The Bangswitch – by Mac, March 8, 2014
News broke yesterday [Friday] that the BATF had raided the business premises of EP Armory and the home of it’s owner, Chris Cook. News reports are sparse as the ATF is being fairly tight lipped about the nature of their investigation. Local news sources are reporting that the ATF is on the hunt for “illegal weapons”. As of this writing the ATF has now allowed the store front to reopen for business.
We recently reviewed an 80% lower receiver from EP Armory here on TheBangSwitch. EP Armory receivers are mostly complete and only require a small amount of machining to convert them into a fully functioning AR15 lower receiver. However, as 80% complete receivers they are not considered to be firearms in the eyes of the government. Once manufacturing is completed by the owner, they are not required to be serial numbered or to be registered on a 4473 form despite the fact they are now deemed to be firearms. Your EP Armory AR15 becomes one of those mystical “ghost guns” bantered about in the media as of late.
There’s nothing nefarious about building your own firearm. As American citizens we have the right to manufacture our own firearms and when we do, there’s nothing the federal government can say about it… that whole interstate commerce thing. As long as you don’t manufacture them for sale you can make as many as you like for your own personal use and it’s none of Uncle Sam’s business.
Who knows what the G-men are ferreting for, one can only speculate. What I do know is that a fine, and highly arbitrary, line exists between a 80% complete lower and a receiver that’s considered to be a firearm in the eyes of our overlords. Could this be related to the nebulous methods used by the BATF to define 80% lowers? <shrug>
Perhaps Mr. Cook was up to something shady. Perhaps it’s the ATF that’s up to something shady and they’re after copies of EP Armory’s sales records… We won’t know until the ATF breaks their silence, or if charges are ultimately filed.
Let’s hope this is nothing more than an innocent misunderstanding and EP Armory is back on its feet in short order.
MAC
MAC is an avid shooter, former MCSF Marine, Armed Citizens United board member, NRA member, Oath Keeper and is commissioned as a Colonel by the Governor of Kentucky. Known for his videos on the Military Arms Channel, he also writes for The Bang Switch, for Shotgun News (Be Ready!) and freelances for Guns & Ammo. MAC has been a life long shooter who has an interest in all things that go “bang” but gravitates towards military type firearms.
I see a plan here,this along with Ares Armory,wonder how many more bu the end of the day,something to keep a eye on along with all the other things feds up to.
Building your own power supply is also a valid tactic now.
I’d say right after, hey DAD thanks for the gun on my birthday. to hey DAD thanks for the gun and the 3KW inverter for my birthday.
I just went for the 3KW power supply. So my lil Harbor Freight 45 turned to 190 now 3 KW.
Sounds like “one off” gun talk, or chineese if your a gun tard-grabber ;o)
Look I ran an ISP for awhile. I had some experience, but mainly the point is, I didn’t crash it, I protected, kept it working and passed it on. With the current blacklists. Back in the day, first the system admin got crushed, literally mushed brains, then the owner got lung cancer. It was dumped into my lap as the owner died who trusted me from back in the BBS days.
I got that puppy going by creating blacklists, and doing a grep for the top 100 hits, rinse, repeat. boom, that lil red light finally stopped glowing. Massive foreign country email DDoS.
But also some rootkits nimda in the /tmp syslinkage / crap in dev so I cleaned it , turned it back for the power it had with the CPU’s @ 2% cool, unless all my COMCAST friends lighting it up and it would work some, but not be anything like the smtp / pop3 problem. The solution I found was to learn to killall -9 cpanel, and also to killall -9 exim and rename that fool binaries, kill all the links to it, and reboot.
I noticed at first it tried to rename itself to exim again. Finaly tracked that down and killed all it. Boom reboot, and then with all the email nuked she ran fine @ cool 2%
Then I grepped the logs, top 100, rinse repeat, sort, and came up with a cidr list that makes the crap go away.
for years every time some one would call in with email problem, and when exim was run, boom, rootkits and hell on earth.
took me exactly 24 hours to figure it out.
Now what I found might make you puke.
This was WAAAY back then mind you..
I found that one email could, penetrate in, get into the /tmp and symlinks, get into every rootkit, and lib, and then it would simply copy from one active directory to another. By the latest in time/date, to the inbox of all /home/~
Now look, if you have a script literally running in your server, then email will simply be a mv /dir to /dir2 operation. THINK, no bandwidth!
The only problem is I don’t think like script kiddies.
I was there to defend the ISP and put that “f-ing red light” out. It was mr X’s last wish. With his second wish to fix the crappy eCOMMERCE problem.
anyway, my point is
command line and persistence and not trusting killed this crap right off. While it never would allow the transactions of credit cards . I killed the fraud by killing exim
lol I should just make a damn music video!
Maybe one day TestPilotDummy might make a music video again! But it won’t be on Youtube. Unless your re-mixing
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T^hat bitch senator feinstink knows. She don’t care.
And with the raid comes them probably getting their hands on customers that have purchased from them. The company must have been doing well in sales.
True……just like the guitar company that was raided by the feds a couple years ago for having illegal exotic wood/even tho they had
license to buy the wood from the exporters.
In this day and age, if your making money/expect a visit from obummers feds.