The system doesn't work that well. The NICS system allows for blocking thousands of requests all over the map every day. Following up would require the handful of federal agents to manually investigate. The brutal reality is there just aren't that many people killed in this manner, if it weren't a highly politicized thing we wouldn't hear about every case where someone is probably even on local news.
The texas statute requires you to follow federal law. Only in the most literal sense could you call that a Texas requirement. Texas doesn't have the right to exempt people from federal law. It's a clarification as much as anything.
That is correct however with a few exceptions that require a special tax arms manufactured by you for your own personal use fall under an exemption from those requirements. There is no limit to the number but it's up to the BATFE if your intent was personal use so anyone with a brain won't expect this to protect racks of identical rifles made to outfit their militia and even 3 identical rifles is probably pushing your luck if you don't have at least that many shooters in your household.
Similarly, you could argue you made the gun with the intent of personal use and only after manufacture made the decision to sell or give it away as a private transfer which is exempt from transfer. But if the BATFE doesn't buy it you are screwed. The sane thing to do is pay the $75 or whatever it is now with an application containing a serial # and avoid risking it.
This is an oddball exception though. Typically what people use all this for is to buy a cheap 80% complete lower. The lower is a minimally functional shell which serves a role akin to a project enclosure in an electronics project which the BATFE has decide is the part which legally counts as the gun but doesn't become one until far enough along in manufacturing hence the 80%. People use a simple template, a youtube video, and a couple hours with a drill press to go from 80% to 100% and then build the rifle with the parts they actually want instead of paying the total price for the rifle and then buying and making all the modifications aftermarket. Gun hobbyists like to tinker with and modify their firearms just like any other modding community and this cuts the cost.
During the Obama era they redefined "military arms" to include just about all firearms alongside a redefinition of "manufacturing" so broad it included a dealer clipping on a scope you bought for you required a $3000 registration with ITER who as another executive agency mysteriously stopped processing the applications or even allowing international transfers (their actual purpose) except for those to nations who donated to the Clinton foundation.
As a consequence a lot of this activity went underground. That era is passed. Trump undid the changes Secretary Clinton made and people should go back to filing the proper paperwork if they are going to transfer guns made for personal use.
During any era people should not go shooting up or otherwise harming senators regardless of how they got their weapon.
You only need to register with the ATF when building certain types of firearm and when transferring ownership. Registering with the ATF requires a serial #. Most of the rules people are thinking of regarding serial numbers actually apply to firearms that had serial numbers which have been removed.
In practice you might be able to get away with registering one and keeping only one or two around at a time and just using the same serial. It'd be illegal but it might pass under the radar. The key thing to remember here is that it is entirely up to the BATFE whether you broke the rules, they believe you were manufacturing for personal use, etc.
Technically you might be able to sell the argument that you made the gun for personal use and therefore didn't need a serial and after several years using for personal use you effected a private transfer. Technically if you made the thing intending to sell it and didn't put a serial on it you've already broken the law even if you fail to actually sell it.
" You can make as many firearms as you like so long they are for your personal use and not for sale. "
Whether you were manufacturing for personal use or not has nothing to do with you or even reality and everything to do with a BATFE determination. If you have an arsenal of 200 AR's you manufactured for "personal use" and a BATFE agent sees it you are screwed. The could be the case with three if he doesn't like the look of you. It isn't wise to push too far under a 'right' that vanishes the instant a BATFE agent doesn't buy it.
"Registering guns, serials, transferring ownership, etc.
There is no fed law requiring any of that."
This is entirely inaccurate. There are most definitely federal laws surrounding gun manufacturing, registration with the BATFE, the transfer of firearms, and the recording of transfers. Those laws allow for exceptions and cases where the rules are relaxed but the laws exist and in many cases the exception is merely the BATFE's choice for there to be an exception.
"Also, there is paperwork/background check required for buying new guns, there is none for a private(non business) selling guns."
As I said above. There is law requiring paperwork/background check aka "transferring ownership" and an exception made for private transfer from individuals who do not hold a CFL (although an 03's transfers are private and still require paperwork). As for serial numbers, certain features require taxes, this requires registration and that requires a serial number. If you intend to transfer a weapon, privately or otherwise, that you have produced for personal use without a serial number, the voluntary form and fee to register it with ATF becomes mandatory before you can legally transfer it.
I will grant you that enforcement would be challenging if you were only doing it one off since there would be nothing to indicate you and not the buyer made it in the first place.
That isn't universal, there are still certain types of weapons that have to be registered federally. You can't build your own machine gun without registering it or as applied here your own short-barrel rifle.
Also there are 3D printers that print in other materials than plastic and they are used by gun shops that do custom work all the time. They aren't the cheap consumer ones but they are certainly out there.
The thing that is lost here is that it isn't hard to make a lower for any number of rifles. This isn't some magical 3D printing makes it possible thing. For maybe $300 you can put together a simple foundry that will let you cast anything from aluminum to bronze. Achieving great skill takes a lot but getting a simple rough shape like the 80% AR lowers is actually pretty simple and you can manage it in less than a weak. Some of the brass and bronze alloys you can make are stronger in some respects than steel and are used for high grade mining and large marine equipment. The reason we don't use them over steel industrially is because iron is much cheaper than copper and steel production lends itself more easily to continual production. At home on the other hand, the higher start-up and volatility of iron and steel processing makes these alloys a great small batch option.
You can carve your 80% lower in foam, use some rubber to make a reusable mold and then lost wax cast them all day long and finish them with simple shop equipment the same as the 80% lowers you buy. You can also 3D print instead of carving that initial piece then do the same with reusable mold and wax cast. In both cases you need to account for shrink (a little bit, these aren't bit parts) but that isn't rocket science and you can look up the relevant specs. Failing that just take measurements and adjust according to those. Once you dial it in you can crank them out all day long.
What people don't seem to realize is that even 3D printing a plastic lower that will fall apart is more work and expense than just paying $50 for a cheap 80% lower with a template and finishing it with a drill press and even though you don't save much it is enough to pay for a drill press.
"But the 3D printed stuff is getting there.....and you can make one that functions today."
Sure, not that either saves you much in the end. No matter how much the ATF (or whatever their latest acronym is) says otherwise there is a lot more to a gun than a lower and those parts add up to the cost of the gun.
You might save a little bit of cash if you want a very non-stock gun by buying the parts you want in the first place but usually not as much as you think and certainly not vs buying a non-ar style rifle.
There is doubt. The security detail could have been paid to take the shot and tossed him out as a fall guy. Is it the most probable thing? No but it is within the realm of reasonable possibility. Him being dead means it will never be investigated. Unless you did it or witnessed it yourself, it is alleged.
Or maybe he just understands the difference between the builder and their hammer. By your logic we should ban hammers if the popcorn guy at the movie theater builds a shoddy house with it.
"Which makes it even more interesting that there was no problem with releasing his name for everyone to know, but the list of politicians on the hitlist was not revealed."
If he is over 18 it is a matter of public record but accusations of crimes really shouldn't be. It allows for exactly what you see here trial in the court of public opinion and the destruction of careers over charges which are ultimately dismissed or for which parties are found not guilty.
He'll never be found innocent in a court of law, they don't assess innocence in a court of law just whether or not he is guilty.
That said, there is meaningful dispute as to whether he was the shooter or not. Basically it all comes down to the word of the security detail who aren't above suspicion anymore than the police. The security detail themselves could have taken a payout and he could be a fall guy.
Now before you go saying anything about crazy conspiracy. I'm not alleging or asserting any of that or trying to raise any suspicion. I'm invoking the general principle of trying to always keep an open mind. What I'm saying is we don't know what happened which is why you don't try people in the court of public opinion. Even if convicted in a court of law it is better to view it as the court or jury finding him guilty than "he did it." Courts are also fallible. For one thing they given greater weight to the testimony and records of 'authorities' vs others which is a plea to authority fallacy and presents an innate bias against the accused. The judge and jury are supposed to be neutral, but the authorities they are giving greater weight to are not and don't expend any effort pretending to be.
He assembled it into a short-barrel rifle which fell under the requirements for an NFA under federal law and Texas Penal Code Section 46.05 as you quoted above.
Let me clarify though, the sharks might together represent a monopoly within that room and within a bubble be colluding to demonstrate the concept but they don't have any sort of monopoly on investing even in aggregate.
The same for my friend and the gas station across the street. The real collusion there as far as I know comes from the commodities market rather than a gas station and only impacts them indirectly.
I don't work in that industry so there could be something happening I'm not aware of. That said you picked a perfect example. I did actually have a friend who managed a gas station as a kid and I'd hang out there so I saw a bit of this and he told me about a bit of it.
They didn't independently come up with their prices or rather someone flinched and set a price first and they'd shave pennies back and forth periodically when one another reduced price. He'd literally step outside and glance at the other guys sign and then respond. A couple months later he told me they'd mostly stopped, they'd just match whichever went lower instead of undercutting. I suppose that would be the point where yes, they began to collude to their mutual benefit and to the detriment of consumers.
You can watch the same thing in action on shark tank. The sharks avoid competing with each other too far or getting in a bidding war. They are colluding.
"Independent algorithms (or people) arriving at the same conclusion from the same data and openly performing actions in their own self-interest without communication is not collusion."
If it comes to the same anti-consumer result and the same result as monopoly behavior in a free market it is collusion. Or insert a new word for what is bad and can't be tolerated if we are to have a sound economy.
It doesn't matter if it is one monopoly fixing terms and pricing in an anti-competitive way, 8 companies with common interest doing the same, or 10,000 doing the same. The active communication isn't the issue. And it isn't just pricing, the major chip manufacturers engage in this sort of anti-competative behavior and coordinate on release rates by releasing roadmaps of how far they are planning to go with their capacities and features in advance via unspoken (or possibly spoken behind closed doors) agreement with each other.
"Collusion is an agreement between two or more parties, sometimes illegal–but always secretive–to limit open competition by deceiving, misleading, or defrauding others of their legal rights, or to obtain an objective forbidden by law typically by defrauding or gaining an unfair market advantage. It is an agreement among firms or individuals to divide a market, set prices, limit production or limit opportunities."
An unspoken agreement fits that definition just fine.
"That is, they may learn to collude even if they have not been specifically instructed to do so, and even if they do not communicate with one another."
Sounds like the situation we have with major companies now.
"Responding to a threat with deadly force may or may not be treated as justifiable homicide"
Another interesting tidbit which has been true of the many states I've lived in. Responding to a verbal threat with force but less than deadly force almost universally has the result of you being considered the guilty party.
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The system doesn't work that well. The NICS system allows for blocking thousands of requests all over the map every day. Following up would require the handful of federal agents to manually investigate. The brutal reality is there just aren't that many people killed in this manner, if it weren't a highly politicized thing we wouldn't hear about every case where someone is probably even on local news.
"What is odd is why Texas is charging him with that when NFA violations are federal offences."
Texas has a statute that requires you to follow the federal laws. Technically when you violate the federal requirement you also break the Texas one.
The texas statute requires you to follow federal law. Only in the most literal sense could you call that a Texas requirement. Texas doesn't have the right to exempt people from federal law. It's a clarification as much as anything.
Maybe but if you are actually doing it for personal use it isn't like you are going to be machining more than one or two.
That is correct however with a few exceptions that require a special tax arms manufactured by you for your own personal use fall under an exemption from those requirements. There is no limit to the number but it's up to the BATFE if your intent was personal use so anyone with a brain won't expect this to protect racks of identical rifles made to outfit their militia and even 3 identical rifles is probably pushing your luck if you don't have at least that many shooters in your household.
Similarly, you could argue you made the gun with the intent of personal use and only after manufacture made the decision to sell or give it away as a private transfer which is exempt from transfer. But if the BATFE doesn't buy it you are screwed. The sane thing to do is pay the $75 or whatever it is now with an application containing a serial # and avoid risking it.
This is an oddball exception though. Typically what people use all this for is to buy a cheap 80% complete lower. The lower is a minimally functional shell which serves a role akin to a project enclosure in an electronics project which the BATFE has decide is the part which legally counts as the gun but doesn't become one until far enough along in manufacturing hence the 80%. People use a simple template, a youtube video, and a couple hours with a drill press to go from 80% to 100% and then build the rifle with the parts they actually want instead of paying the total price for the rifle and then buying and making all the modifications aftermarket. Gun hobbyists like to tinker with and modify their firearms just like any other modding community and this cuts the cost.
During the Obama era they redefined "military arms" to include just about all firearms alongside a redefinition of "manufacturing" so broad it included a dealer clipping on a scope you bought for you required a $3000 registration with ITER who as another executive agency mysteriously stopped processing the applications or even allowing international transfers (their actual purpose) except for those to nations who donated to the Clinton foundation.
As a consequence a lot of this activity went underground. That era is passed. Trump undid the changes Secretary Clinton made and people should go back to filing the proper paperwork if they are going to transfer guns made for personal use.
During any era people should not go shooting up or otherwise harming senators regardless of how they got their weapon.
You only need to register with the ATF when building certain types of firearm and when transferring ownership. Registering with the ATF requires a serial #. Most of the rules people are thinking of regarding serial numbers actually apply to firearms that had serial numbers which have been removed.
In practice you might be able to get away with registering one and keeping only one or two around at a time and just using the same serial. It'd be illegal but it might pass under the radar. The key thing to remember here is that it is entirely up to the BATFE whether you broke the rules, they believe you were manufacturing for personal use, etc.
Technically you might be able to sell the argument that you made the gun for personal use and therefore didn't need a serial and after several years using for personal use you effected a private transfer. Technically if you made the thing intending to sell it and didn't put a serial on it you've already broken the law even if you fail to actually sell it.
" You can make as many firearms as you like so long they are for your personal use and not for sale. "
Whether you were manufacturing for personal use or not has nothing to do with you or even reality and everything to do with a BATFE determination. If you have an arsenal of 200 AR's you manufactured for "personal use" and a BATFE agent sees it you are screwed. The could be the case with three if he doesn't like the look of you. It isn't wise to push too far under a 'right' that vanishes the instant a BATFE agent doesn't buy it.
"Registering guns, serials, transferring ownership, etc.
There is no fed law requiring any of that."
This is entirely inaccurate. There are most definitely federal laws surrounding gun manufacturing, registration with the BATFE, the transfer of firearms, and the recording of transfers. Those laws allow for exceptions and cases where the rules are relaxed but the laws exist and in many cases the exception is merely the BATFE's choice for there to be an exception.
"Also, there is paperwork/background check required for buying new guns, there is none for a private(non business) selling guns."
As I said above. There is law requiring paperwork/background check aka "transferring ownership" and an exception made for private transfer from individuals who do not hold a CFL (although an 03's transfers are private and still require paperwork). As for serial numbers, certain features require taxes, this requires registration and that requires a serial number. If you intend to transfer a weapon, privately or otherwise, that you have produced for personal use without a serial number, the voluntary form and fee to register it with ATF becomes mandatory before you can legally transfer it.
I will grant you that enforcement would be challenging if you were only doing it one off since there would be nothing to indicate you and not the buyer made it in the first place.
His argument may have been weak but his premise was correct. It is not illegal to manufacture a firearm for personal use without a serial #.
That isn't universal, there are still certain types of weapons that have to be registered federally. You can't build your own machine gun without registering it or as applied here your own short-barrel rifle.
Also there are 3D printers that print in other materials than plastic and they are used by gun shops that do custom work all the time. They aren't the cheap consumer ones but they are certainly out there.
The thing that is lost here is that it isn't hard to make a lower for any number of rifles. This isn't some magical 3D printing makes it possible thing. For maybe $300 you can put together a simple foundry that will let you cast anything from aluminum to bronze. Achieving great skill takes a lot but getting a simple rough shape like the 80% AR lowers is actually pretty simple and you can manage it in less than a weak. Some of the brass and bronze alloys you can make are stronger in some respects than steel and are used for high grade mining and large marine equipment. The reason we don't use them over steel industrially is because iron is much cheaper than copper and steel production lends itself more easily to continual production. At home on the other hand, the higher start-up and volatility of iron and steel processing makes these alloys a great small batch option.
You can carve your 80% lower in foam, use some rubber to make a reusable mold and then lost wax cast them all day long and finish them with simple shop equipment the same as the 80% lowers you buy. You can also 3D print instead of carving that initial piece then do the same with reusable mold and wax cast. In both cases you need to account for shrink (a little bit, these aren't bit parts) but that isn't rocket science and you can look up the relevant specs. Failing that just take measurements and adjust according to those. Once you dial it in you can crank them out all day long.
What people don't seem to realize is that even 3D printing a plastic lower that will fall apart is more work and expense than just paying $50 for a cheap 80% lower with a template and finishing it with a drill press and even though you don't save much it is enough to pay for a drill press.
"But the 3D printed stuff is getting there.....and you can make one that functions today."
Sure, not that either saves you much in the end. No matter how much the ATF (or whatever their latest acronym is) says otherwise there is a lot more to a gun than a lower and those parts add up to the cost of the gun.
You might save a little bit of cash if you want a very non-stock gun by buying the parts you want in the first place but usually not as much as you think and certainly not vs buying a non-ar style rifle.
There is doubt. The security detail could have been paid to take the shot and tossed him out as a fall guy. Is it the most probable thing? No but it is within the realm of reasonable possibility. Him being dead means it will never be investigated. Unless you did it or witnessed it yourself, it is alleged.
Or maybe he just understands the difference between the builder and their hammer. By your logic we should ban hammers if the popcorn guy at the movie theater builds a shoddy house with it.
"Which makes it even more interesting that there was no problem with releasing his name for everyone to know, but the list of politicians on the hitlist was not revealed."
If he is over 18 it is a matter of public record but accusations of crimes really shouldn't be. It allows for exactly what you see here trial in the court of public opinion and the destruction of careers over charges which are ultimately dismissed or for which parties are found not guilty.
He'll never be found innocent in a court of law, they don't assess innocence in a court of law just whether or not he is guilty.
That said, there is meaningful dispute as to whether he was the shooter or not. Basically it all comes down to the word of the security detail who aren't above suspicion anymore than the police. The security detail themselves could have taken a payout and he could be a fall guy.
Now before you go saying anything about crazy conspiracy. I'm not alleging or asserting any of that or trying to raise any suspicion. I'm invoking the general principle of trying to always keep an open mind. What I'm saying is we don't know what happened which is why you don't try people in the court of public opinion. Even if convicted in a court of law it is better to view it as the court or jury finding him guilty than "he did it." Courts are also fallible. For one thing they given greater weight to the testimony and records of 'authorities' vs others which is a plea to authority fallacy and presents an innate bias against the accused. The judge and jury are supposed to be neutral, but the authorities they are giving greater weight to are not and don't expend any effort pretending to be.
He made it into short-barrel rifle
He assembled it into a short-barrel rifle which fell under the requirements for an NFA under federal law and Texas Penal Code Section 46.05 as you quoted above.
He is presumed to be innocent, that is SUPPOSED to be the reason. You aren't supposed to defame people, that is the reason there are damages!
Besides, in some cases defaming the dead could cause damages to surviving relatives and business interests and you could be liable for those.
Security detail at the game allege they saw him start shooting, engaged him, police joined. Police believe the detail, therefore "authorities say."
It still has to be proven in a court of law.
Let me clarify though, the sharks might together represent a monopoly within that room and within a bubble be colluding to demonstrate the concept but they don't have any sort of monopoly on investing even in aggregate.
The same for my friend and the gas station across the street. The real collusion there as far as I know comes from the commodities market rather than a gas station and only impacts them indirectly.
I don't work in that industry so there could be something happening I'm not aware of. That said you picked a perfect example. I did actually have a friend who managed a gas station as a kid and I'd hang out there so I saw a bit of this and he told me about a bit of it.
They didn't independently come up with their prices or rather someone flinched and set a price first and they'd shave pennies back and forth periodically when one another reduced price. He'd literally step outside and glance at the other guys sign and then respond. A couple months later he told me they'd mostly stopped, they'd just match whichever went lower instead of undercutting. I suppose that would be the point where yes, they began to collude to their mutual benefit and to the detriment of consumers.
You can watch the same thing in action on shark tank. The sharks avoid competing with each other too far or getting in a bidding war. They are colluding.
"Independent algorithms (or people) arriving at the same conclusion from the same data and openly performing actions in their own self-interest without communication is not collusion."
If it comes to the same anti-consumer result and the same result as monopoly behavior in a free market it is collusion. Or insert a new word for what is bad and can't be tolerated if we are to have a sound economy.
It doesn't matter if it is one monopoly fixing terms and pricing in an anti-competitive way, 8 companies with common interest doing the same, or 10,000 doing the same. The active communication isn't the issue. And it isn't just pricing, the major chip manufacturers engage in this sort of anti-competative behavior and coordinate on release rates by releasing roadmaps of how far they are planning to go with their capacities and features in advance via unspoken (or possibly spoken behind closed doors) agreement with each other.
"Collusion is an agreement between two or more parties, sometimes illegal–but always secretive–to limit open competition by deceiving, misleading, or defrauding others of their legal rights, or to obtain an objective forbidden by law typically by defrauding or gaining an unfair market advantage. It is an agreement among firms or individuals to divide a market, set prices, limit production or limit opportunities."
An unspoken agreement fits that definition just fine.
"That is, they may learn to collude even if they have not been specifically instructed to do so, and even if they do not communicate with one another."
Sounds like the situation we have with major companies now.
Agreed on all counts.
"Responding to a threat with deadly force may or may not be treated as justifiable homicide"
Another interesting tidbit which has been true of the many states I've lived in. Responding to a verbal threat with force but less than deadly force almost universally has the result of you being considered the guilty party.