The Hughes Amendment had an interesting side effect. If you read Chapter 18, 922 (o) it is not a ban per say but demands Government approval for the manufacture and sale of a machine gun after May 19,1986, the date of enactment. There have been rumors floating around for years that certain politicians have been registering machineguns and selling them.



Recently, evidence of this came to light when the BATFE screwed up and confiscated an MG that was listed as a transferable that had been sold to a donor of a political person who once he received the firearm, stopped donating. The gun in question wasn't even in production in the 1980's. It was first produced in the mid 1990's.



Also, if you speak to the BATFE, and ask how many transferable machine guns are on the NFRTR, they will give you a strange answer. The number was fixed in 1986, so it shouldn't be hard to say "there are X amount of transferable MG's on the registry". Instead, this is what you get, "Between 175,000 and 250,000." Or some variation of that spread.



This problem crosses party lines, and even both sides of the gun control debate. In 2005, a BATFE employee let it slip that one of the top gun control advocates currently in Congress procured a machine gun and got BATFE to register it on a form 1 as a transferable. Why? Well, the gun was obtained for about $700. This elected official sold the gun for $18,500 with much of the money going into a severely depleted campaign fund. How do we know about this? Well, this elected official sold the gun and gave a file with the gun that contained the original sale price and a copy of the original form 1 dated to August of 2004. The owner was concerned and contacted BATFE. He then faxed a copy of the documentation to the agency where the employee in question received it.



The firearm in question is a Colt M16A2 manufacturered in 1993.



This seems to be the norm, not the exception. An HK MP5 conversion sold for $650 in 1985. Today, due to the ban, that same gun commands $8500 or more. An M60 belt fed machine gun sold for $1200 or so in 1985. Today, that same gun will get $25,000. If a politician can buy an MG or acquire one for a few hundred, it's a hell of a way to fund a campaign at a 1000% profit or more per item.



In 1989, BATFE published a comment where they stated that there were 130,000 registered transferable machine guns in the NFRTR. In a recent edition of Small Arms Review, the BATFE are quoted commenting that there are over 185,000 transferable MG's in the registry. Given those numbers, it is likely that there are well over 50,000 contraband machine guns in the hands of politicians and citizens in the US many of whom have no clue that they have committed a felony.

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