While automatic weapons are supposed to be heavily regulated, for 15 years it was possible to buy them without doing the required notification of local law officials. In fact, it was possible to buy a military-grade machine gun without so much as the background check faced by ordinary gun owners.
Many local law-enforcement officials refuse to approve the transfer of machine guns, silencers and other heavily regulated weapons to residents in their jurisdictions. As a workaround, gun owners have obtained them through the use of trusts, legal entities that don’t require permission from sheriffs or police chiefs.
The wide-open period of using trusts to bypass laws around automatic weapons began in 2000, when a loophole in the law became obvious. Over the next 12 years, some 40,000 gun trusts were created to hold an unknown number of automatic weapons. Finally, in 2012, the Obama Justice Department moved to correct this problem along with another that was closely associated.
The actions will restrict the reimportation of surplus military-grade weapons solely to museums and will close a loophole that allows people to evade required background checks for owning machine-guns and short-barreled shotguns by registering them with trusts or corporations.
In an earlier story today, I indicated that some 390,000 machine guns were in individual hands in the United States. I made that assumption based on 2006 numbers, since the regulations require most privately owned weapons to have been registered before 1984. However, the trust loophole blew up my assumptions.
As of April, 630,019 machine guns were registered with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, including more than 11,700 in Nevada, up from 456,930 machine guns in 2010.
Even with the new order being issued in 2012, it took until 2016 for ATF to finalize rules for handling gun trusts. And while trustees are now subjected to the same background check as other applicants, it’s still not clear if these new rules subject those who apply under a trust to the same restrictions by local authorities that apply to individuals.
It now appears that Stephen Paddock had at least two automatic weapons among the 19 weapon clutch he brought to his hotel room.
Investigators found 18 to 20 firearms, some fully automatic, in a room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, the law-enforcement official said. That is from where the suspect, identified as 64-year-old Stephen Paddock, allegedly fired upon thousands of concertgoers below. The weapons included AR-15-style and AK-47-style rifles as well as a large cache of ammunition, the official said.
There are several options for how these weapons ended up in his hands.
- They may have been legally registered weapons sold to Paddock in his name, since he appears to have had no disqualifying criminal history prior to this event.
- They may have been semi-automatic weapons which Paddock modified.
- They may have been semi-automatic weapons which were modified before being illegally sold to Paddock.
- They may have been weapons that came to Paddock through the shadowy world of gun trusts, where they could have been invisible to local officials and free from any background checks.
But, in any case, the provisions allowing re-importation of military weapons and sale of these weapons to gun trusts, mean that there are now almost twice as many machine guns circulating in the United States as there were when the supposed cap on their number was imposed in 1984.