What’s the key act of illegality here? The nature of the arms involved, their destination, their transport, or “the knowledge that (they) would be used to kill, injure, or destroy property"?
If I wanted to buy a few Stingers and TOWs for my personal protection, could I legally do so by getting the proper licenses from the proper federal agencies?
If I decided I need a Silkworm, or whatever model the Chinese are making this year, could I legally do so?
This is, in a way, a kind of Gun Control issue. As the poster known as ExTank pointed out in another recent thread that I’m too lazy to dig up right now, the Framers of the U.S. Constitution made a distinction between “arms” – weapons that a solider would carry and use all by himself in the field – and “ordnance.”
The traditional definition of “ordnance” was weapons that had to be operated by more than one person. (They could be carried by one person, but required at least two people to operate.) At the time the Constitution was drafted, about the only piece of “ordnance” in common use was the portable cannon. Nowadays, however, weapons like bazookas and light antitank weapon (LAW) rocket launchers are considered ordnance, even though they are designed to be operated by one person.
However, machine guns – at least the portable, assault rifle variety – are most definitely not classified as ordnance. They are small arms. Yet fully automatic firearms are all but totally illegal in the United States thanks to certain Federal “excise tax” laws. (They are completely illegal in some states, such as California.) Furthermore, grenades and other compact explosive devices are still considered ordnance despite the fact that they are smaller and lighter than most rifles, and despite the fact that there are certain kinds of grenades designed to be hurled through the air by a rifle.
And I can’t imagine why night vision goggles are even considered weapons of any sort.
The process of buying arms first involves finding a dealer in prosthetic devices who can sell you some from the used or damaged stockpile. That will be cheaper. It depends on how useful you want the arms to be.
Of course, I’m assuming that you don’t just take the easy route of running your elbow into a buzz-saw. If you do that, then you’d get a new arm, and your medical insurance would pay for most of it, so that might be one cheap way. Not without its drawbacks, however, including a fairly high level of pain and inconvenience. But cheap.
Still, you’d be getting at most two, I suspect, unless your insurance company is a lot more inefficient than I would imagine.
Until not very long ago, encryption was considered a munition as far as export was concerned. This led to a lot of mathematicians being labeled “arms dealers”. I even have a t-shirt with the RSA algorithm on it that was, technically, a munition.
I believe crypto now handled by DoC instead of DoD, but the point is that the classification of anything as a “weapon” depends mostly on what group of bureaucrats are bent about its distribution. If the military types want to restrict night-vision goggles, they put goggles in a classification that falls within their purview.
IANA international arms dealer, but, if memory serves, international movement of arms is only legal if you have what’s called an end user certificate. This is a statement from the purchasing body that they are purchasing the specified arms for a specified purpose, and that they do not intend to resell or redistribute them. The “purchasing body” has to be somebody checkable, usually a governmental body (armed forces, police force, that sort of thing).
The rationale is that these certificates can be checked, and (if necessary) disapproved by the powers that be in the exporter’s country, so that arms don’t fall into the hands of terrorists or enemy governments (or, if they do, at least there’s some sort of paper trail). Obviously, forged or dubious end user certificates are a sine qua non of black market arms deals.
So, jcgmoi, my layman’s opinion is that it’s the transport of the arms in itself that’s illegal.
Laws covering the purchase of arms within a country, obviously, vary according to the country - but, if you want to buy weapons from the People’s Republic of China, you may be out of luck. (Unless you can get made chief of your local police department, and don’t get your equipment budgets audited too closely…)
(I am a layman. Please do not rely on my advice, get arrested, and, on your release, come after me with heat-seeking missiles.)
Steve Wright: Thanks for bringing up ‘end user certificates’. That seems to be key, although my understanding of the arms buying process is not yet enough to knock together a business plan.
C K Dex: I’ll have to give your post an incomplete since you made no mention of ‘fingers and TOWS’.