Heres an interesting one. A man was arrested on illegal manufacturing charges but the Judge and ATF let him walk because it would appear they do not want to change the law defining the AR15s lower receiver as the firearm even though it doesn’t fit the definition.
CNN Reports that for more than a year, Joseph Roh illegally manufactured AR-15-style rifles in a warehouse south of Los Angeles.
But five years after raiding his business and indicting him, federal authorities quietly cut a deal with Roh earlier this year and agreed to drop the charges.
Why?
The judge in the case had issued a tentative order that, in the eyes of prosecutors, threatened to upend the decades-old Gun Control Act and “seriously undermine the ATF’s ability to trace and regulate firearms nationwide.”
Federal authorities preferred to let Roh go free rather than have the ruling become final and potentially create case law that could have a crippling effect on the enforcement of gun laws, several sources familiar with the matter told CNN.
Further more, Nicolaysen, defense attorney, argued that the definition of a receiver under the relevant federal code differed in various ways from the AR-15 component Roh was accused of manufacturing.
Under the US Code of Federal Regulations, a firearm frame or receiver is defined as: “That part of a firearm which provides housing for the hammer, bolt or breechblock, and firing mechanism, and which is usually threaded at its forward portion to receive the barrel.”
The lower receiver in Roh’s case does not have a bolt or breechblock and is not threaded to receive the barrel, Nicolaysen noted.
He called the decision to classify it as a firearm nonetheless, the result of “secret, in-house decision-making…
