"ARES is refusing to hand over the names of their customers, claiming the ATF is wrong and these aren't firearms. Since the ATF gets to make the call on whether they are or aren't,
I'm not sure what leg ARES is going to stand on."
That the ATF knowingly lied to courts/their agents in order to obtain the warrant to raid EP. They can define the end product or its process as a firearm all day long, but they can't lie about it to do so; their has to be some sort of justification (while they aren't required to define what makes an AR lower, when samples are rejected as firearms, they are required to state why they found that to be the case, so corrections can be made before resubmission.) You still have to be informed of the charges against you in this country, and actually have some evidence of committing them, to be prosecuted (let alone raided).
There has been zero, again, zero, evidence from the end user's products of EP that their castings could physically be made as lowers before a plug is inserted. There is mechanical interference in the FCG pocket that would prevent a completed lower from being removed from the mould. The charges are akin to the ATF claiming a billet of bar stock you milled into an 80% was first cast as a complete lower (again, this is physically impossible), then melted down and cast into the 80%. And that somehow the re-casting process does not remove the designation of 'firearm' from the finished article.
Frankly, even if the 80% were once functional firearms (there is no law against personal manufacture, so long as sale is not the purpose), once they are rendered inoperative (and cannot be sold as firearms), they are no longer subject to GCA rules. The fact the EP plug material is bonded to and inseparable from the secondary "lower" layer, makes it about as inoperative as you could ask for (which the ATF did, and received from EP in the first place.) There is no requirement they be utterly 'destroyed' per ATF reqs like machine gun receivers, because in the last 80 years, 'once a receiver, always a receiver' has
never been the ATF's guidance --why now? Because they don't require jigs to make? Neither does a STEN receiver with a template glued/etched into it. And again, there is a very strong legal/technical argument to be made that injecting an identical plastic into a functional reinforced plastic receiver would constitute "destruction" in the first place.
ATF's arbitrary and illogical rules already forced EP to be
very thorough when it came to ensuring their product could not be construed as a firearm. Even the ATF was unable to construe it as a firearm. That is why there are such good arguments against their action here, and such outrage. What we have is a a citizen who asked a police officer if they could use the crosswalk, waited until he said they could, made sure not to deviate from the crosswalk, and was ticketed by a different officer on the other side of the street for J-walking (which is actually defined as crossing an
intersection illegally --hence the "J")
"
"
An 80% STEN receiver --piece of pipe-- is identical in process to an EP lower, just made from a different material. Even if the template is etched, so it is part of the tube like the EP lower, it remains incomplete by ATF standards.
"Part of how the ATF seems to make the so-called "80%" determination is in how much work it takes to finish the receiver. If you don't have to use a jig and can convert the hunk o' polymer into a working lower in one hour, I can certainly see why the ATF would consider that you're closer to the line than they're comfortable with."
The last time ATF tried issuing guidelines like that, it was "8 hours in a furnished machine shop." They were forced to go back on that, since that kind of abuse of regulatory scope would basically cover all tubing, sheet metal, and billet (if CNC or trained mill-workers were present). Once more, the real root of the problem is the ATF's broad discretion on the matter in the first place. Congress has had 80 years to think about how they would like this industry regulated; it's high time the regulations were codified into law (for good or ill) so they could be nailed down.
TCB
--EP changed its process, and thus was no longer abiding by the approved design. What's funny, is that I've never heard of manufacturing processes being a focus of determination letters for non-firearms, just end products (semi conversions of full-auto parts kits are different, and care must be taken to install so called 'denial features' that prevent eventual full auto capability before the firearm is reactivated, which often requires a certain order of manufacturing operations)
