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West Milwaukee, Chilton Answer OC Lawsuit

Constitutionalist

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Anyone know the status of this case? Any schedule of when briefs have to be filed or a possible trial date? I am trying to follow this case an am having a hard time finding info. Thanks
 

jrm

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Discovery ends 11/15. Dispositive motions are due 11/30.
 

Interceptor_Knight

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Lammie wrote:
Case in point: The case of David Olofson. The U.S. 7th circuit court of appeals has upheld Olofson's conviction of selling a machinegun even though the automatic fire was a result of a malfunction of a semi-automatic weapon.
There was no malfunction. The parts as installed when the firearm was tested (M16 trigger group minus the auto sear) were in perfectly servicable and properly functioning order. The parts as installed when the firearm was tested allowed a condition of hammer follow to take place which allowed multiple rounds to discharge with a single pull of the trigger. Olofson's claim is that the ATF or their star witness installed those parts.
 
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McX

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It's a shame to see Lie And Deny is still alive and well in this country!
 

Brass Magnet

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"Respectfully request a jury trial"??

Who get's to decide if it's heard before a judge or a judge and jury?

My thinking is that it would better to not have a jury and have the case decided as a matter of law if it's possible.
 

Nutczak

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Interceptor_Knight wrote:
Lammie wrote:
Case in point: The case of David Olofson. The U.S. 7th circuit court of appeals has upheld Olofson's conviction of selling a machinegun even though the automatic fire was a result of a malfunction of a semi-automatic weapon.
There was no malfunction. The parts as installed when the firearm was tested (M16 trigger group minus the auto sear) were in perfectly servicable and properly functioning order. The parts as installed when the firearm was tested allowed a condition of hammer follow to take place which allowed multiple rounds to discharge with a single pull of the trigger. Olofson's claim is that the ATF or their star witness installed those parts.

My understanding is that the BATF could not readly duplicate the slamfire malfunction on Olefsons firearm without using ammunition known for their very soft primers. Plus it took several attepts to duplicate the malfunction too.

none of their testing was recorded, and I think it is suspicious that they had the rifle foe so long and virtually no oversight in their testing. For all we know, they may have tweaked the firing mechanism to make it do what they wanted to get a conviction.

Has anyone here ever had an SKS slamfire and fire multiple rounds? I have seen it on several occasions. it can happen from not getting all the cosmoline out of the bolt, it can happen from having a free-float pin among other common SKS issues.

Olefdon got railroaded, pure & simple. We should all keep his case in our minds for a reminder that the Govt can screw you for anything even if you are fully innocent.
 

Interceptor_Knight

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Nutczak wrote:
My understanding is that the BATF could not readly duplicate the slamfire malfunction on Olefsons firearm without using ammunition known for their very soft primers. Plus it took several attepts to duplicate the malfunction too.

Has anyone here ever had an SKS slamfire and fire multiple rounds? I have seen it on several occasions. it can happen from not getting all the cosmoline out of the bolt, it can happen from having a free-float pin among other common SKS issues.

BATF testing used common commercial ammo which has standard primers, not "very soft" primers. Military ammo has extra hard primers in order to resist slam fires. It was legitimate to test it with commercial ammo. The AR did NOT malfunction. As tested, it contained M16 parts which someone deliberately installed. Olofson admitted to changing the trigger group at least once since he owned the rifle but denied using M16 parts. When moved to the 3rd unmarked selector position, the rifle exibited a condition of hammer follow. Olofson failed to prove the point that the ATF may have installed these parts. I don't believe that this was even his line of defense.

Unless you wish to be prosecuted for possessing an unregistered machine gun, I suggest that you properly clean and lube your SKS and AK, etc rifles before taking them to the range. Being illegal is the worst of your worries though. The odds of a Kaboom are very high without an auto sear. You could kill or injure yourself or someone else. This is not the same as bump firing which uses the recoil of the weapon to depress the trigger rapidly.
 

Nutczak

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Here is my cite Where is yours?



Posted: June 02, 2009
9:48 pm Eastern

© 2009 WorldNetDaily
"By this time, the weapon had been in the hands of the ATF for four months. What caused the functional change in the weapon to fire as it had not done before is unknown, although the ATF agent did acknowledge that the change in the outcome from the October test resulted from a change to 'softer primer' ammunition," the appellate documents said.
Edited to add http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGIC_enUS311US311&q=Olefson+%2b+primera google search using Olefson + Primer
 

Lammie

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[align=center]


[align=center][size=+2]US V Olofson: A pseudolegal Case[/size]

by L. Neil Smith
lneil@netzero.com[/align]For Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership http://www.jpfo.org
[/align]
[line]

[align=left]
The camera closes in.
The screen swells with the wizened, hateful visage, under its ludicrous English periwig, of George Jeffreys, the original "hanging judge" of the Bloody Assizes as he sentences the innocent Doctor Peter Blood, convicted of having treated a man wounded in a battle of the 1685 Monmouth Rebellion, to a lifetime of slavery in the British West Indies.

Nobody watching the 1935 movie "Captain Blood" was particularly surprised at the irrationality of the verdict or the harshness of the sentence. Judicial processes meant to bolster authority, often at the expense of justice and humanity, were a feature of the English court system, and one of many reasons -- as most individuals of my own and older generations were taught in school -- that Americans fought for independence.

Not so today. Now our children and our grandchildren are often told by a politically-corrected educational establishment that there was no good reason for the American Revolution, and that we'd all be better off if the colonials then had respected and cooperated with authority. As far as justice is concerned, they're told the humblest person, accused of a crime, can always count on getting "his day in court".

I'm sure that's just what young Kenyon Ballew, his family, and lawyers expected when they went to court seeking restitution because a violent gang of police and federal officers, for some reason disguised as hippies, smashed through his front door one summer evening in 1971 -- on a fraudulent plea-bargained tip from a newspaper boy they had arrested for burglary -- and shot at him more than a dozen times as he emerged naked from his bathtub, paralyzing him for the rest of his life.

The Ballew case may not have been the first instance of the new police "philosophy" of fascist thuggery, moronic incompetence, and brutal unconcern over "collateral damage" that has since flooded over this nation like a dirty tide, destroying whatever pretense was left that this is a free country, but it was the first many of us knew of, and nothing would ever be the same. A line of causality stretches taut and straight from Ballew's suburban Maryland home in 1971 to Mount Carmel on the rolling Texas plains in 1993 -- and continues on to this day.

All of this comes to mind because of a recent federal trial, the case of U.S. v. Olofson in Milwaukee Wisconsin, in which the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (instigators in both the Ballew and Branch Davidian atrocities) charged a National Guard Drill Instructor of "unlawful transfer of a machinegun" because, owing to a worn or broken part, it would sometimes -- very rarely, actually -- fire more than one round of ammunition with a single pull of the trigger.

This is not, in fact, any kind of illegal "enhancement", it is a dangerous malfunction. Len Savage, the expert I spoke with before I started this article tells me that when such a malfunction occurs, the particular weapon involved fires at three times the rate considered safe.

Olofson, it appears, was asked by a Robert Kiernicki to teach him to shoot. Olofson did, and even let Kiernicki take "his oldest AR-15" -- a semiautomatic version of our current military rifle the M-16 -- to a public range and practice. On Kiernicki's third time at the range, after firing 120 rounds, the rifle sputtered three times and jammed.

Law enforcement people present on the range swooped in, and in due course, Olofson was arrested, charged, and has now been convicted of a gun "crime" he never intended to commit or even knew he had committed, one that happened when he was miles away and someone else pulled the trigger.

The rifle in question was sent to the BATFE Firearm Technology Branch (FTB), who examined and test fired the weapon and declared it "just a rifle". Special Agent in Charge Jody Keeku asked FTB to re-test the firearm, this time using soft-primered commercial ammunition.

The FTB, which has no standardized testing procedures -- in fact, no written procedures at all for testing firearms -- tried again, this time getting the desired results. BATFE, with a self-admitted fifty percent error rate, then pursued an indictment against Olofson and paid Kiernicki "an undisclosed amount of money" to testify against him.

At the same time Olofson was being charged with unlawful transfer, because his rifle malfunctioned, and apparently had some M-16 parts (not the parts that would make it a machinegun) the BATFE removed another "machinegun" from its registry of such weapons because they deemed it to be an AR-15 with M-16 parts, but not a machinegun. Len can produce the documents to substantiate this extremely convenient contradiction.

Hear Len being interviewed on JPFO's podcast, Talkin' to America and see some of the legal documents associated with this case. Click on over to http://www.jpfo.org/filegen-n-z/talkamerica.htm and then proceed to http://www.jpfo.org/filegen-n-z/olofson-vs-us.htm.

Be aware, however the court never had access to this information. When Olofson's attorneys requested that the court compel BATFE to produce these and other documents proving Olofson's innocence, BATFE's Chief Counsel's Office loftily informed the court that the documents involved contained "tax information" -- namely, a $200 federal excise tax stamp -- and that the court was therefore prohibited from seeing them.

All such documents -- even a BATFE letter to the manufacturer of Olofson's rifle mandating a safety recall in 1986 (due to its going "full auto" if it malfunctioned) -- were kept secret from the judge in the case, Charles N. Clevert, and the rest of the court. BATFE's Chief Counsel told Assistant U.S. Attorney Gregory J. Haanstad, who passed it along: "The Court will have take our word that the documents in question contain tax information, and contain no exculpatory evidence".

Haanstad claimed the law does not exempt a malfunction. He claims that it states "any weapon that shoots more than once without manual reloading, per function of the trigger is a machinegun". When Len, acting as a defense expert, took the stand, he asked, "Are you saying if I take my great-granddaddy's double barrel shotgun out and pull one trigger, and both barrels go off, it's a machinegun?". Haanstad cited the law (U.S. Code, Section 5845), restating that "any weapon that shoots ... "

If your semiauto rifle breaks, you are now subject to federal prosecution. Even more ironic, those in the sporting culture, who have derided so-called "black guns" and "assault rifles" for so long, now face a real possibility of their expensive double shotguns being seized, and of possible prosecution, if BATFE's no-standards laboratory -- which has no procedures in writing and does all of its testing in secret -- can make it fire more than once with a single pull of the trigger. If there is information proving their innocence, BATFE can always claim it's tax information, and prevent both judge and jury from considering it.

Len and I differ on one central point in this mess, gun expert though he is. He is a tough, decent, bright, and courageous gentleman, and I have no desire at all to argue with him in public. He believes that the judge in this case conducted himself properly and points out that the man even chastized the federal prosecutors on at least one occasion because they had attempted to deceive him and the defense attorneys.

This is not a new thing. At one of the legal proceedings against Kenyon Ballew, back in the 70s, the prosecution brought in "evidence" of Ballew's "criminality" consisting of a can of black pistol powder which they claimed he was going to use to make grenades. In fact, he used it to load his only handgun, a replica of an 1847 Colt Walker revolver.

But it wasn't enough simply to produce the can. They brought in at the center of a long, long plank, its ends supported by a pair of theatrically nervous individuals acting as though what it held was nitroglycerin.

BATFE's conduct at the Olofson trial was subtler, but just as criminally misleading. What the judge should have said is, "You will tell your agency to produce those documents immediately, or I will have you locked up until they do. Bailiff!" The fact that he didn't say that makes him a bad judge, a weak judge, and anticonstitutional judge.

BATFE's very existence is a violation of the highest law of the land, in and of itself. How can this sort of stupendously outrageous crime go on for decade after decade? Answer: who signs a judge's paycheck?

BATFE drifts, utterly rudderless, without underlying principles, precisely like the entire United States government does today. The criminally totalitarian mind-set that permitted the creation of this agency in the first place -- despite the clear language of the Bill of Rights -- encourages wars to be waged without any legal declaration by Congress, and kidnapping and torture to become working policies of what was once supposed to be the freest country on the face of the Earth.

It does so because it suits those who profit, in terms of power and privilege or other ill-gotten gains, from such a moral and legal vacuum.
[/align]
 

Interceptor_Knight

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Nutczak wrote:
Here is my cite Where is yours?

Here it is....

If you take the time to read the transcripts you will find that his defense was based on the definition of a machine gun, the testing standards, whether the presence of M16 parts makes it a machine gun, yada yada yada, but does not hinge on the claim that it didn't have any M16 parts in it when it left Olofson's possession. The law may be unjust and he may have been railroaded because of a grudge, but all the ATF had to present for evidence is that the rifle fired more than 1 round with a single pull of the trigger and it was because of the M16 parts deliberately installed by Olofson, Kernicki or the ATF themselves. The ATF also presented witness testimony that Olofson was aware that the selector was a M16 selector because it moved toa 3rd position and that it would fire a burst if moved to this position. Olofson never presented evidence that the parts were not installed by himself.

A slam fire is apossibility with regular commercial grade ammo and primers if you place a round in the chamber and the bolt is not slowed down by stripping a round from the magazine but will only produce a single discharge if the disconnector is doing its job. There is no such mythical beast as "extra soft" grade commercial primers. Military grade surplus and commercial ammo has extra hard primers.


[align=left]http://www.firearmscoalition.org/new/images/stories/appeallost.pdf
Four of the AR-15’s
1 fire control components were parts fromM-16 rifles: the trigger, hammer, disconnector, and selector switch.
The government’s expert testified that he used military grade ammunition the first time he test-fired the AR-15 with the selector switch in the unmarked position and that the gun fired only one round. Later, using civilian-grade ammunition, he conducted two more test-fires of the weapon in the unmarked mode.
We do not see how that information could have exculpated Olofson; section 5845(b) does not require compliance with ATF test-fire procedures in order for a weapon to qualify as a machinegun, nor must the weapon fire any particular grade of ammunition or in the prohibited fashion during the first test-fire.
[/align]

[align=left]http://www.jpfo.org/pdf02/olofson-trial-tran-2-0f-3.pdf[/align]

[align=left]
Q. Whereas in the automatic position what happens?
A. The hammer would be allowed to fly forward and strike the primer.

Q. Okay. And in this case could you see whether the -- when the second round was chambered, whether the hammer hit that second round?
A. Yes, there was a dimple in the primer where the -- actually the hammer strikes the firing pin and the firing pin strikes the primer. There was a dimple made in the primer by the firing pin.
[/align]

[align=left]
A. Yes, sir. It was due to the ammunition I was using. Even though it was commercially available ammunition, it was a military grade ammunition which has a much harder primer than standard civilian ammunition.

[/align]


[align=left]
Q. Well, with that explanation in mind, you performed a second test using standard civilian grade ammunition, right?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. Okay. And can you explain that test?
A. Yes, sir. In that test I fired a total of 60 rounds with three magazines, 20 rounds in each magazine, and also three different types of ammunition. I used Winchester, Remington and Federal ammunition. The test was conducted similarly to the first test in that I also checked the safety first, but I did not go into the semi-automatic position, I went directly to the full auto position and squeezed the trigger.
Q. Why didn't you test the semiauto position again?
A. Why did I not?
Q. Yes.
A. I knew that the weapon functioned already.
Q. Okay.
A. And that was the purpose for firing it in the semiauto position.
Q. So you just checked the safe position, right?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. Found again that it worked?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. And then you put the selector switch in the unmarked third position?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. And what happened when you did that? First of all, you said that you used Federal, Winchester, and Remington brands?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. 20 rounds of each?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. Okay.
[/align]


[align=left][/align]
 

Interceptor_Knight

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Lammie wrote:

All of this comes to mind because of a recent federal trial, the case of U.S. v. Olofson in Milwaukee Wisconsin, in which the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (instigators in both the Ballew and Branch Davidian atrocities) charged a National Guard Drill Instructor of "unlawful transfer of a machinegun" because, owing to a worn or broken part, it would sometimes -- very rarely, actually -- fire more than one round of ammunition with a single pull of the trigger.

This is not, in fact, any kind of illegal "enhancement", it is a dangerous malfunction. Len Savage, the expert I spoke with before I started this article tells me that when such a malfunction occurs, the particular weapon involved fires at three times the rate considered safe.
This is what is misleading. Olofson never presented any evidence or used any defense in court that it was a "malfunction due to worn out parts".
 

apjonas

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Brass Magnet wrote:
"Respectfully request a jury trial"??
Nothing wrong with being polite!

Who get's to decide if it's heard before a judge or a judge and jury?
Well the constitution (7A) has something to say about it but the judge would rule on the issue (which may be appealed).

My thinking is that it would better to not have a jury and have the case decided as a matter of law if it's possible.
Not likely - too many facts are in dispute.
 
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