MNGunTalk.com

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.”

The definition of receiver under the ATF regulations requires four component: a “housing for the hammer, bolt or breechblock, and firing mechanism, and which is usually threaded at its forward portion to receive the barrel.” (27 C.F.R. § 478.11; emphasis supplied.) The evidence at trial was uncontroverted that a finished AR-15 receiver does not contain a bolt or breechblock and is not threaded to receive the barrel. (E.g., Tr. Feb. 21, 2018, pp. 111-13 (Jackson); Tr. Feb. 24, 2018, pp. 65-67 (Hoffman).) Indeed, the Government concedes the point in its opposition. (Opposition, p. 23.) The plain conclusion is that the finished receiver is not a firearm.

The Government’s theory of conviction rests on proposition that the AFT had “classified” finished receivers as firearms, notwithstanding the conflict with the definition published by the ATF in its regulations. Examination of Government expert Daniel Hoffman revealed that there is no “objective classification scheme or system in place.” (Tr. Feb. 24, 2018, p. 44.) ATF personnel simply make a determination in response to individual inquiries. (Id.) Usually, there is no consultation with ATF counsel. (Id., p. 50.) More significant for present purposes is that there is no way for the public to learn the particulars of the classification system. (Id., pp. 44-45, 55.) The only way a person can learn of an AFT classification is to make direct contact with the AFT. (Id., pp. 48-49, 55-56.)

It is clear that the ATF’s classification of articles as firearm does not comply with the rule making process which brought into effect the public
definition for firearm found in Section 478.11. The rule making process under Administrative Procedures Act, 5 U.S.C. § 551, requires promulgation of a rule and eventual publication of the rule in the Federal Register. 5 U.S.C. § 552(a).

Lumpy wrote:What's stopping them from "defining" any damn thing they want as an illegal weapon?

In United States v. Jiminez, 191 F. Supp. 3d 1038, 1045 (N.D. Cal. 2016), the court found that the definition of receiver in a parallel provision of the regulations, 27 C.F.R. §479.11, was unconstitutionally vague. Just as here, the court focused on the language of the regulation:

Tellingly, the Government makes no effort to parse the statutes or the CFR for proof of notice or clear standards. In effect, it concedes that the plain language of the law does not answer the vagueness challenge. This is tantamount to acknowledging that even if Jimenez had read the rules and regulations, he could not have known that the lower receiver of the AR-15 would be covered by them. That alone is a strong blow against the Government's position.