Being kind of new to learning about guns, all I will say about government interpretations about 'wording' is that the FAA can consider a pilot's license to be "altered" if it is encased in laminated plastic, even though the paper license itself is not altered.
With the federal government, there are often no appeals with any 'teeth' at all, and many interpretations are used to justify their grossly over-bloated bureaucracies and certain careerist motivations.
If the ATF has any staff who are as arrogant and arbitrarily vindictive as some elements within the FAA Medical and Certification Branch (happened to a friend), you could not pay me $50,000 to shoot a gun with such an alteration. Read up on what happened to expert Bob Hoover several years ago after a typical airshow (loop, then a roll with both engines shutdown/'feathered').
Some of them would have fit into Stalin's NKVD really well.