There’s much consternation over the proposed rule changes that will expand the CLEO sign-off requirement to cover every single person listed as a member of a gun trust, and the NFATCA is taking the brunt of the blame. They’ve been seen as “giving away” the gun trust to the ATF, selling gun owners down the river. And while it certainly looks bad for the NFATCA, that’s not how they see things. In their opinion, the fault for the ATF coming down hard on the NFA trust lies with the People of the Gun and their big yaps . . .
From one of the board members:
We were aware that the Trust thing was going to blow up on the NFA community and we let people know. We tried to negotiate but there were a lot of people on the Internet publicly explaining how to open an NFA Trust and “Wink Wink” there were no background checks and you could put all your friends in the trust and they could all get access to the guns. No one could ever know who was in the trust “Wink Wink.” We all saw the posts, anyone who knew how the world works, cringed. Once again the braggarts posting their questionable behavior had screwed the NFA Community.
We offered that the massive increase in NFA transfers to trusts was due to the antiquated CLEO provision and it being a pain to get a signature at best, and de facto gun control in many areas at worst. Our suggestion was remove CLEO and it would remove the motivation of a large portion of the Trust applicants’ need to use a trust and put them through simple ownership process and transfer using a modern method.
They were going to hammer the Trusts etc anyway with elimination or 100% background checks, the fact is we were good on this until the idiots who were abusing it so that their felon friends could get access to NFA firearms in a trust trumpeted it all over the place and made their abuse of the system not just an insider thing for them, but told every LE and ATF person in the country what they were doing. Don’t blame the NFATCA, blame the loudmouths and abusers who made this an issue.
Good thing I never gave these progressive Marxists a single dime of my money, nor will I ever!
The very least I can do is cancel my subscription to Small Arms Review, and have.
Any idea how this will impact, if at all, existing gun trusts and the nfa items they own?
I actually have to agree with this assessment. Similar thing happened when steel core 7.62×39 got banned because people made a big deal out of AK pistols.
I specialize in selling parts for 5.45×39 AK-47 and AR-15 pistols. LOL
I don’t have any felon friends. However, I do have friends, and giving one of them access to my NFA items (and me to his) without potentially breaking some arcane construction of the “possession” rules is what I like about trusts. Well, that and my county has “no sign” CLEO.
I can appreciate what this unnamed board member is saying, but at the same time, don’t blame me because you fucked up. If the ATF used your own words against you, that signals to me that the documents you submitted were not properly vetted for language that could be used against you. That seems like a “you” problem, not a “me” problem. You made the mistake of believing the ATF/DOJ was acting in good faith, and you made the mistake of giving them the opportunity to use your own words against you.
To the extent that gun-friendly laws have managed to fly under the radar, I feel the same way about braying triumphantly about how we’re managing to hoodwink the antigun forces. In California 80 percent receivers and finishing parties have been happening QUIETLY for years, but thanks to the spate of recent online talk about them, the notoriously antigun legislature is looking to close this “loophole.”
Loose lips sink ships, guys.
I’d like to see these so called posts trumpeting the supposed access of restricted firearms to felons and the ensuing arrests for illegally providing firearms to felons which would certainly have occurred had these events actually transpired in significant numbers.
Otherwise I am going to have to call shennanigans on NFATCA for trying to shift the blame to us mortals. These guys sound more like career politicians everytime I read about them.
I was thinking the exact same thing. It is illegal for a felon to have a firearm in their hands regardless of whether a trust owns and provided the firearm or the felon found it in a field. Further, it is illegal as far as I know for anyone to knowingly provide a firearm to a prohibited person.
And I, for one, have never heard anyone claim to provide a trust owned firearm to a felon. I think the NFATCA explanation is complete kaka.
I agree. I’d also like to know where all these supposedly full auto “weapons of war” are coming from too. Last I checked, the GCA of 86 made the manufacture of NEW FA guns for the civilian market illegal.
For the record, I’d like to see the source where this unnamed board member made these statements. I’m not a fan of excoriating people without the proper backup.
Agreed, I want to know which person is quoted as saying these words. Quote the source please.
I would like to see proof that felons or other prohibited persons have been using NFA trusts to gain access to firearms.
Such a simple thing, no? If that’s the basis for new rule-making, there should be ample proof of the phenomenon to justify the new rules.
I have serious doubts that this is actually a something which can be proven, much less something which happens at a significant rate.
The only instance I have heard of a felon using a trust was the California ex cop cop killer Dorner using a trust in Arizona to get suppressors.
Was he a felon at the time of purchase or receipt? Or only after his rampage?
The whole comment strikes me as a CYA/blame someone else for your disastrous screw-up. It has no evidence or sources at all. Maybe it’s true, but I need more than this.
What an a-hole. So apparently there are a large number of people creating gun trust so they could give access to their extremely expensive NFA items to felons and then bragging about it, in turn making themselves a felon? /SARC OFF W-T-F??? Why set up the trust then? Giving access to guns to felons is already a crime, a trust doesn’t make it legal!! Sometimes, it amazes me how stupid people are to believe this BS. I set up my trust to make the infringing process of aquiring NFA toys less painful. My wife and kids are on my trust, if any one of them became ineligible to possess a firearm they would immediately be removed from the trust.
100% correct!!!
The fact that people are blowing the trust issue out of proportion is scary. If these “felons” so deemed to have these items, a dremel and about 90 seconds of time could skirt all trust/NFA laws altogether.
The reality of matters is that the opposition considers the 2nd Amendment itself to be a giant loophole in need of implied “correction”.I’m certain Obama has held meetings titled ,in effect,”How can I screw those pesky gun owners today.”
“the fact is we were good on this until the idiots who were abusing it so that their felon friends could get access to NFA firearms”
Ok “NFATCA Board Member” where are the all the crimes committed by these felons with their “abusive” access to NFA firearms. Hell I’ll settle for ANY crimes committed by registered NFA items by the people that they were individually registered to or people on a trust they were registered to…..please, enlighten me. And if you can provide any names, where are the charges and convictions for the crimes.
You guys thought you were helping and the other side was above board, that’s on you. If you didn’t see that if things went against you that you would get heat then you should pack it up and call it a day because you are not ready for the harsh reality of the world we currently live in.
I have a hard time believing that this rule change happened solely on account of NFATCA’s efforts to eliminate CLEO sign-off. In the wake of Obama’s failure to push Congress into extended background checks and the publicity of Dorner’s rampage (and subsequent media focus on NFA trusts), this was going to happen one way or another (IMHO). The administration needed to look like it was doing something and these rule changes give Obama a small amount of political cover.
I think many of the comments here are spot on, in that they (NFATCA) shouldn’t be surprised with being used after poking the bear. However, I do not think they’re culpable for the rule change (assuming it goes through) and the infighting/finger pointing wastes resources.
“…the infighting/finger pointing wastes resources.”
That may be the whole point of the exercise.
Read what the ATF posted and determine for yourself if NFATCA is to blame.
I’ve read through it in it’s entirety. IMHO, I find it likely that these changes would have been enacted regardless of the petition that NFATCA filed (an attempt to remove CLEO sign off). Regardless, I also agree with everyone here that the petition itself was a bad idea. The same goes for everyone writing in to the ATF looking for a ruling on some of the grey areas of the NFA. Each time, collectors run the risk of the ATF prohibiting yet another configuration they previously didn’t care/know about.
Frankly, this “excuse” from someone at NFATCA is just straight up ridiculous. Giving an NFA item from a trust to a felon or denied person, is still a felony. Getting caught with said item, is just as bad. There is no legal recourse, no rationalization, no justification. Simply put, this “statement” from someone at NFATCA is an attempt to cover their own backsides with this hogwash. The issue with the trusts getting scrutiny starts and stops at their door, no where else. I want to know which A-hole made this statement, which board member, because it’s a load of hooey (technical term).
This is the conversation overheard down in the slave quarters where one slave is angry wiith the other because he pissed off the master and now the master is taking it out on every one? They got their Thirteenth Ammendment , we’ve always had our Second but it needs to be refreshed.
Let’s fix this
I blame the gun grabbers. They are the ones who need to *fix* the loopholes in laws that we don’t even need to have. Sure, the statist control freaks visit our sites. Although they are stupid, ignorant, and dishonest, even they can read a “How To File an NFA Trust” article.
I don’t know whose “fault” this is but generally:
Freedom of speech. You have the right to exercise it any way you want, but that doesn’t mean that your excercise is inoculated from inspiring others to bring the axe down on you and your cause. If speech couldn’t cause things to happen then it wouldn’t need to be protected.
As a rule, it’s really dumb tactics to advertise favorable loopholes in the system before you gain enough control over the system to protect them from being closed.
-D
yeah but its worse than that. gun people include law enforcement and law enforcement friends is a two edged sword. half want to protect gun rights and the other half want them restricted. unfortunately so many of the same people that advertise to gun people also advertise to law enforcement so it doesn’t matter how quiet we keep things, it always gets out and they’ll keep chasing us down because thats the nature of the beast.
instead of “advertise” I should have used the word “flaunt”. That’s more accurate to the particular behavior I have in mind.
How many incidents of a felon gaining access to a firearm and using it to commit a crime due to a trust have there been?
Nope. Don’t buy it. The ATF doesn’t need to read internet message boards to know how their rules work and exactly who and what NFA stuff people are buying. If there were so many “felon friends” using trusts to get machine guns, the streets of Chicago would be lit up brighter than a Christmas tree. There were what, 2 instances of prohibited persons getting NFA stuff via trust that the ATF knew about? That wasn’t the issue. I don’t know if NFATCA had ulterior motives on behalf of the industry (their mission statement does not include Joe suppressor owner like me). Or if the ATF was ok with allocating resources for 1,000 trust applications a year, but not 30,000. Or if this is just the anti-gun rights administration sticking it to gun owners. Or maybe all three. But whoever’s to blame, I think the CLEO sign off for everyone is coming. Maybe not soon, and I suspect with full grandfathering. Now is the time to start the hard work of changing the law. Get your US Reps and Senators to work on repealing or gutting the National Firearms Act. Get state reps to create laws mandating CLEO sign offs in a timely manner.
I agree with Tom. All of this stuff stems from the NFA, which clearly infringes on the RKBA. At some point, you have to start working to overturn the bad precedent rather than trying to find ways around it or ways to accommodate it.
I for one welcome this turn of events. The sooner it happend the sooner we can get the NFA struck down on 2nd A grounds.
I don’t see the NFA getting overturned by SCOTUS. I think they’d prefer to leave deciding which weapons are and aren’t restricted to Congress. That said, political wars are fought and won in the precincts. Start by working on getting pro-rights Sheriffs elected. Sometimes those elections are won by a few hundred votes. When women start seeing that their husbands and children can protect their hearing with suppressors while deer hunting, but a silly Sheriff and Washington regulations prevent that choice, then it’s the beginning of the end of NFA.
“The fact is we were good on this until the idiots who were abusing it so that their felon friends could get access to NFA firearms in a trust…”
– show me where this happened.
The NFATCA sold out. End of story.
Absolutely agree. I emailed NFATCA after David Codrea broke this story and they said much to the same effect as what’s above. More specifically, they said that David had his version of the story and they had theirs and that David wasn’t in full possession of the facts. I think that NFATCA got bitten (along with the rest of us) when they tried to make an “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” deal for their members in non-CLEO friendly climates with the ATF without fully realizing that ATF under Obama is all take and no give. They handed this one to the ATF and now we’re all going to feel the brunt of their backroom dealings…
Possession of a firearm by a felon is already illegal. Adding a felon to a gun trust does not a legal gun owner make. It is absurd to think that someone who has gone through the process of setting up a gun trust and acquiring an NFA item would put themselves and their property at risk by adding a felon as a trustee. A criminal has no need for a gun trust, they simply can get whatever they want, however they want.
I had never heard of the NFATCA until reading these blogs. Based on the board member quote here, they impress me as an unprofessional bunch.
My sheriff wouldn’t sign off on a form 4 properly so I had a trust drawn up. LOL
There are far too many in our community who think that the way to defeat the “enemy” is to roll over and show him you are no threat.
This results in the leadership of organizations like NFATCA being critical of those actually FOLLOWING THE LAW, since it “looks bad” … or someone at a party was mean to them about it, or any excuse imaginable for not simply standing up for what is good, right and legal.
History shows that this never works. If you roll over an play dead, the opposition has no encouragement to do anything but bury you.
Exactly! It isn’t 1934 anymore. We know there is no negotiating with the enemy, no demands that we can yield to, no category of gun owners that we can throw under the bus to gain permanent peace for the rest of us. Every time we give up, all we do is give them a leg up in the next fight.
When our side compromised on the original NFA (The government left pistol and revolver owners alone, and focused on non traditional guns like machine guns), it took four years for them to propose extending it to all guns. We are fighting for the right to own guns here.
Their implication is, of course, that gun control works. But this makes sense, as if the NFA was eliminated as it should be, then they’d all be out of jobs.
I’ll help them on their way. I had been considering joining, thinking they’d help reduce headaches, but if they’re so ready to blame people for helping others get around paperwork headaches to get safety devices and shorter guns (THE HORROR), they can suck eggs.
I wonder who specifically they are referring to? I mean, I don’t think telling people how to set up a trust is implying that they should game the system to provide felons with weapons. Is this something Adam Kokesh and company ever talked about?
“They were going to hammer the Trusts etc anyway with elimination or 100% background checks, the fact is we were good on this until the idiots who were abusing it so that their felon friends could get access to NFA firearms in a trust trumpeted it all over the place and made their abuse of the system not just an insider thing for them, but told every LE and ATF person in the country what they were doing. Don’t blame the NFATCA, blame the loudmouths and abusers who made this an issue.”
CITATION PLEASE, you back-stabbing short-sighted shit for brains mother fvcker. My plan for a can is fvcked now because of you, with no sheriff of CLEO that will sign in my area! FOAD you little c0ck sucking fvck hole!
So blame your own supporters and constituents when the tide turns…. I see how it goes. FOAD.
It’s not “abuse of the system” when the laws are stupid and the behavior is legal. Make stupid laws, get stupid results. The answer is to repeal the NFA and GCA. We need to play start that campaign going.
A felon in possession of a firearm is still a felon in posession, wether he is a trustee or not. The trust doesnt magically make it legal, and I just had to submit all my trust paperwork a few weeks ago. All the names and SSN’s are there in the trust paperwork, If they are simply rubber stamping the paperwork, and not doing a background check, then why the hell does it take six to eight months to process? I would think they would at least run the folks listed in the trust for felonies. If I fudge the names or numbers, then the felon isnt actually listed in the trust and isnt covered anyway. So its a moot point. Circular argument with no loopholes, use the information provided to run the trustees and make sure theyre not felons. They check to make sure theyre all of age right? Thats why you have to submit the trust paperwork. To make sure all the trustees are legally allowed to have access to trust property. Theyre making up rules to cover problems that shouldnt exist in the first place.
Rule one of fight club do not talk about fight club. Rule two of fight club, do not talk about fight club. They are correct. This site is to blame just as much as anyone else who talked openly about the trust.
You’re delusional. The trust method was not in any way, shape, or form a secret. The only possible way that you could claim “this site (or anyone else) is to blame” is if you could point to an example of where someone said, “Here’s how to get your felonious friends access to NFA items.” Besides the obvious estate planning uses, the trust method was first and foremost simply a way to get around capricious CLEOs who refused to sign simply because they are anti-gun.
Someone somewhere within the group made money off of this,or had to make a deal because they were caught with committing some kind of no no.So they sell everyone else down the river to save their own skins.Be prepared and ready.Keep your powder dry.
Even ignoring needing a jackass to sign off on it, my motivation for wanting a trust is to avoid the fingerprints and pictures that treat NFA owners like sex offenders. I have no problem with a background check, it’s the rest of it that turns me off.
I’m a torofecundian. I can spot bullshit a mile away. And the is some stinky bullshit.
Gutless too. The protected class at NFATCA thought they had it all sewn up. They
get to keep their expensive toy collections, while the dregs, us, were left twisting in
the wind trying to get a CLEO sign-off that they knew anyone not a serious collector,
would ever get. But the duplicitous bastards in the Obama admin aren’t playing fair,
or are reneging on the carve-out, waiver, or exemption they negotiated with the ATF
and the DoJ, over NFA rule changes. But let’s get to the biggest pile of bullshit here.
This is the oldest liberal bullshit con-job ever. Accuse the opposition of supporting
whatever claim you are fighting for, for your own purposes, most of which, in and of
themselves, are wholly political in nature. This is, any means to an end, liberalism.
As anyone familiar with this narrative can tell you, to liberals, an accusation has the
weight of being true, until it is proven otherwise. We’re left trying to prove a negative.
Wrong! As many astute commenters have said, if much is being claimed, then much
must be proven. Can anyone tell me why someone would want to be an accessory
to whatever crime a felon might commit, using a gun provided by their NFA trust?
This is so stupid, it makes cosigning a loan for a drug addict sound like a good idea.
The NFATCA are now showing their penance by throwing us under the Obama NFA
bus to nowhere. We’re at that moment, when we’re finding out who our friends are.
Cherchez la nom. Put up, or STF up.
The president of the NFATCA is at least a “very special friend of the ATF”. Some people have suggested that in fact he’s a confidentiality informer for the ATF. Other senior members of the NFATCA also appear to have very interesting relationships with the ATF. Supsicous people might kind of wonder who wrote that proposal the NFATCA presented. And you will note that the NFATCA still hasn’t released their original proposal.
http://www.examiner.com/article/why-did-nfatca-president-forward-claimant-email-about-legal-case-to-atf
http://sipseystreetirregulars.blogspot.com/2010/11/true-story-of-life-of-ra-bear-inception.html
Oh, and the elves at the NFATCA seem to have been busy deleting some of the more incriminating posts on their board.
I can kind of see the authors point. We can be our own worst enemy sometimes. Kind of like after september 11. All these news people saying thank god they didnt attack this place, all you would have to do was this one little thing and millions would die. Why are we pointing out how to destroy ourselves. That doesnt mean that they didnt see it coming and did nothing to cut it off. It would be better to just keep things on the downlow and work from the shadows.
My trust specifically states that prohibited persons are banned from using assets of the trust. I bet a lot of others do also.
I’m obviously way behind on this but I’m here now so….
How about you let the law handle the lawbreakers instead of imposing more BS government regulations on the law abiding folks? Sounds like a bunch of liberal hacks to me.
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