Are Your Owned Firearms Legal In The State or Jurisdiction You Reside?

Read on friends, this from a lawful firearms owner whose firearms are now illegal in his state… What a shame…. Taking firearms from law abiding citizens. A travesty of a misguided law aimed at law abiding citizens, says firearms instructor, FFL and Gunsmith Gregg Kielma. Please read on and understand where your state or place of residence legislation make be headed.

At one point I owned two perfectly-legally-purchased shotguns that were later classified as ‘NFA weapons’, meaning they weren’t “banned” but they now required registration.

I saw a notice in a gun magazine that they had been reclassified, and that the punishment for having an unregistered NFA item was a MANDATORY 10-year jail term, and a MANDATORY $250,000 fine, PER weapon. Not wanting 20 years in jail and a half-million dollar fine, I called the BATF to see what the procedure was to get them registered. The nice man on the phone said, “We haven’t yet developed a process for that,” to which I replied, “then I assume that until you have a process, the penalties for possessing them without registration paperwork would not be enforced…?” He said “No, the penalties would still apply…”

I hung up the phone, thankful I’d not been given any personal details. I couldn’t find any gun shops that knew how to do it, because most gun shops don’t have the license to deal with NFA firearms (machine guns, suppressors, and so on). None of the gun shops could even buy them from me, for the same reason.

Finally, I found an NFA shop, and they said they would help me get them papered. That took a few months, but I finally got the ‘stamps’ proving they had been duly registered.

I wanted to just sell them at that point anyway, but couldn’t have done that until they got papers, or I’d have gotten in worse trouble.

Once they were papered, I wanted to sell them to that NFA shop, but the rules are so strange they couldn’t just buy them from me and sell them; they had to keep them locked up with me holding the key, and finally they found me buyers and helped make sure the paperwork got done right. Because the guns weren’t worth much anyway, and there was now an added $200 the buyer had to pay for each one to do the transfer and registration, I wound up getting $500 for guns I paid $750 for.

It was a frightening experience, to be ‘legal’ at one minute, then all of a sudden ‘in violation’ through no fault of my own, then a maze of paperwork I was unfamiliar with, but every page had a notice that any misstatement would be punishable by fines and jail time.

Yet your average punk gangbanger is out there buying whatever illegal guns they want. I’m not sure how all this paperwork is keeping us safer.