First there is a significant difference between the law and a regulation. Beuracrats, of which the ATF and all other federal agencies are, can create and change regulations, they do not have the authority to change law. Further, if the law and regulation isn’t written down they don’t have any existence. In short, the opinions and interpretations of one or more of these beuracrats have no meaning until they are formalized and in writing. Further, it is standard policy to warn someone who is in good faith attempting to obey the law and regulations as written. This is precisely what happended with the 80% issue. Some of these beureucrats got a bee in their bonnet that some machine shops were essentially doing all of the work for some of their clients; however, proving that in court (and potentially risking their ability to regulate it at all) was something they weren’t going to pursue. So they have made this new ‘inpretation’ that you must own the equipment yourself in order to do such work. The reason they have not attempted to simply say individuals can’t do this work at all is because Congress has passed a law saying we do have that right. As I said, despite their claims that regulations have the same weight as law, beuracrats do not have the authority to pass laws. A regulatory violation is rarely a felony, and even then there is the issue of INTENT, which is required for a crime to be in place. This is why regulatory violations are usually handled with written warnings on the initial offense. It is only in the extreme cases, particularly those with actual violations of the law where charges or even fines are levied.
Of course all of the above is based upon an intent to actually follow both the law and the regulation AS WRITTEN. As long as our interpretation is reasonable, which I think is a given, considering that any application. at the space is going to be subject to review by multiple members we are safe. Frankly, I think this thread is wasting time until the committee is formed and its first meeting where we can begin to hammer out the scope of the committee and any rules it needs to establish. There are some reasonably clear cut things we can agree on.
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You can’t perform any manufacturing operations. So if the item isn’t current a functioning gun, you can’t make it one. Of course if it was a functioning gun but something has broken, then you can repair and/or replace the broken item
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You can perform many common ‘gunsmithing’ operations yourself. Things like moungting a scope, replacing trigger, etc… on any weapon you own legally.
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You must be the legal owner of any of the guns or gun parts you work on.
For things like classes, the issue is much less clear, and those should be handled on a case by case basis, with the responsibility for determining the legality being the responsibility of the people who want to give the class. I would suggest that we have the committee (or a sub-committee) be responsible for approving the curriculum and law/regulation research for any such class or any other activity that is not generally understood to be legal.
Finally, we really need to be careful when attempting to regulate our members. We are not a commercial entity such as Tech shop, where we have the resources to actually monitor members and ensure compliance. We are a co-operative of volunteers. As such, we have a degree of immunity from legal responsibility for the action of a member, as long as we have written policies that our members must comply with the law. The more we try to regulate individual actions the more we can be held accountable for when we fail. And we WILL fail in such and attempt because we do not have, nor can we, the resources to perform such monitoring.
