Couple purchased government surplus storage containers but turned out they... weren't empty

I wouldn’t have said a thing.

Whoops, Australia is a Targeted Country but they forgot to include Tasmania.

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To be fair, Tasmania is overrun with Turbo Chooks.

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Clearly we need to ban the sale and possession of surplus storage containers, lest this happen again.

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They aren’t legal anywhere. Full autos post 1986 can never be transferable, and these will remain government property until the government releases them somehow. Which won’t happen.

Maybe, maybe not. I can easily imagine how this could happen, having some experience with the relevant parts of our government. The stories I could tell, except I can’t. Sometimes I’m amazed that things aren’t much worse than they are.

Yeah, I hope I’m never in such a position but if I were, I would NOT do what they did. I would arrange to surrender them through an attorney, who would, I assume, make some agreement that there would be no prosecution and no search warrants, or a very carefully defined scope of search warrants, and no SWAT teams. Which is awful because that’s a bunch of money just gone due to some screw up in the government.

Haha, best comment.

They really should, but there’s no way that would happen, because whose line of funding would cover that? No one.

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It’s been commented on a handful of times, so it might be worth noting that the author of the original article is working backward from a weird inferred definition of ‘fully automatic’ to be a bit sensational.

No M16A2 is fully automatic. They tried a full auto setting with the old versions during the Vietnam war and found it to be a huge waste of ammunition. The closest you can get is the three-round burst mode, selectable by a thumb switch on all rifles. The ATF has codified ‘AR-15-style weapons’ that fire more than one round per trigger pull as technically machine guns for the purpose of closing a legislative loophole. This would make an M16A2 in civilian hands a machine gun definitionally but not remotely a fully automatic weapon. The reporter is conflating ‘legally called a machine gun when a certain configuration of parts are used by a civilian’ with ‘machine guns in movies are full auto’. /ramble

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Why is this even relevant to the fact that someone “forgot” these weapons and the container was then sold as empty? If they were tactical, military grade peashooters the same mistake was made. The exact nature of the guns is the least important part of the story.

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Because of multiple comments upthread regarding the legality of fully-automatic weapons, which the ones found in the crate were not. Just trimming some fat off of the discussion.

Whistle blower law.

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Somehow it’s never too early to start talking about the specific mechanical intricacies of guns, but it’s always too early to start talking about reforming gun laws. Go figure. :woman_shrugging:t2:

This incident exposes, at best, gross negligence at SO many levels. That in the least nefarious scenario, it happened simply because along the entire process and chain of custody, not one person bothered to check the containers, is pretty scary. I wonder if we’ll find out how many containers had stuff in them…

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Wow very interesting! I didn’t think of that and I don’t know anything about it, other than, “it exists”, but yeah that does sound like a possible maybe. They really should. Small businesses like this can’t afford to deal with this nonsense.

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Well, would you look at that, you’re right!

Aidy Bryant Snl GIF by Saturday Night Live

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The BATFE (aka the Jack booted Thugs) has no sense of humor. They can (and have) charged people for having string (it’s feasible that you could use it to make a fully automatic firearm), charged people for possession of a non-papered fully automatic when it was just a malfunctioning semi-auto firearm to begin with, and other things that Joe Average would say ‘that’s not a machine gun!’.

@Fefelo and @Peter_Willard1 beat me to the other points I was going to make.

That won’t make a lick of difference to the BATFE; These were government devices in the hands of civilians, and that’s a no-no.

PLUS. MANY.

@Mindysan33 : Is that Orville Peck, by any chance?

Bronco GIF by Orville Peck

Who else!

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It’s irrelevant. By federal law they are definitionally machine guns, regardless of whether they are “AR-15” style or not. Also, we don’t know they are M16A2 pattern. If they’re not, they very well could be full auto.

Happy Big Brother GIF by MOODMAN

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If you watch the video from the source article, they show one taken out. 100% they are M-16A2s. Old ones. And they are 100% full auto.

Someone in the military is going to be so screwed when they track back where it SHOULD be and figure out how it got to where it is.

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