ATF Not Amused by FFL’s Attempt to Get Rid of Hundreds of Defective Shotguns

By
Dan Zimmerman
-
89
dumpster of guns
Dumpster containing 236 Radikal Arms NK-1 Shotguns (Courtesy ATF)

According to court filings first reported by CourtWatch, on January 19, 2023, an Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, sanitation worker stumbled upon a dumpster with 236 … shotguns in it. The shocking finding led him to call authorities, who found many of the guns were functional, the filings stated.

Investigators wrote that in late 2022, the owner of the store, International Firearm Corporation, Anthony Mussatto, had asked agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms how to destroy the weapons, citing a manufacturer’s defect.

Mussatto was told in the fall by the ATF to slice the faulty guns in three different areas, according to a January 26 search warrant.

Several months later, on same day the agency was contacted by the sanitation worker, ATF agents visited the dumpster and found functional guns, “despite being partially cut,” according to the warrant. …

Now, agents are looking into whether Mussatto improperly disposed of the weapons and whether his staff provided a man two shotguns for free, potentially allowing him to skip a background check, an ATF agent said in a filing.

— Azmi Haroun in Federal agents discovered a dumpster filled with almost 250 working rifles and shotguns in Oklahoma, and allege that a man was given 2 free shotguns to hang on his wall

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89 COMMENTS

  1. If I was that sanitation worker, I’d either have 236 more shotguns or a well stocked gun parts store on flea bay. Or some of both.

    • Back in the early 2000’s, a buddy of mine had to haul some stuff from his job site to the local landfill. He said he pulled in and they proceeded to tell him to drive around back to some corner location and dump the stuff there. He said he drove to said location and was unloading stuff when he noticed something sticking out of the garbage that was dumped there. He grabbed it, wiped it off a bit and then stuck it behind the seat of the truck. Got his item home that night, cleaned it up good, and said he took it to a gunsmith his next day off to have it checked out.

      His find? A perfectly good and functioning Chinese Norinco SKS.

      • @No_Ones_Home Hopefully not stolen or used in a murder case… maybe the gunsmith checked with police before he repaired it.

        • Stolen might be an issue, but unlikely. Unless someone had a reason to run it through NCIC no one would ever know.

          If it was used in a murder that wouldn’t matter either. They probably couldn’t place him where the murder occurred at the time it occurred and he probably doesn’t know the victim or have any motive. You got nuthin’ copper.

          Today with cell phone tracking and other records you can easily show you were at work or home sleeping or at a bar when Bebe and Pooky did that drive by on Lil’ G.

        • with cell phone tracking

          Anyone out to commit a crime and takes their cell phone with them is a complete moron and truly needs to be in the care of state authorities…

        • MB (the real MB) – My friend lives in MT. Doubt it was used in any murders. Stolen? Firearm theft was probably less of a potential then as compared to today. I’ll have to ask my friend if he just had the gunsmith spend 5 minutes looking it over to see that it was functional & safe to shoot or left it with said gunsmith to completely strip it, clean it and put it back together. Also whether my friend told the gunsmith he found it or ‘bought it from a relative’…those aren’t questions I ask.

          Also remember, he came across this in the early 2000’s. If I remember, it was before the 2006 “Assault Weapon Ban” expiration. SKS’s were cheap to buy in the late 80’s and into the 90’s. If I had my guess, someone bought the SKS thinking it would be one or more of the following:
          – accurate (they obviously are not)
          – shoot long range with it (not the best for that)
          – use it for hunting (it’s way heavier than a standard sporting bolt rifle from that time)
          – trick it out with a Tapco stock and higher capacity detachable magazine (AWB ruined that idea or was cost-prohibitive for the person)

          Internet back then wasn’t what it is today. So what does one do with a something they have no use for and tons of the same things are available everywhere for $100 (or less)? Who’s to say non-firearm owning individuals were cleaning out the home of a deceased relative? “You want this? Na, toss it.”

          Lastly, some would say, “It’s an SKS. It belongs in the dump.”

        • “Likely someone just threw the Chicom POS away”

          Some folks did stupidly get rid of their SKSs, thinking they were defective, when in reality they failed to clean out the deep-buried Cosmoline the Chinese used for ultra long-term storage after manufacture. You could only get to it by fully breaking it down and detail cleaning it.

          Are you all butt-hurt that you threw your SKS out? 😉

      • These most likely soon to be x FFL must have been influenced by hunter biden. It would be a cold day in hell before any FFL I know did something that dumb.

        • once had to do that with an MP-40…cut the receiver into 3 parts…then swap what was left for a functional STEN…could have put a papered receiver on it but it would have cost about 500 bucks

    • came across a bunch of cut-up guns in a dumpster once…won’t say where…brand new Glocks, Benillis and an MP-5…there’s probably a story there…

  3. In the military, it wasn’t the senior leaders who trashed our “good deals”, it was ourselves; abusing privileges, and losing them.

    So it is with gun owners at times. We really needed an FFL to not know how to dispose of unusable inventory.

    • Sam,

      IF you are going to go to the trouble to get an FFL, you have to be ‘Caesar’s wife’. You can’t afford ANY screw-ups. That an FFL would be so sloppy sorta screws all of us. I’m sorry he did it, but . . . I’ve never even heard of the store. I can GUARANTEE you I’ve never bought a firearm from them (and never would, based on that report).

      Having said that . . . REPEAL THE NFA!!!!!

      • “That an FFL would be so sloppy sorta screws all of us. ”

        Waiting for the anti-gun mafia to declare that thousands of “crime guns” have been traced to the FFL noted in the article.

  4. In addition to what others have said, it sounds to me like the “teenage employee” was the one committing the violation. He was tasked with cutting up the weapons, and did not do his job. Then he gave a few away to someone.

    Also, why do I never find a dumpster full of guns? I would offer to dispose of all they needed disposed of for no charge! Life just isn’t fair. 😪

    • The owner of the business is still responsible. Teenage employee? Adult supervision is required, we all know that. No matter what business you are in, you are responsible for employee’s actions. You check on the less reliable employees often, and you check on reliable employees less often. No one is so reliable that you don’t check on them at all. If you’re smart, you’ll have someone checking on you as well, hoping they catch any mistakes before the customers do!

  5. Maybe a quick call to the Taliban would have relived him of the disposal issue, it worked for Biden.

    • dacian, the DUNDERHEAD Just because someone says that he/she might kill someone doesn’t mean he/she would go through with it.
      Seems you like to read in between the lines. Do you also read minds?

    • dacian, you’re a goddamned liar.

      From your link:
      “At a news conference Wednesday, police Lt. Leonid Tsap had said there was a ‘high chance’ that officers, along with building security staff and witnesses who grabbed Johnson, had ‘prevented a mass shooting.’ But police backtracked in a statement Thursday. ‘At this point of the investigation, there are no indications that any persons were threatened with a firearm nor have we identified any intent by Johnson to plan a mass shooting incident,’ the statement said.”

      • to Man with no sense

        DEFLECTION. If the man had planned on carrying it out he would have been prevented from doing so. If he can prove his innocents he gets his guns back.

        Now even a Retarded Neanderthal realizes this is a better system than doing nothing and hoping he does not follow through with a threat. Obviously there was a heated confrontation that caused these people to call the police because they were being safe rather than sorry knowing he had an arsenal in his apartment.
        LAPD busts into army veteran’s Hollywood apartment to find firearms
        Dramatic video footage captures the moment they later storm his 18th floor apartment where they found two assault rifles and high-capacity ammunition magazines, all of which are illegal in California. They also found three semiautomatic pistols, a sniper rifle, a shotgun and more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition. Several rifles were pointed from windows toward a nearby park, the LAPD had said. Police didn’t identify the park, but online maps show a dog park next to the apartment complex.

        Nice try Man with no sense but you failed to report all of the information on this nut case.

        • dacian the DUNDERHEAD. It is too bad that you don’t understand that we will not stand by and do nothing when it comes to folks like you trying to take out firearms. For some unGodly reason you don’t understand the meaning of one of the smallest words in the English language. There is a adage that goes something like this. “If in one hand and sh*t in the other.” If Napoleon won the Battle of Waterloo, would we be speaking French?

        • @dacian

          There is no such thing as a law that prevents a person from committing a crime if they choose to do so, not even a ‘red flag’ law.

          Although you clearly intentionally lied in your post, I’d like to point out the obvious to you which you always seem to simply ignore in favor of lying about something. That obvious is, the person you claimed a ‘red flag’ law stopped had already appeared with firearm in the area meaning he could still have pulled the trigger – so obviously a ‘red flag’ law did not prevent that.

          You don’t get it you moron – a law does not prevent someone from committing a crime if they choose to do so, a law will not prevent an in progress crime from happening. There has never been even one law that kept an in progress crime from happening. All the law can do is after the fact. And although in some cases a law may allow some sort of preemption in some aspect for a ‘state of being’ (e.g. a ‘danger’ under ‘red flag law’) even then it is still acting after the fact of ‘discovery’ and did nothing to prevent a criminal act before ‘discovery’ and it still did not prevent any ‘crime’ if no crime had taken place and would not have prevented a crime if such was already enacted.

          Your claim of “California’s Red Flag laws prevent another mass murder.” is not only 100% false, your portrayal of it is also 100% false and not only that but your complete logic is 100% false, and you intentionally lie.

          This is not the ‘minority report’ movie and there is no such thing as a Tom Cruise character pre-crime thing. You and the rest of the democrats and anti-gun live in a fantasy world thinking “a law prevents a mass shooting” – ya don’t get it, laws do not ‘prevent’ in progress crimes, you can’t say “if we had had a law this mass incident would not have happened”- its a 100% false logic, its a small child emotional plea logic that is not reality, its a deception logic, its an emotionally based logic for stupid people that are too dumb to think for them selves.

          But, you lied about it anyway.

        • dacian, you idiot.

          “If the man had planned on carrying it out he would have been prevented from doing so.”

          IF. Speculation, not fact.

          “If he can prove his innocents he gets his guns back.”

          How very Soviet of you. The standard here in the US is “innocent until proven guilty.” Ever hear of it?

          “… you failed to report all of the information on this nut case.”

          You failed to quote part of the very story which you linked. All that I did was fill in the last vital piece of information which puts the lie to the rest of your assumptions.

        • so you’re guilty until proven innocent?

          Pretty popular among the more evolved soshullist and dedicated kommie based countries around the planet that the unmentioned troll holds up as its ideal Utopia…

        • Proving one’s innocent is against all U.S. principles of law. What do you think the Fifth Amendment is all about? Too many people are too ready to dismiss the first Ten Amendments. They are all that stand between us and complete and overpowering authoritarian government.

        • They are all that stand between us and complete and overpowering authoritarian government.

          Until the aforementioned authoritarian government decides that the Constitution is no longer applicable, coming soon to a neighborhood near you… Words on paper are only as strong as the prevailing authority’s will to uphold/enforce them…

    • dacian the demented dips***,

      Umm . . . and that proves WHAT, exactly HOW, dacian the demented????

      Oh, that’s right, it proves not one damn thing. Thanks for playing, you dimwit.

      • Everyone is making a star out of dacian by responding back to him, I quit responding back a long time ago. I did not think there could be a person this dumb on the planet, Except maybe biden and his cronies.

        • “I did not think there could be a person this dumb on the planet, Except maybe biden and his cronies.”

          Hey, I resent being left out.

        • SAMSON, NO ONE is making a “star” out of the DUNDERHEAD. Unfortunatly there are people who believe what this idgit says just because it is in print. The intelligent thing to do is to counter it with the truth.

        • As soon as Dacian inserts his anti gun propaganda , it seems, the whole discussion turns to Dacian and whatever his stupid comments were. After about three comments I usually leave the article. It seems that his arrival derails the conversation. Maybe there are some valuable insights following Dacians remarks but I’m not going to wade through the crap looking for a blossom.

  7. Why didn’t he just offer them for the cost of the background check/4473 and a signed statement that the taker knows they are defective.

    You can get 5 firearms on a 4473, right?

  8. When I was a kid there was a junk yard about 3 miles from where we lived at one point. The owner didn’t mind, it reduced the vermin population and he paid us a quarter for each rat we shot. So sometimes we rode our bikes there to shoot vermin with our .22’s to make a little pocket change as it was sure thing. One day there was an addition of some big boxes of stuff just dumped off, and one of these boxes spit open when it was dumped off the truck. At first we didn’t notice it being intent upon rat hunting but when we wandered over that way after the truck left we saw a Thompson submachine gun laying half in and half out of the broken open box. We checked it out, not loaded and no magazine. It would have been a neat thing to keep but we turned it over to the guy in the junk yard office, he called the cops and gave it to them. It probably made it into some cops personal gun collection.

    • if that had been MY boneyard the coppers never would have got that phone call. I’d figure out what to do with it later. AFTER I had made a through search of the stuff that had fallen off the truck when it was dumped.

  10. So what brand of shotties were they, and also, does this convince anyone else here that bullpups of questionable quality with a chamber right next to your head is a generally BAD idea?

  11. That ain’t nuthin !!
    Check out the GM6 Lynx, literally a 50 bmg pipe bomb with a trigger attached.

  12. -Sigh-
    A California couple finds a stash of 1800’s gold coins, a sanitation worker finds a bunch of shotguns and what do I find?
    I find the spot where my dog peed in the house by stepping in it.

    • relative of mine bought a house with a safe in it he couldn’t open…he didn’t seem concerned even though the previous owner was reputed to be “connected”…having that thing in my house without knowing the contents would have driven me nuts….

    • if it weren’t for Bad Luck, I’d have No Luck at all.
      Thete’s a reason why I don’t go to Vegas or play the Lotto.

  13. Hmmm…a quick check of TTAG showed you reviewed this Sultanate shottie less than 2 years ago. Not surprised they threw away 260🙄

  14. Second China spy balloon found to be transiting Latin America. China says the first one over the U.S. was a ‘meteorological’ balloon that went off course in error, but I wonder what they will say about a second one.

    • Who knows? Both balloons could truly be research or weather balloons. We (the United States) launch research and weather balloons often. Who is to say that China isn’t doing the same thing?

      Of course those balloons could totally be something else as well.

      We (the public) simply do not have enough information to determine what risk, if any, those balloons pose to us.

      • 100% is NOT a “weather balloon”. Where is the Space Force with their phase cannons and water pistols?

        • if it turns out to be nefarious we’ll know what to do next time…and that means dealing with it immediately…

      • if that thing was truly a weather baloon the ChiComs would have sent us a nice note advising us that, for some unknown reasn our weather blimp wndered off course and is floating at 70,000 feet over northern Nebraska. Please ignore it as you excuse our incompetence. I think there are still some versions of the old U 2 in inventory. I’d have deployed one or two and gone up for a looksee close up.. and a detailed monitoring or the craft.
        I trust those guys about as far as I can toss one of the heaviest ones. And I got a bad throwing arm and two bum shoulders.

  15. I was kinda hoping they got rid of them by converting them into novelty prank shotguns that fired spring-loaded snakes or something.

    • Alec B wants one, preferably painted orange.

      Gonna beat his kids at ‘Nerf Wars’ once and for all!

  16. Time to end the ATF. The federal entity on the Potomac has no right to be involved with guns or toenail clippers or anything else that is manufactured here in the United STATES of America.

    • “no right to be involved with guns or toenail clippers or anything else that is manufactured here in the United STATES of America“

      But these guns were not manufactured in the USA, so no problem.

      • MINOR Miner49er Have you ever bothered to READ the 2nd Amendment, the Heller, McDonald and the Bruen decisions? That language is pretty clear. Even a Leftist wingnut should be able to comprehend.

      • DIMwit….

        the items named (relating to which BATFE have no business meddling) in their order of appearance are:
        guns toenail clippers anything else that is manufactured here in the US……

        the later modifiers do not apply to either of the first two items.

  17. “despite being partially cut,”

    well, the ATF did tell him to do that if that “partially cut” is in 3 places.
    😁

  20. I believe this as much as I believe anything Miner and Dacian post.

    But it’s funny and those losers don’t see the irony in the sarcasm of it.

    Still functional, even after following the ATF’s directions, and somehow they are not to blame. I think the store owner and their employees followed what the ATF said, right? So who’s at fault?

    I mean, it’s not like it was that serious, right? If they “visited the dumpster several months later”.

    lmfao.

    • people “find” guns all the time…especially demolition crews…remember one of the guys showing me a nice vintage S&W .45 that he found inside a wall…

  21. If you are wondering what kind of guns these are it’s right under the picture. “236 Radikal Arms NK-1 Shotguns”. It is also a link to a review right here on TTAG.

  22. why didn’t they wait for a gun buy back somewhere. Dump the defective guns, make a few bucks. or Foot Locker giftcards

    • nor that anyone else knows of, for that matter. And when it comes to those louts I have n sense of humour……..

    • that’s the enforcement branch…worked alongside these guys for 10 years…never once saw one smile…

  26. 1st let me adjust my tinfoil hat. Thats better. I’m betting that there is a whole pile of cow pies about this story that we will never know. I’ll also bet that a bunch of alphabet Gov. agencies are involved behind the curtain. Fast and Furious anyone?

  28. Is the ATF ever amused?
    I thought that much like the State Patrol, employment requires the surgical insertion of a nightstick up your keister.

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