Dolk[/quote]
First off quoting several people who were there when WGA lost their license. This was at a time when the ATF was upgrading their type of receiver destroying and they upgraded to flame cut receivers.
They were in the process of going around and getting in touch with dealers who had sold the kits. WGA lost their license because of their reaction to the agents wanting the information of who they had sold these kits too. Now in defense of Burns we will never know whether he refused to give then this information to protect the peoples privacy of who he sold them to or if he actually didn't have the information. Remember now these were treated as non-weapons and Burns may have not had that information. Whatever he removed the agents from his store and the way he did it was not nice. There was physical interaction and language that was not meant to be heard in front of the ladies present. They went out side for awhile and when they came back in they gave him an ultimatum of either voluntarily shut your store and give us your license or we will padlock this place and you may never see the contents again. He called his lawyer who told him to shut his big mouth and give them the licenses and shut the store. The outcome was he lost his license and was told to never have any connection with the guns again. His wife was allowed by the ATF to begin selling again about a year later as it was their living and they could not be denied that ability by federal law.
I always liked Mr Burns but recognized the fact that he was a "NewYorker" crude and rude and brash to the ninth degree. I can not count the times he hung up on me shouting curse words as he did. I would just call back and most times he had calmed down and was nice as pie listening to what I wanted. I too had an occasion to run a fowl of the ATF rules on sub gun kits in this time period. I bought a sub gun kit at Knob Creek and later sold it without doing much of anything at the time to it. I started getting calls to call the ATF Baltimore and Wilmington office. Well when I got home from work they were always closed so finally one night I connected with them. They were calling in relation to the kit I had and if it was saw cut as I remember it was. I told them I had sold it at a gun show and I had no idea who the guy who bought it was or where he lived. They would not accept my answer and began to tell me I was supposed to put that on my logbook and know who I sold it to and threaten visits at the work place. I repeated over and over to them that this was considered a non-gun and therefore never was entered into the logbook. My first thought about this was first how did they know I bought the thing (I paid cash) and why were they bothering me in the first place? This is one of JYD's references to grey areas I guess. I dropped my licenses not long or maybe even about that time. I ended the calls by telling a buddy lawyer what was going on and he sent them a certified letter of contact. They often badgered my buddies with shops for information that was protected by privacy laws back then and now is subject to National Security invasion of privacy laws. So stuff you want to be kept between you and your FFL are often surrendered to ATF agents then and especially now. You would not believe the power of an agent that tells a gun shop owner we are going to shut you down if you don't tell us this information.
Burns would doubtlessly still have his license today if he had reacted in a more civilized way to the agents and tried to explain patiently where he was coming from but that was not his way and he paid the price I guess. So take it anyway you want he may have actually been protecting our privacy by refusing to give the agents the information they wanted but knowing him I really doubt that. The agents were trying to back enforce a new rule which he was not going to cooperate with and his brash and crude nature cost him. My thoughts are they were not right in trying to get the information and Mr Burns was just his normal hard to deal with self. So you see he sold nothing wrong he just refused to cooperate with a force of government which unfortunately knows no apparent bounds of control. I personally doubt he was protecting us as his principles were just not that high to begin with. Take it as you may but I hope that clears the air of what actually happened! Bill
around 5 or 10 above this morning here.
