Here’s an odd story out of California that dates back nearly a decade but I’m only just hearing about it now. It deals with a man named Joseph Roh who lived in a suburb of Los Angeles. After a lengthy BATFE investigation, it was determined that Roh had been illegally manufacturing AR-15 style, semiautomatic rifles (without serial numbers) in his own warehouse. What’s more, he had been selling them for $1,000 a pop to people, many of whom were not legally allowed to purchase a firearm due to having a criminal record. In fact, one of his customers turned out to be John Zawahri, who you may recall from a mass shooting in Santa Monica in 2013.
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“The judge in the case had issued a tentative order that, in the eyes of prosecutors, threatened to upend the decades-old Gun Control Act and “seriously undermine the ATF’s ability to trace and regulate firearms nationwide.”
A case once touted by prosecutors as a crackdown on an illicit firearms factory was suddenly seen as having the potential to pave the way to unfettered access to one of the most demonized guns in America.
Federal authorities preferred to let Roh go free rather than have the ruling become final and potentially create case law that could have a crippling effect on the enforcement of gun laws, several sources familiar with the matter told CNN. Each requested anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the case and its possible implications.”
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How is that possible? Roh apparently wasn’t selling completely finished weapons. It’s legal for anyone to manufacture or sell nearly all of the components that go into making a firearm. The exception to the rule is that you can’t sell the frame or receiver. That’s the part that encloses, among other things, the firing pin and the hammer. That part needs a serial number on it and you need an FFL to sell it.
The problem with AR-15 style rifles is that the receiver comes in two pieces. Each, by itself, isn’t sufficient to meet the federal definition of a receiver. Roh was selling pieces that a felon could assemble into a functional weapon with relative ease, but none of the pieces he was dishing out technically qualified as a firearm.