BBS Kit from Polymer80 advertising cropped and scaled by Dean Weingarten Posted on 03/23/2021 8:04:37 AM PDT by marktwain
BBS Kit from Polymer80 advertising cropped and scaled by Dean Weingarten
U.S.A. –-(AmmoLand.com)- At about 5:00 to 5:30 a.m. back on the 10th of December 2020, the ATF raided the corporate headquarters of Polymer80, located in Dayton, Nevada. Fake-news-media outlet CNN had been notified in advance of the raid.
The ATF was operating on a novel legal theory: the idea that parts, in proximity to 80% receivers, constituted firearms.
According to a very reliable source, two computers were taken, more or less, as some peripherals may have been taken as well. The computers were to be returned on 11th December, once the ATF has taken “images” of the data on the computers.
Virtually no product was taken. The Agents were looking for Buy Build Shoot (BBS) kits. None were found because none were in stock.
The ATF then contacted Brownells.com. Brownells does not sell BBS kits, so none were found at Brownells.
My source says ATF agents then went to a Polymer80 employee’s residence in another state, and without a warrant, bullied their way inside and took a BDS kit the employee had.
The ATF legal theory, that parts in proximity to an 80% receiver, constitute a firearm, is new legal ground. The fact no product was taken, and no cease and desist order was issued, may indicate the ATF is on very shaky legal ground.
As AmmoLand News investigative reporter John Crump has written in an earlier article, Polymer80 has ATF Determination Letters showing the Polymer80 products are not firearms.
The “proximity” reading is rather ambiguous.
(Excerpt) Read more at ammoland.com ...
Looks like they made a serious error.
The ATF should be disbanded, and every agent who enforced a gun control law should be charged with conspiracy to deny civil rights under color of authority.
Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria techniques used by the government.
the prices on all of the 80% stuff has gone up by about 40% the last year or two., and everything is always out of stock and backordered. I ordered an 80% AR15 receiver only, in November and got it in February, a year ago it was shipped the same day you ordered it!
Out of the stuff I built, I personally like the 1911 45 ACP kit the best.
No error, they haven’t changed their opinion that parts in proximity to an 80% receiver is a firearm, they just haven’t codified that yet, but the raids were fishing trips for data on who bought BBS kits, for when the Congress gets around to banning “Ghost Guns”. Also the purpose was to intimidate potential buyers and sellers.
The article states: Virtually no product was taken. The Agents were looking for Buy Build Shoot (BBS) kits. None were found because none were in stock.
Then later the article states: "The fact no product was taken, and no cease and desist order was issued, may indicate the ATF is on very shaky legal ground."
1) If no product was found, it naturally follows that no product was taken. That has nothing to do with "very shaky legal ground."
2) If no cease and desist order was issued, perhaps that is because no formal letter was necessary. A search of the Polymer 80 website shows that they no longer offer the "Buy, Build, Shoot" kits. They clearly don't want to test the ATF's "very shaky legal ground" and decided to end the sale of the BBS kits.
Search of Polymer 80 website for "Buy Build Shoot:" https://www.polymer80.com/search?keywords=buy%20build%20shoot
https://www.polymer80.com/pistols/80percentpistolkits
No, those are just 80% frame kits. Polymer 80's "Buy, Build, Shoot" kits included the 80% frame kit, plus a slide, barrel, trigger assembly, and slide parts kit.
The ATF approach is entirely too ambiguous. What about parts in proximity to a 74.99% (or 50.01%) 'receiver'? And what kind of parts are we talking about: 100% certifiable gun parts, or 80% parts? How about airsoft parts (IIRC, marktwain or some other knowledgeable individual informed me that certain simulated firearm parts can be successfully substituted for the "real deal")?
If you look at an AR-type lower receiver, it's essentially a metal channel, to which other parts are attached. A few years back, while removing an unused satellite dish from my house, I realized that the dish support arm was approximately the same size internally as an AR15 lower. Which raises the question: how long before ATF starts raiding airsoft businesses, and comparing the customer lists obtained there with lists of satellite service customers? After all, if you've got a dish on the roof, and a toy gun in the closet, you've got an X% 'receiver' in proximity to "parts"...
Until the 80% lower crosses that threshold and becomes an 81% lower and thus a firearm, it's a lump of plastic or aluminum, period.
The ATF is trying to work under their "constructive possession" theory, where if you have a standard AR, and you have an upper with a barrel shorter than 16" (and don't have a pistol lower), then you have constructive possession of a short barreled rifle, even if you never mate the upper and lower together.
They imaged the drives - they got what they came for, don’t kid yourself.
Part of that picture is an administrative or bureaucratic determination of "intent", via some arbitrary measure such as percent-of-completion for a proto-receiver, or distance of such an item from undefined parts. The government somehow determines an individual's intent to commit a crime, and files charges; said individual must then somehow prove their innocence to avoid prosecution and incarceration. That approach encourages selective enforcement, which makes life much easier for government officials, but exceedingly difficult for everyone else...
I'd say the agency needs to be disbanded and anyone who has ever worked for it in any capacity needs to be taken out to a field and fed into a woodcutter so that their remains can be easily used as fertilizer.
I don’t see the point of these kits if they are purchased on line with a credit card. There’s nothing secret about that.
I actually knew a couple of ATF guys in passing, years back. They were really good guys, and pro-gun. They basically busied themselves all the time hunting down other agencies who were raiding gang houses and drug operations, and tacking on federal gun charges to get those criminals taken off the streets for longer than they otherwise would have been. My impression was they were even bothered by Waco, but they held their tongues because in that area of federal LE things are pretty bad, worse than you would think. I am sure they are all under full surveillance, with people listening in their houses, and assessing all the time if they are becoming a threat to what is taking over our nation.
I think ATF probably has a lot of good LE guys in it at the ground level, toiling away each day to get rid of real criminals like gang bangers and drug dealers.
But like the rest of our government the leadership is infiltrated by the intel operation that is all throughout our government and society, and as a result the top of the agency is filled with these agents who want to disarm the US so the intel operation can at some point clamp down and assert full control.
The truth is, there may be almost nothing that is private. People don’t understand the size of the domestic surveillance network, how big the informant/surveillance part of it is, how organized, sectored, and arrayed over the entire nation its watching program is, how high end the tech they deploy is, or how anyone can find themselves with every moment of their lives documented.
In this environment, and for the brief period during which the government is still afraid to let people know how bad it is, your strength can be making their coming after you expose how bad it is. So if you buy this with a credit card, they may be hesitant to come after you, because they don’t want to reveal they hacked the manufacturer’s computer network and stole their sales list. Or they hacked the credit card company and stole the list of purchases. Or they don’t want to reveal they were keeping track of your credit card receipts as part of an illegal surveillance operation targeting you. If they come after you, you may e able to point out they shouldn’t have known what you wer eup to, unless they were doing something bad too.
So you will slide to hide their surveillance program, while the guys who bought a full firearm get busted because ATF pulls the 4473’s. In this environment, just a little more effort to stay off the books can be the difference between being left alone, and being openly hunted down.
I'm sure that's true, but I assume it's vast.
I assumed it was vast too, but then I saw it and realized it is far worse than I would ever have thought possible.
I post these things just to warn my fellow patriots to understand, they should focus more on making sure that whatever the government has can’t be used without exposing how it was gotten, than on expecting to hide it successfully and have nobody the wiser.
God Bless brother.
They got what they wanted. The computers doubtless have the names and addresses of all who have been sent a kit.
Likewise FRiend
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