While automatic weapons are supposed to be heavily regulated, for 15 years it was possible to buy them without doing the required notification of local law officials. In fact, it was possible to buy a military-grade machine gun without so much as the background check faced by ordinary gun owners.
Many local law-enforcement officials refuse to approve the transfer of machine guns, silencers and other heavily regulated weapons to residents in their jurisdictions. As a workaround, gun owners have obtained them through the use of trusts, legal entities that don’t require permission from sheriffs or police chiefs.
The wide-open period of using trusts to bypass laws around automatic weapons began in 2000, when a loophole in the law became obvious. Over the next 12 years, some 40,000 gun trusts were created to hold an unknown number of automatic weapons. Finally, in 2012, the Obama Justice Department moved to correct this problem along with another that was closely associated.
The actions will restrict the reimportation of surplus military-grade weapons solely to museums and will close a loophole that allows people to evade required background checks for owning machine-guns and short-barreled shotguns by registering them with trusts or corporations.
In an earlier story today, I indicated that some 390,000 machine guns were in individual hands in the United States. I made that assumption based on 2006 numbers, since the regulations require most privately owned weapons to have been registered before 1984. However, the trust loophole blew up my assumptions.
As of April, 630,019 machine guns were registered with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, including more than 11,700 in Nevada, up from 456,930 machine guns in 2010.
from Daily Kos http://ift.tt/2hItUvl
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