Folks,
Remember the last seen in For Whom the Bell Tolls when a wounded Gary Cooper teams up with a Lewis Gun in a last ditch delaying action to keep the Fascisti at bay so the rest of the guerrilla party can get away?
My thanks to Irregular Amish Tom for bringing my attention first to this and then to this.
Feel free to jump in on the fight to save this piece of history from the gun grinders.
Mike
III
8 comments:
Another story about a long lost, unaccounted for, firearm being found. I wonder how often this happens and no report is made. I also wonder when I'll luck into finding something this great!
Thom
umm, you know Cooper was playing a man fighting for the Abe Lincoln Brigade right? I mean, the American company fighting with the communists.
Their is so much missing in this story that it amounts to the blind leading the blind.
I start with this statement;
Machine Guns are Legal to Own by Citizens in all but a hand full of States in the United States of America.
So long as they are registered under the NFA and have a Tax Stamp.
Is this gun legal to own, this requires looking at the history of it, and how they got it. Is it a war bring back with papers, that can be found, was it registered during one of the amnesties, or registered out right when it was acquired, by who ever acquired it, and gave it to the veterans group. If any of these things are true then it is worth a lot of money and they can dispose of it under the law as they wish.
If it does not have the required papers and no record of it being registered can be found with the ATF, then it can still be donated to a Museum with government approval, or it must be destroyed, but even here there is value in the parts which can be recovered by a Class 2 or 3 dealer.
There is nothing new in this story, and we will hear it more often as the WW 2 generation of guys leave us, lots of stuff came back from all sorts of places that were never registered and are there for not legal to own, pick a war from the last one hundred years and you will find bring backs.
I always say if you want a real handle on the number of machine guns in the United States, take the ATF official number and multiply it by five, and this will give you a good start, Legal No, Here Yes, What ever Grand Pa or Uncle Jo left in the Attic, in the Barn, buried in the basement in that drum of oil, in His Closet or Trunk is still there, are their papers on them, that is another question.
The Black
So, if the NRA/Reagan bunch hadn't saddled us with a prohibition on registering NFA machine guns which weren't registered before 1986, would it have been easier to save this piece of history?
At least it sounds like some caring people at the Sheriff's Department are trying to preserve it. Too bad the chickenshits at the veteran's group dumped it on law enforcement without settling on how it would be preserved first.
well now that sheriff took an oath. He could just keep it. The oath and the gun. Or keep the oath and give the gun back to post.
Somehow I don't think that oath will be kept.
I do not think the 1986 law has anything to do with it. The last chance to reg. this gun was 1968 I believe. It is a stupid law but still the law and it is a shame.
R Stout
didn't the Sgt. York museum get into a similar problem as this not that long ago with a german Maxim, and they ended up keeping it?
bring backs are common items...I had a guy that wanted to sell me a WW2 Belgian Browning High Power with original stock he "appropriated" from an iraqi officer during the first gulf war..I was highly interested. the price he was asking wasn't that bad either, and the sale would have been legal in my state.
then he said "oh and I have these grenades too...."
I told him to go fishing with the grenades..and I wasn't going to talk to him until he had. WAY too much trouble.
Form 5 registration is perfectly legal for LEOs and military. Form 10 would allow an appropriate museum to get it.
I didn't like the attitude of "well, we could register it but then on the other hand we could have it melted two different ways or demil it" as it costs them all of the time to fill out a 4 page ATF form, as A LEO agency, to form 5 or 10 it and keep it as is, original condition. LEO agencies are not charged a registration fee like "non only ones". So it's not like there was anything to worry about. Fill out a four page form, mail it to the BATFE, legally registered. Form 10 it for free if you want to give it to a museum. Problem solved for the cost of a few minutes paperwork.
They made it sound like it was going to be a hideously difficult task, which it isn't for "only ones". They could legally register it with less effort than it takes me to lace up my bots in the morning.
Post a Comment