, and put the receiver in one oily bag, and the parts in another that you might find later, that would've been awful nice of him...

It would've been even nicer if he'd registered it in the amnesty & left the tax stamp in the will...

These threads are why I keep reading the NFA subforums. The intricacies of the laws around this stuff are crazy.

After turning it in, would BATFE let you know if it was on the registry, and allow the transfer to heir as usual?

If it's in the registry, sure.  But confirming it's registered is a delicate thing best left to an attorney.

amnesty registrations and war trophies were tax free so had no stamp, but gramps would have had paperwork, at least.

Yes, and it's worth noting that lack of NFA registration is not an immutably bad situation.  There is precendent to allowing current registration of older, papered bringbacks and war trophies. If you can find any official documentation from the War Department or DoD confirming proper procedure was followed at the time, then they may allow it to be entered into the registry as a transferable MG.

Definitely worth running this down...

If it matters I remember the guy saying it is called a grease gun.

Yeah, that's stolen gov't property.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M3_submachine_gun

So there is no way it was owned in a legal way?

We don't know. You'd need to find registration paperwork or confirm it's registered.

Shirley you are not serious. Lots of grease Guns in public hands.

So you didn't go read the "so you found a machinegun in the attic" thread linked above?  

That answers ALL your questions about how to find out if it's legally registered.

Uhhh............the SAME Federal laws apply in KS and AK as anywhere else.

yes it could be legal and registered

grease guns are legal and legally in private hands

read the link posted previously, it explains exactly what you need to do

I did read it and thought that  would be the way to go till somone said because its a American  made grease gun its goverment owned and is stolen.

I now see he was wrong.....

Long story short: Your "friend" should turn the house upside down looking for paperwork, like it's a winning lottery ticket. If there's no joy with that, he should hire an attorney, preferably one that specializes in NFA stuff to inquire with the ATF if the gun is registered. He needs the serial number off the gun to do this, but he does not need to actually see the gun. After that, if it's in the registry your friend can have ATF transfer it to him on a form 5, and he gets a free machine gun.  If it's contraband, however, it must be surrendered to ATF.

Good to know.  How did they get there?

Originals were likely reimported before 1968.

Most of the transferable M3s are amnesty registered GI bringbacks or reactivated DEWATs. There's not a whole lot of them, but they are out there. And the M3A1 is significantly rarer in the wild than straight M3s.