Numerous cases concerning arms and their trafficking in the US are being decided in favor of defendants who don't roll over and plea due to the disconnect between a popular administrative convention and the actual text of the law (archived). It turns out that when the "weapon" being trafficked is an AR-15 lower receiver, the lower receiver itself doesn't qualify under the law as a "weapon" because too many of the features that the text of the law requires for it to be classes as a weapon are part of the upper receiver which is a completely different part on the AR-15.
Prosecutors and other USG bureaucrats have simply been pursuing cases through administrative convention, deciding the lower receiver itself would be the magic part they would treat as a weapon despite no single AR-15 part on its own qualifying as a weapon under the law. At present some members of the USG judiciary are already dismissing cases over prosecutor objections.
Remember kids, any plea agreement proposed by a USG prosecutor isn't ever any kind of deal.
Possibly I'm thick, but I don't get it — what's to stop'em from decreeing a different part to be "the weapon" ? E.g. the barrel, like in ye olde sovok; or the bolt; or which ever requires the costliest machining/annealing.
Per USG paper wank, the reciever is the weapon. The receiver is the weapon because it contains a number of features that allow the rest of the parts to be assembled into the weapon. Historically I suspect the receiver being less of a wear item than other necessary parts played into this.
Changing any rules around firearms is still politically charged in the US. It's the only thing Pantsuits have been consistently opposed on. New rules along the lines of "the receiver or the barrel or the bolt on their own could be treated as a weapon" would mean the rural US has been completely defeated in the legal arena. Whether the dispute continues to be pursued elsewhere afterwards would be the best indicator of whether any America managed to survive in the rural US or not. If rednecks and local sheriffs start lynching ATF agents together, maybe something of America was dormant. In the more likely situation where the fat manalone rebels in their own heads get frog boiled without actually doing more than anon internet derpery, much ado about nothing.
AFAIK the 1986 full-auto ban went in with no lynchings. Ditto Clinton's later thing. Near as I can tell, USG's "arms politics" is mostly a "game into one goalpost", historically.
The full auto ban was 1968 and not quite an outright ban. It's a "jump through these hoops and if you endure the opportunity to get a stamp might pop out of the machine", a hundred years earlier some states passed "Army-Navy" laws restricting civilians to carrying revolvers approved for issue to the troops as a sort of "if you can't afford one of these you shouldn't carry a gun" measure.
The Clinton thing in the 1990s is what changed the US from having a handful of weirdo states that allowed conceal carry before Clinton, to only two banning concealed carry going into Obama, and all 50 states having some form of civilian concealed carry scheme.
Maybe the situation is less stable than I'm seeing it, but the Clinton thing polarized US politics by coralling all of the potential push back against creeping Pantsuitism into this one front to the detriment of every other.