David Olofson is sitting in jail. Like many non-violent citizens who represent no threat to anyone, Olofson is a victim of paper pushers and their endless rule books.
There are several ways for a person to unintentionally commit a felony, but most of them are looked at by prosecutors, judges, and juries as the accidents they are and dealt with accordingly. Such is not always the case however, especially when firearms are involved; for the past 2 years David Olofson has been learning that the hard way. Olofson is a regular guy who happens to be fond of AR15 style sport-utility rifles. He loaned a rifle to a friend. While the friend was shooting it he moved the safety switch to a point beyond the Fire position. The rifle fired a couple of short bursts and jammed. Someone at or near the club called the police to complain about machinegun fire. The police notified the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) and David Olofson was subsequently charged and convicted of illegally transferring a machinegun.
You may not be a weapons collector, as Olofoson was, and as I am. You should still be worried. If the government can arbitrarily make up its intrepretation of its own unconstitutional rules as it goes to the point where the intrepretation doesn’t match the reality of the situation then it isn’t just people who collect guns that are in trouble – we’re all subject to the whims of dishonest bureaucrats who believe they are demigods.
As the years pass I find myself having a harder and harder time respecting the rule of law. That is because the rule of law is increasingly corrupt. Intent used to matter. That is no longer the case.
The cornerstone of this charge is the government’s contention that it doesn’t matter whether a gun fires multiple shots as a result of malfunction or modification because the law defines a machinegun as; “… any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.” While on the witness stand, firearms expert Len Savage asked the Assistant US Attorney prosecuting the case if that would make his grandfather’s old double-gun a machinegun if it malfunctioned and fired both barrels with one pull of the trigger. The AUSA responded by paraphrasing the legal definition of a machinegun with emphasis placed on “any weapon which shoots… more than one shot… by a single function of the trigger.”
What I or any reasonable person would call a weapons malfunction is being used by our federal government to put a non-violent citizen who represented no threat to anyone in a cage and hold him there for a period of years. That is unconscionable.
These people intend to control us all one day, from the moment we are born until the moment we stop breathing. By these people I mean petty bureaucrats. I mean the enemies of freedom. I mean the faceless men and women who, by typing something on a keyboard thousands of miles away are able to turn you into a criminal in the eyes of the law without you even knowing anything just happened. These are the modern evil wizards of our time, and they are plotting to take over the kingdom.
If you care at all about freedom in America, I encourage you to donate whatever you can to David Olofoson.