Ladies and Gentlemen, the ATF has made a gigantic leap forward in the field of making sure adorable blonde moppets can’t shoot their eye out.
A local business owner is flabbergasted after a shipment of 30 toy guns for his store was confiscated by ATF agents in Tacoma.
Brad Martin and his son, Ben, sell the Airsoft BB guns from their store in Cornelius where they’ve been in business for seven years.
The Martins said they buy their stock from Taiwan because the merchandise is less expensive. But the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives seized a shipment of 30 in October. That shipment is worth around $12,000 and the ATF is promising to destroy the entire shipment.
I feel safer already, don’t you? After all, who knows who might have been hurt by these things if some enterprising young felon had gotten their hands on one of these!
Special Agent Kelvin Crenshaw said the toys can be easily retro-fitted into dangerous weapons.
“With minimal work it could be converted to a machine gun,” Crenshaw said.
I’m not the world’s biggest gun expert, but I’m fairly certain that you can’t convert a BB gun into a machine gun. Maybe, with some effort, you could convert one to fire small caliber rounds (I doubt more than a .22), but it would almost certainly be a single shot weapon. But a machine gun? There’s no way that the internal structure of a BB gun would be strong enough to handle that rate of fire.
But even if this absurd premise is true, I can’t think of a legal justification for this seizure off the top of my head. It’s possible, after all, to convert certain semi-automatic rifles to be fully automatic if you know what you’re doing, but you can buy and sell them legally. On the face of it, this looks like a nonsense seizure and if that’s true I hope that the Martins get their property back.
h/t Radley Balko
