Tom Owens of Confederate Yankee posts on Pajamas Media about the recent seizure of AirSoft toys in Tacoma by BATFE on the laughable grounds that they could be converted "with minimal effort" to real, functioning machineguns. Here's the money quote from Part 1, in which Owens talks to Stephen Pringle of the UK's Airsoft World, which has to contend not merely with the BATF but with the UK's froth-at-the-mouth gun control in which you need a license to own even an Airsoft toy.
We have seen an AWSS rifle break at the junction between the upper receiver and the barrel, an area subjected to some of the greatest stresses in a real AR-15 as that is where the chamber would be located. The machining required to create a gas-operated rifle from one of these rifles would be extensive and expensive, requiring the replacement or fabrication of several key components — barrel, gas block, gas tube, receiver, bolt carrier, bolt, firing pin, associated springs, etc. Anything less would pose as real a danger to the shooter as to any potential victims. There is also the long-running argument that if someone with criminal intentions has the skills to actually convert an Airsoft gun, they probably have the ability to fabricate a basic firearm from scratch.
Pringle also notes that Airsoft toys occasionally suffer catastrophic failures even at the low compressed-gas pressures they normally operate at, much less the 50,000psi pressures that a real M16 has to safely contain.
The essay is in three parts. Part one discusses the absurdity of the BATFE allegations. Part two discusses what would be necessary for the BATFE's claim to have any grounding in fact, and how far short the Airsoft toys fall of meeting the necessities:
In short, the gunsmith determined that the entire upper receiver would have to be replaced by an upper from a real M4/M6 [sic] type rifle to have a hope of functioning, and a trigger pack from a real M4 would have to undergo extensive modification to even fit. And even when modified to fit, it wouldn’t fire. If this gunsmith is correct, then all the effort to take a $400 toy and $600-plus of real gun parts — plus significant labor from a proficient gunsmith — would result in a thousand-dollar club less functional than the original toy, unable to fire real bullets or Airsoft pellets.
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In addition to the failure-prone lower receivers, the various Airsoft toys (including WE Tech) tested by AirSplat could not mate a real AR upper receiver to a toy lower, due to the placement of the two pins that hold the upper and lower units together. The hole location for the Airsoft pins were not compatible with the real AR upper, and were in fact ingeniously placed in such a location that attempting to drill new holes would result in the receiver metal tearing between the existing holes and new ones, immediately turning the receiver to scrap.
Finally in part three, Owens documents a history of apparently targeted abuse by US Customs specifically against Airsoft Outlet Northwest, while other vendors across the US are allowed to import and sell them without interference, including a Customs agent who forcibly removed the orange plastic muzzle caps from Airsoft toys and then declared that they were illegal because they lacked the orange muzzle caps — a charge echoed by BATFE, despite the fact that according to 15 CFR 1150, Airsoft toys are not required to have the orange muzzle cap anyway. (As an additional detail, an ATF whistleblower site claims that the ATF Special Agent in charge of this fiasco is a former ATF Assistant Director who was demoted and transferred for incompetence, regulation violations, and reprisals against his own employees.)