Excitement at the Gun Show

[DaveHH]

Around here, staring down a million dollar prosecution bill as opposed to a plea bargain, the plea wins every time. I personally look at prison as a vocation for these fools and I say make it as bad as possible inside so they won't choose to come back. The whole LE situation makes little sense here. The cities continually have drunk stops that catch a very few drunks and 20-35 llegals with no license or insurance. These are real money makers for small towns ( the city of Petaluma has demanded HALF of towing and storage fees associated with these crimes from the towing agency ), and with MAD and the like, the public doesn't say anything. I think that the public would be better served by having those officers on the street catching gang bangers and burglars, but there's no money in that so they fleece the guy who had 3 glasses of Pinot Noir because he has the ability to pay. It has become a giant game of GOTCHA, with huge parking fines, speed traps, drunk stops, while ignoring the fact that the gangs have taken over the streets. God bless LE, but when they put revenue over crime, we all lose. And I guarantee that the average officers prefers to get the criminal.

[imarangemaster]

The Sheriff's Office in Kalifornia I retired from actually had a good sense of priorities. If you wrote too many tickets or chippy arrests, you weren't doing your job. It kept you tied up too much. Besides, we were spread REALLY thin, and din't have time to mess with petty cr@p. We used traffic stops as a tool to see who, was where, doing what, but wrote few tickets. Consequently, felony arrest rates were pretty good! My Sgt. told me if I wanted to write lots of tickets, I should have joined the Highway Patrol!

[Gibbs505]

Great save there jim!!!

[dracster]

...I just had a brain drizzle.
If one was to purchase a registered M2 kit and then installed that kit into a M2 marked reciever , would not the unregistered reciever now be covered by the kit's paperwork ? Or would they rule that it was two machineguns , one OK and one bad ? That would be true IF the kit was EVER removed ( even for cleaning) , but til then ?
Prob'ly too much to hope for...but still , has anyone asked?
Chris

It would probably be the same as those who modded their HKs to take a swing down trigger pack with a registered sear. The modification was ruled to make the rifle a machine gun and the sear is a machine gun. You would have 2 machine guns in 1. They would probably look at the M2 in your scenario the same way.

[Bill Hollinger]

The LEO didn't do anything about it because he didn't know there was an issue with it being marked M2. With my many years as a LEO I can tell you that cops can be the most ignorant people in the world when it comes to guns. That cop probably didn't know an M2 from R2D2. This was one of my biggest gripes when working the streets. There is very little formal training for LEOs about firearms identification. I tried to hold a couple of classes but the participation was dismal at best. I would consistently have other cops call me to respond to ID one gun or another. Most of my beat partners started catching on.

For a number of years ATF, Bakersfield PD and Kern County SO would go into a shop that sold military surplus. They would do random checks but never found anything out of the ordinary. Above the counters there were four "dewat" machineguns hanging from chains. An M1 Tommy gun, type 26, MP40 and a Sten gun. All were fully functional and two, the Sten and MP40 had loaded magazines in them. Nobody ever caught it until some CSI techno-geek went in to but a set of BDUs for work.