This has zero chance of going anywhere. The Whiskey Rebellion of 1791-1794 decide it.
Excise taxes levied on Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms are accepted practice. Congress has decided all manufactured firearms will be assessed an excise tax. Additionally, machine guns, short barrel firearms, and other destructive devices are assessed an additional $200 excise.
Ruby Ridge was specifically about failure to pay a $200 tax stamp for a sawed of shotgun. Waco was about failure to pay $200 tax stamps for automatic weapons.
The Constitution’s commerce clause is not the locus of authority, it is excise tax from Article 1, Section 8.
US Constitution, Article 1, Section 8:
The Congress shall have power To lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defence and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States
I think you need to do more research.
Weaver was entrapped by Federal operatives who instructed him to cut off the shotgun he sold them at a particular place on the barrel and then threatened prosecution in order to try to get him to roll over on an alleged white supremacist group in the area. They wanted him to be an informant on his neighbors and the alleged NFA violation was the leverage. (Where do you measure the length of a shotgun barrel from?)
The Feds underestimated Weaver, who would not play ball and who failed to appear in court over the incident. The Feds staked him out, which led to gunplay and the rest of the incident.
Weaver subsequently won his freedom and a significant lawsuit for the wrongful death of his wife at the hands of "Hostage Rescue Team" sniper Lon Horiuchi, who was promoted. Gerry Spence represented Weaver pro bono, even though he did not agree with many of weaver's beliefs, because he felt there were serious issues of Government misbehaviour.
As for Waco, the 'official' line during the Waco investigation, used in Congressional testimony, was that grenade casings had spilled from a ruptured package and allegedly the BATF was going to investigate the possibility of illicit destructive devices.
It was well known that one of the cottage industries of the Branch Davidians was presenting, among other things, novelty items like the "complaint Dept.--take a number" grenade mounetd on a wood base with a numbered tag on the pin.
BATF agents, on a fishing expedition interviewed one of the dealers the Branch Davidians bought firearms from, who called Koresh in the presence of the ATF agents and Koresh offered for the agents to come inspect the firearms present there. The agents declined that offer.
No one has been able to testify that there was a copy of a warrant present at the Waco raid, and the official versions of the story vary. The front (metal) door, which could have established who shot first was not recovered according to the official account.
The BATF is notorious for altering arms siezed as evidence, and there is no evidence of fully automatic weapons or select-fire weapons existing at Mt. Carmel prior to the raid. Reports of what 'sounded like machine gun fire' were shown to be the product of a legal trigger actuator mounted on semi-automatic firearms.
The body count alone, and the dynamics of the failed assault indicate an absence of automatic weapons in the hands of Davidians: the BATF should have lost far more people on a raid that size if the Davidians had had the 46 or so claimed automatic weapons at the onset of hostilities, especially considering that the Davidians knew in advance of the raid, and the BATF knew they knew (the phone line was tapped), but went ahead anyway.
Hardly the actions of someone who thinks they are facing a hostile and well equipped force with automatic weapons.
Please check into the raid more, in both cases, and do not rely on sources like CNN for your information. During the Congressional hearings, with a 5 minute rule, CNN would show the Democrat's thespian antics, then cut to commercial for the duration of the Republican questioning, then back to the hearings for five (democrat questioning) minutes, then back to commercial (for the Republican questions)...
I was aware of CNN's pro-Clinton bias, but admittedly was shocked at such blatant censorship of what was going on.
C-SPAN carried the hearings the first day, then after the end of Special orders in the House, which ended any time from 6PM Central to Midnight, and the portions which were televised ran anywhere from an hour to six, so it was almost impossible to catch the hearings on tape unless you stayed awake and watched them.
The cover-up (which is what that was) reeked.
Irrelevant (to the jurisdiction of the BATF) stories were circulated in the media regarding rumors of everything from a meth lab to child abuse, which were used to sway public opinion against the Davidians (a relatively obscure church group, a branch of the Seventh Day Adventists) and frame them as a cult out of control.
Had the objective been to arrest David Koresh, he could have been picked up jogging, and all the bloodshed, the siege, and subsequent holocast (burning the building, evidence, bodies, and all but a few of the survivors to that point) could have been avoided.
IMHO, this was an illegitimate, grandstanding operation which went sour.
Were Koresh, with hostile intent and forewarning, in command of fifty or so adults capable of wielding the two Barrets and the 46 (claimed by the BATF afterwards) fully automatic weapons, with a half hour to organize, people would have been at the windows with automatic rifles and an ample supply of ammunition, the Barrets would have been located to take out the two pickups acting as tow vehicles, and the remainder would have been instructed to sweep the canvas-covered cattle trailers the BATF used to ferry in the agents from back to front, trapping the live ones amidst and behind the dead and dying. That would have been an "ambush".
That did not happen.
Instead there was dialogue at the front door, a 911 phone call to try to get someone to "call it off" (which incidentally, exposes the wiretap), and then scattered and building resistance to the attack which led to only four Federal assault force fatalaties. Had the Davidians had the assets claimed, and with a half hour forewarning (a TV crew asked the postman, who was a Davidian, how to get to Mount Carmel because there was going to be a big raid there and they were there to film it, the postman phoned Mt Carmel and told them), with forethought and malice ambushed the BATF, there might have been four survivors, not four fatalities.
A critical look at events does not bear up the official story, and the later news magazine versions of what happened there are even further off the mark, and significantly distorted.